We continued our work to highlight to businesses the potential risks their activities can pose to local watercourses. In 2009/10, this saw our Pollution Prevention team make 1,098 visits to industrial and commercial sites, in areas identified by the Environment Agency (EA) as pollution 'hotspots'.
Where feasible, we made a large proportion of these visits jointly with EA representatives, continuing our partnership approach to environmental improvement.
These visits follow an approach first adopted by the EA to tackle persistent pollution problems in urban watercourses, particularly associated with neighbouring industrial estates and commercial units.
We have adopted this same strategy and have been actively visiting industrial pollution hotspots for several years. In recent years, the location of the sites visited has been driven by the Water Framework Directive (WFD), to target areas where the EA has identified that the water quality in adjacent rivers is particularly poor.
The visits aim to:
Minimise the risk of non-agricultural contamination of rivers and streams
Identify problem locations
In the 12 months covered by this report, we visited areas including Maidenhead, Swindon and Slough. As before, we also revisited some sites identified in previous surveys as posing a high or medium risk. These included Beddington, where return visits found many sites now constituted only a low risk – a clear example of positive education and awareness raising.
As in other parts of the country, the disposal of fat and oil to the sewer network continues to pose a major problem, as it sets hard and blocks the pipe. The sewage, which therefore cannot flow away, often escapes via a manhole, causing flooding and pollution.
Fat, oil and grease deposits cause more than half of the 55,000 blockages that occur annually in our area.
Our pollution prevention programme aims to raise awareness about the potential consequences of disposing of fat and oil to the sewerage network. In each case, we highlighted the problems and advised on how to improve practices.
During 2009/10, we made 1,097 visits to businesses dealing with food, including restaurants, fast-food outlets and factories. These included campaigns in Farnham, Basingstoke, Crawley, Reading and Brixton.
We continued to focus on higher-risk businesses, making repeat visits to check if previous advice had resulted in any improvements or procedural changes.
We have also worked with local councils' environmental health departments, to get their backing in making joint visits and targeting campaigns to specific hotspot locations.
We chair the WaterUK Sewerage Network Abuse Prevention (SNAP) group, which represents the national water and sewerage sector, and aims to prevent incorrect usage of public sewers.
This group has developed water industry statements on flushable products and macerated wastes. In addition, it has developed the Water UK SNAP protocol in order to determine the flushability of household products labelled as flushable. In the future, the group is seeking to establish an internationally-agreed standard for flushability.
In many parts of our region, the sewer network has two parts: domestic and industrial waste is conveyed to our sewage works through one system of pipes, while separate surface water sewers carry away untreated rainwater to a local watercourse.
Pollution can occur when household drains, connected to washing machines, dishwashers and basins, are wrongly connected to the surface water drain, instead of the foul water system.
We work jointly with the Environment Agency (EA) to combat the issue of misconnected drains. The EA firstly identifies the affected 'outfalls', where pollution from these misconnections is entering local rivers and streams. We aim to trace back the pollution and identify the properties causing the problem. We then liaise closely with the customers concerned, the relevant local authorities and the EA themselves, to ensure appropriate measures are put in place to rectify this.
In 2009/10, we significantly improved the water quality of 39 unsatisfactory outfalls. This means we improved a total of 161 outfalls during the five years to March 2010.
This is the culmination of painstaking work to trace these pollution sources and eliminate the misconnections from the surface water sewerage network, and can significantly improve the water quality of the affected rivers and streams. We are working to improve a further 38 outfalls in 2010/11.
The National Misconnections Strategy Group is based on a Thames Water model, in which we have worked with the Environment Agency and other key stakeholders to tackle the issue of misconnections. We continue to lobby the Government to consider giving water companies powers to rectify plumbing errors as described in the Flood and Water Management Act.
We developed the Connect Right brand, an awareness campaign which aims to highlight the problem of misconnections. This received a successful parliamentary launch, at the House of Commons in February 2010. For more information, please visit the Connect Right website.
We have also played a major part in putting together a national 'good practice' reference document for other water companies and contractors. This will, for the first time, enable misconnections to be tackled in a consistent way nationally in order to reduce non-agricultural water pollution.
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