National guidance for healthcare waste water discharges
Healthcare organisations undertake a number of activities that do, or have the potential to, result in the discharge of various items and substances to sewerage systems.
100,000 kilometres of England’s sewer pipes were built before the mid-1960s and use an old-fashioned design that carries two kinds of waste: rainwater from street drains, and sewage from homes.
They are therefore known as ‘combined’ sewers. Combined sewers were built many decades before modern rates of population growth and climate change were understood, which means that there is often now more sewage and rainwater going into these systems than first envisaged.