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The article was updated a few hours ago but when it was originally posted and accumulated its first slew of upvotes, the fine hadn't been rescinded yet and the only statement from the council was that their enforcement officers had acted appropriately and the fine was appropriate.

Also, in much of the UK, the surface water and foul water drains both go into a single combined sewer system, with areas that have been built up for centuries like this one being most likely to still use that old approach.

Seriously. If you wouldn't fine them for littering by dumping the coffee on the pavement right beside the drain (which it would washinto on the first rainstorm) then they shouldn't fine them for anything by dumping it directly into the drain.

No one is going to get fined for dumping coffee on the sidewalk. But they might get fined for dumping oil or paint on the sidewalk.

Reading this it feels like you people still live in the middle ages, dumping the contents of shitpans out the window. ^^

It’s already a huge problem as people DO put contaminated water into these drains, probably due to widespread ignorance.

You talk of ecosystems, but we're talking about a beverage made entirely of natural biodegradable ingredients. It's bean water. You may as well complain about the runoff coming out of a nature preserve.

What she did was right. It was safe. Your slippery slope would apply to bulk dumping or actually dangerous liquids. In reality, roads and roofs are covered with all kinds of dirt and things, all of which gets washed into the storm sewer every time it rains. But here you are pretending a quarter cup of coffee could possibly be problematic.

So all the diesel runoff from leaky lorries, tractors, badly maintained vehicles etc and, whatever else that gets spilt on the roads goes into our waterways untreated?

Plus Thames water has been releasing raw sewage into our waterways.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-67357566

Thanks for explaining

In the UK (and like many places) there are 2 systems of water drainage

Not necessarily, older systems tend to be combined systems where sewage and rainwater go down the same pipes and are treated before going into the river. London (where this story takes place) is like this as the system was built in the 1800s when they didn't care about treating water before it went into the Thames. This becomes a problem when it rains too much and it overwhelms the treatment system so they just dump untreated sewage into the Thames like the good old days.

Then again maybe they're building a parallel separated system to try and reduce the load during heavy rains. Ie. We were rebuilding this road anyway, might as well connect it to a new storm water drainage system instead of sending it to the old Victorian one, and that's why they don't want people dumping.

Your main point is correct for most people living in places that were developed in the 1920s or later, don't dump shit in the storm drains.

Can confirm, binmen hate coffee bin juice

Fines are for the poor.

Makes people less inclined to fight or ignore it when there's a time limit like that.

The UK only has one type of sewer, so the storm drains flow into the same waste processing plants as the toilets. However, those waste processing plants then declare an emergency due to unexpected high volumes and just dump everything into open waterways if it's rained within the past week, which, as it's the UK, it almost always has. There are multiple issues at play here, and they're all dumb and foreseeable if you assume companies will do whatever is most profitable without breaking the law, and none of them are this person's fault.

This wasn't police, it was council enforcement officers. People too stupid to get into the police.

It's the UK. It's a big scandal at the moment that most of the drains lead to rivers, lakes and the sea with only a small fraction of sewage actually being processed before being released from the processing plant. The fines for not processing the sewage were smaller than the costs of building and running treatment plants, so the water companies have just been paying the fines and giving all the money they were paid to build the treatment plants to shareholders as dividends. As no one's broken any laws they haven't already nominally been punished for, there aren't any realistic and politically tenable solutions unless billions of pounds can become magically available.

Is coffee even considered waste?

That makes no sense to me, because you will literally have feces from animals, dead birds and other animals, etc.