often too late to identify the source. The fines are clearly not a serious deterrent to farmers. Properly resourced policing and significant fines could all but eliminate these sources of river pollution. The use of drones and new advances in digital technologies to detect diffuse pollution will help to transform detection. There would be costs to the Environment Agency and the other bodies, but the balance of the damage versus these costs points towards more enforcement. The polluters may be fairly diffuse, but the pollutees are diffuse too, all down the river. Slurry in rivers can and should be stopped. Diffuse pollution should be limited. Both make good economic sense. The fact that the costs of the damage may well exceed the value of the total economic output of the farm tells us a lot about the perverse economics of much farming practice. Pollution is under-priced; agricultural output is therefore also under-priced.
Once the river gets to its middle stage, the ratio of grassland to arable land usually shifts towards arable. Conventional arable farming adds several layers of pollution and stress to rivers. It uses intensive fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides, and as with maize and the Somerset Levels example, it leaves the soils exposed to run-off and the depositing of silt in the rivers. It may also take water from the river for irrigation.
Farmers operating in these middle river areas are themselves vulnerable to the flooding that their activities can help give rise to, and hence they want to get the water quickly off their land and into the river, so the rate of run-off is artificially increased by ditches that take the chemical cocktails directly to the river much faster and hence in more concentrated forms. This raises flooding risk downstream, exporting the dangers to others. This was a process once managed through water meadows and vegetation cover along the rivers, in part because this made economic sense in a predominantly mixed farm system, but also because ploughing up riverside meadows required heavier and more powerful tractors and machinery. That can now be done. Once flooding was a resource for farmers to exploit in order to enrich their land. Now it is a menace to get rid of as quickly as possible.
The results are economically very inefficient and the economy would be much better off if many of these practices were curtailed or even stopped altogether. The central issue from an economic efficiency perspective, which we keep coming back to, is that some farmers are polluters who do not pay for the damage they cause others. Instead, they are polluters who expect to be paid not to pollute.
As discussed in greater detail in the next chapter, this should be reversed. If farmers paid for the pollution they caused, they would use chemicals in smaller quantities and target them more accurately. In the case of flooding, if farmers paid for the services that the river provides in taking excess water away, the ditches might not be so deep. They could also store more water. Finally, in a polluter-pays model, silt exported to rivers from riverside ploughing and cropped fields would come with a bill, and fewer of these fields would be ploughed.
With a polluter-pays policy, and hence the right relative prices, the rivers would be in a much better state. Biodiversity would go up, abstraction would go down, more ponds and reservoirs would be created, and the land would be wetter, especially in winter. It is all just good economics, and leads to a much more sustainable farming industry.
Dealing with the industrial legacy
Coal mining has wreaked havoc with rivers for a couple of centuries, and whole river systems have effectively been killed off by the spillages and run-off from mines. Mining tends to attract industrial processing to locate nearby, which adds to the pollution.
When it comes to mining and heavy industry, it is only relatively recently that polluters have been expected to pay. It is a surprisingly new idea. Mining has historically taken the same approach as that taken by the farming industry: the rivers are there as free waste-disposal systems.
As with farming, the economically efficient answer is to make the polluters pay. But it would still leave a horrible legacy. The toxic chemicals remain evident in the silts and muds of the rivers, and will do so for a long time to come. There have been many measures to deal with the legacy of asbestos in buildings, yet in the case of mercury, lead, radium and other nasty chemicals and substances in river muds, few such measures have been applied. Instead they just lie there in the sediment, largely out of sight, and off the agendas of the regulatory bodies. Roughly 2,000 miles of over 400 of our rivers may be affected by substances like cadmium, zinc, lead and arsenic. All have their unique pollution fingerprints – from examples like Bleaklow in the Peak District and the efforts to save the peat moorland from acidification, to the coal and industrial wastes affecting the coasts of the northeast.
In many, perhaps most, cases, there is little that can be done to make the polluters pay for legacy pollution, since the companies are typically long gone. The burden falls to the state to sort it out. In the case of coal mining, there is the Coal Authority, still grappling with the coal industry legacy, the flooded and polluted waters in old pits, and the groundwater problems.6
The economics of cleaning up these past legacies is often finely balanced. It very much depends on the precise pollutant, how stable the deposits are, and how fast the rivers can ‘cure’ themselves by washing the heavy metals out to sea – and then pollute some other marine environment.
Most of the mining has now gone. The ordinary economics of the markets has done for coal and most other mining, although open-cast mining still poses a threat and the use of water for fracking requires regulation. There are still the clay pits, and tin mining and even cobalt and lithium extraction may return in Cornwall. These aside, the main problem is no longer so much about the mining, but dealing with its legacy.
As mining and heavy industry have declined (often to be replaced by imports and production doing its environmental damage elsewhere), the various pharmaceutical and chemical concoctions that make up our daily lives and end up being washed down the sink and flushed down the toilet, are among the new challenges. Contraceptive pills lead to oestrogens impacting on fish life. Antibiotics can be toxic for the bacteria and algae that form the basis of aquatic ecosystems. Anti-depressants can change bird behaviour. Shampoo, soap and washing powders increase phosphorus content in water courses.
The pharmaceutical industry is a major threat when it comes to our rivers and water supplies. As with earlier industrial pollution, the rivers are treated as waste-disposal systems, especially when the companies can pass on what ought to be a producer responsibility to the consumer. They supply the drugs and products, we use them, the rivers then collect them, and water companies try to remove them from our drinking water and wonder what to do about them in our sewage.
A radically different approach is needed before we end up leaving the next generation with major new damage and another industrial pollution legacy. The catchment-based approach starts by trying to limit what goes into our environment. Drugs are tested for their effects on human health, but less so for their waste disposal. Producer responsibility, and therefore polluter liability, could change the game. Imagine if GlaxoSmithKline were liable for the environmental damage caused by its products. Imagine if Unilever were responsible for the disposal of all its beauty and personal hygiene products. The result would be a radical shake-up of the chemical composition of their products. They would have a direct incentive to minimise the risks.
But what about us, the consumers? The problem with a pure producer responsibility approach is that it leaves us free to dump our waste, without any thought as to how we do this. We should learn the lesson from municipal waste disposal and recycling, making the householder responsible for the safe disposal of their rubbish. We have separate bins, and there are regulations about the safe disposal of white goods and batteries. These may be imperfect processes, but they go in the right direction. Sewage is just another form of rubbish. To secure a better environment, household waste needs to be considered holistically. All of it needs to be regulated. In the case of sewage, consideration should be given to using pricing too. As technology advances, it will be increasingly possible to monitor the content of our wastewater and sewage. We can meter water coming in. In due course we may be able to analyse what is going out with real-time information. Might you change your behaviours if you really knew what was in your waste and the damage it might do? And if you paid for the consequences?