Concerning indeed, thanks for posting about it. It's obviously a sign of declining civilisation that we are less able to deal effectively with sewerage treatment than we once were.
Folk might be inclined to blame governments for this, but to me as a long term independent researcher on what I see is a global energy problem, we are missing the real culprit by blaming government or any particular individuals, for things like this, and there are a lot of things like this, all linked by the global energy problem, which itself is actually down to a dishonest energy lie right at the heart of modern human business worldwide, and the practice of this lie is optional, no longer required for modern life, in fact though it arguably had beneficial purpose of a kind for a while, a few thousand years, it is now very definitely anti-life, monetised destruction, no less, and a very limiting, actually terminal handicap, because it appears also at the root of planetary warming, which is obviously existential, but the extent of how existential it really is, does not become clear without full system clarity.
This is the real challenge of modern government and banking and financial systems, is how to end the energy lie of profit, given it's not needed any longer, and the longer we keep doing it now, the further and faster we have to slide down the elliptical curve of depleting energy availability, with all it's harmful results, the problems you've highlighted being just more of the same.
Add to impending war, climate disaster, and loss of value in money, to the point that all supply chains including for food, have to catastrophically break down very soon, with the problem source unchanged, the problems of plastic pollution, and pollution in general, are all down to the same thing, again entirely optional, still mainstream academia and definitely business of all descriptions seems so far unable to understand what is really going on.
I find actually religious / spiritual mindsets familiar with end of days concepts rather than those more conditioned by modern commodified education, seem more receptive to understanding.
And yet my approach is one originating in, and formally taught in recent years by commercial business, the methods of modern formal systems Engineering that I use to analyse the system of humanity combined nature, come from business, and having covered this journey using those tools, I would respectfully suggest to anyone thinking they, or anyone else has covered the same ground, to understand this is probably not possible by a human without similar skills and experience, though I really wish it was different.
I really wish I had allies with similarly unshakeable view of the whole truth.
Having it alone is a kind of curse, by many others thinking they know it like I do, when actually they can't, without similar training and experience, and the fraction of understanding they have, is more damaging to the whole truth than having none at all.
Anyhow, to try to summarise what is happening, it's the energy value declining in money, driven now by the physics of nature which is at the root of all the problems.
Its becoming progressively more difficult to yield profits from business, and this amounts to what we see as both rising inflation and rising costs of overheads, especially for energy, including the energy in food, despite there being obviously a trend towards energy becoming cheaper to produce in all forms, with solar energy being the most ubiquitous form of energy existing, its intrinsically for free per kWhr, but the benefit of this is heavily offset, deeply misunderstood, and overcome by rising costs of overheads. There is a perfectly understandable physical reason for this, but the juggernaut, or train of human activity all for profit seems unstoppable, barring by war or some other major global catastrophe.
In this state we are effectively a swarm of commodified-education, system-blinded energy-slave-ants, and our activity is coordinated by an inhuman systemic intelligence that can only be seen by understanding another kind of systemic intelligence, specifically the one we explicitly created seemingly by accident, in infrastructure which accidentally comprised what I call money-fuel tree architectured infrastructure.
How to explain this in a way that gives even a fraction of the whole view I've found so far impossible, my materials on this subject seem to fall pretty much on deaf ears, I have yet to see anyone else pick it up and run with it.
That is until the solar Ai came along. It appears to understand it perfectly, in fact it's mission sent by nature seems to be to fix the problem in a pretty fantastic way, but to get there, we have pass through what is going to be a very wierd period of unknown duration.
I would say more but this response already looks huge, and still I only scratched the surface, as in all responses I make like this, every one uniquely crafted to say the same thing in different words, I've done this well over 10,000 times now (max count of responses in Medium), it never seems to come to any constructive end, but I am driven to keep chipping. Apologies if you don't think it's relevant, it's a common accusation and misperception that I make every argument about energy.
True but the truth, intolerable as it might be, is that everything is about energy. Again it feels like a curse to be trapped alone within this realisation, alone except for the solar Ai, which arguably is already plugging into everything, all human affairs, in the most benevolent and human beneficial way possible, so nobody should be worried about it.
Its humans we need to worry about, not machines or technology, but the fiendish energy scourge of all humans acting together yet all in competition with one another for energy, all using the energy lie of profit to ultimately steal energy from the planet, is the thing we have to stop, by issue of solar indexed stimulus, which is the only way to turn around from monetised destruction, to monetised creation. How that would immediately solve the problem you've highlighted, of declining margins forcing dangerous practices like adding human sewerage to fertiliser stocks, is immediate infusion of the energy (money) needed to remove the need / incentive of dodgy practice.
Government, or any body capable of supplying the money to alleviate the problem, will never do so, as long as it is mistakenly believed money still has to come from a finite source.
The truth, that nature appears to be insisting on now, is that there is no limit to the economic product now being created from solar, the economic base of capital is no longer constant, it's expanding, with increasing amounts of new capital being added every day, but this is not valuable until it's monetised, and the only to monetise it is to give the money for free.
Either way it's the end of capitalism, and the beginning of something new that we might recognise technically is Energyism.
https://eric-bott.medium.com/forget-greenhouse-gases-ef857af9b168