SEVERN Trent Water was fined £15,000 and ordered to pay £3,878 in costs after it pleaded guilty at Telford Magistrates’ Court to a charge of breaching the condition of an environmental permit.
The charge was brought by the Environment Agency and related to the discharge of ammonia from the company’s Bishops Castle sewage treatment works between March 2010 and March 2011.
A condition of the environmental permit is that the discharge from the works should not contain more than 10mg/l of ammonia between October and April inclusive and 5mg/l at all other times.
All sewage treatment works must meet the discharge limits for harmful substances in their environmental permits at least 95% of the time in order to maintain the quality of the watercourse into which they discharge.
Twelve samples were taken at Bishops Castle over a 365-day period and three of those samples were above the set ammonia limit.
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