Boat owners dumping toilet water into Dutch canals, lakes
Discharging toilet water into canals and lakes in the Netherlands is not allowed and carries a high fine, but many boat owners do it without a second thought. Enforcement of illegal discharge is complicated, and perpetrators are hardly ever reprimanded, the Telegraaf reports.
Boat owners in the Netherlands are supposed to collect their toilet water in a wastewater tank, which they can empty at a wastewater pump in the port. But many skippers simply discharge their tank on open water. Some don’t even have a wastewater tank - their toilet flushes directly into the canal, river, or lake.
“They can’t do anything to me if they don’t see the turd floating,” Jan Huibers, a yacht owner in Heukelum, told the Telegraaf. He called the regulations banning the discharge of toilet water into open water nonsensical. “We just pump everything overboard.”
Wil and Dick’s ship in the Katwijk Marina flushes directly into the surface water with no wastewater tank involved. “Most boats hardly have room for a tank,” Dick told the newspaper. Their previous boat did have a tank, but they hardly ever used it. “Then you go to the pump, and there is no one to man it. Or it was broken, so it was of no use to us,” Wil said. According to the couple, they never see anyone using the pump at the port. “Everyone discharges illegally.”
Katwijk harbor master Evelyne Zwart agreed that the pump is rarely used. “That pump is used maybe 20 times a year, and we at least still have a working pump.” Zwart is trying hard to raise awareness among skippers and boat owners about how dirty illegal discharges make the water they use every day. “People simply don’t think about the fact that they are swimming in their neighbor’s turds.”
Enforcement of illegal discharges is complicated, the police told the Telegraaf. Until this year, they needed a search warrant to check whether a boat’s tank was discharging into the open water. Now, the water police are allowed to check, but it doesn’t have much priority, spokespersons for the Zeeland and Amsterdam police told the newspaper.
