Surfers Against Sewage has been instrumental in helping to introduce and enforce new government legislation to protect our seas and mobilises more than 100,000 community beach and river clean volunteers annually.

Formed in the 1990s by the surfing community in response to the state of Britain’s beaches, the charity now works across a range of environmental issues with current campaigns focusing on plastic pollution, ocean recovery and climate change. Water quality is still high on the agenda though, with the #EndSewagePollution campaign already helping to make some changes in legislation.

Hugo says: “Sewage pollution is still a massive problem. In 2020 there were more than 400,000 discharges of untreated sewage into UK rivers and almost 3,000 discharges into UK coastal bathing waters during the May–September bathing season alone. The sheer volume of sewage and run-off entering the water means the UK is ranked below every EU country for bathing water quality and only 14% of rivers meet good ecological status.

“At SAS we have our ‘Safer Seas and Rivers’ service which allows people to check the quality of the water in real time and that monitoring has been helping us to challenge water companies on discharge.

“When people swim in water that has raw sewage in it they are at risk of gastroenteritis, ear, nose and throat infections, skin infections, and even hepatitis and e-coli. Poor water quality can also harm river and ocean wildlife, reducing biodiversity and damaging delicate ecosystems.

“Recently we managed to influence some legislation with the Environmental Bill but there is still more that needs to be done and we’re campaigning to get an amendment through that will put a legal duty on water companies to prevent discharges.”

Many people will have seen news reports of companies being allowed to discharge waste into rivers due to an inability to access the correct chemicals, incidents which are obviously of great concern to Hugo.

He says: “SAS was born in the 90s which was a decade of legislation and regulation being introduced to protect people and the environment, and it’s had a massive impact – 98.5% of England’s bathing waters passed the Bathing Water Directive’s minimum standards in 2016, compared to what would have been only 27% in 1990 when we started campaigning on the sewage issue.

“But now we’re in a decade where we seem to be rolling back on these protections and that is a very worrying state of affairs to be in. We’ve seen stats recently that show the UK is one of the least biodiverse countries in the world. And the worst of all of the G7 countries too, actually close to being in an ecological meltdown, which is shocking for a country that’s just hosted the G7 Summit and COP26 negotiations about the climate.

“So for me, we are in a really crucial time. We’re seeing the amazing youth movement around the climate, people rising up against social and environmental injustices and we need those people because sadly a lot of the systems we work in will keep trying to bury the truth, will keep trying to say ‘the process is dealing with it’ while they move on to a new agenda.

“But we need to keep calling things out from the front line and, in our case that is at the beach front, whether it’s plastic pollution, water quality making people ill, erosion driven by climate change, or the destruction of marine habitats. Those are the things that really motivate us and we need to keep talking about them to bring about change.

“I am an optimist though. I believe this is going to be a crucial environmental decade and we should look at where we want to be in 2030 – with an ocean thriving with life again, a coastline free of sewage pollution and free of single use plastic. We will keep fighting for that at SAS and I hope we can bring more people along on our journey.”

And how can people get involved with this journey?

“The ocean is for everyone. We pride ourselves on being a really open, inclusive and friendly charity with something for all. People can get involved in our beach cleans, they can use the Safer Seas app and they can use that to campaign with us, they can write to their MP, they can come along and be involved in our communities. We work with small businesses and local leaders to reduce their collective plastic footprint and now we’ve got a schools programme which reaches over a million schoolchildren in 3,000 schools. All our research and activity is on our website and we love to connect with people.”