As reported by The Guardian and Unearthed, an investigative news publication from Greenpeace, Trump is shitting on the environment as he exploits it for money.
In the rolling dunes of Aberdeenshire, where the North Sea wind sculpts a landscape millennia in the making, a different kind of shaping has occurred. It is a story written not in sand, but in legal permits, treatment tanks, and discharge samples.
The Trump International Golf Links Scotland, a resort heralded by its owner as “opulent and beautiful” and recently showcased to a British prime minister, stands on coastland that was once protected for its rare, shifting dunes.
Today, it stands accused of a more mundane blight: repeatedly fouling its own nest.
New data reveals that the luxury clubhouse has breached sewage contamination limits 14 times since 2019, with eight of those violations categorized as extreme events with the potential for “immediate and serious environmental harm.”
The details, uncovered through freedom of information requests and released by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA), read like a clinical indictment.
Samples from the resort’s private wastewater system exceeded permitted levels for contaminants—suspended solids, ammoniacal nitrogen, and the oxygen-demanding matter of untreated waste—on nine occasions in 2019, four in 2024, and once in the first half of this year.
The resort operates on a “soakaway” system, where treated effluent is meant to filter through gravel beds before entering the earth.
The failures occurred at the sampling point just before that final filtration, a point which the company argues should spare it from final judgment. SEPA, while noting its expectation of “better performance,” has stated its assessment concluded the actual environmental impact was minimal due to the subsequent soil filtration.
This modern sewage footnote is but the latest chapter in a history of profound environmental alteration. The course is built upon the Foveran Links, a dynamic, 4,000-year-old dune system that was designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI).
To build his “world’s greatest golf course,” the developer required the “stabilization” of these living, moving sands. The construction, involving major earthworks and planting, “partially destroyed” the site, reducing its unique geomorphological features to fragments.
The damage was so conclusive that in 2020, the protected status was formally removed from the portion of land occupied by the resort. What was once a nationally important natural habitat is now a manicured fairway, a transformation that a coastal ecologist described as the loss of a “virgin, undeveloped wilderness.”
The current sewage disputes echo formal objections raised years before a single golfer teed off. When plans for a second course on the estate were advanced in 2017, SEPA lodged a firm protest.
The agency objected to the continued use of a temporary soakaway and demanded that the resort connect to the public sewer system before any expansion.
It warned against plans to create an irrigation lagoon and to draw groundwater, citing risks to neighboring water supplies.
These warnings from Scotland’s environmental guardians highlighted a foundational conflict: the project’s inherent pressure on a fragile coastal ecosystem.
In response to the latest findings, a spokesperson for Trump International Scotland, Sarah Malone, defended the resort’s record of repeatedly mixing human excrement with the area’s supply of drinking water.
She stated that exceedances have been “very rare” and contested SEPA’s methodology, arguing that a certain number of exceedances are permitted given the intense monitoring frequency.
She emphatically asserted it would be “categorically wrong to suggest that our system was causing environmental damage,” and pointed to the repeated renewal of the site’s operating license as proof of compliance.
Furthermore, she shifted focus to environmental contributions, citing the planting of native grasses and the creation of new wetlands.
Yet, to critics, the pattern is clear and consistent. Bob Ward of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change connected the original vision of “disregard for the environment” directly to the ongoing operational revelations, calling the resort a “blight on the Scottish landscape.”
The saga from protected SSSI to a site of recurring sewage breaches presents a stark parable of prioritized development. It raises an uncomfortable question that stretches from the Aberdeenshire coast to regulatory offices and boardrooms: when the powerful promise enrichment, how often do we quietly agree to let the foundations—be they ecological or ethical—slowly erode?
The land, it seems, keeps a record of what it is given and what is taken away.
Discover more from NJTODAY.NET
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.