Busting the myths around sewage dumping

Sewage discharges have been a contentious topic for the water sector for years with the rollout of event duration monitoring laying bare the number of times overflows discharge. So far this has prompted yet more public and political outrage but according to Thames Water’s sustainability director Richard Aylard, these uncomfortable conversations are essential if the sector ever wants to “bust the myths of sewage dumping”.

“We’ve all seen the headlines – they’re at it again,” Aylard says, painting the scene of a control room on a dark stormy night when one operative says to another ‘the tanks are getting a bit full again, shall we put it in the river?’ and a button is pushed to dump another load of sewage into a waterway.

“We all know that’s not what happens, but that’s what many believe is happening,” he says, adding: “But people who dump things tend not to publish real-time interactive maps of when and where they plan to do it.”

This transparency is crucial to Thames’ mission. “By getting this out in the open even if it’s uncomfortable – and believe me, it is – but we need people to understand what’s going on. Only then can we have a conversation about what collectively needs to be done, who’s going to do it, how it gets paid for and- given that it’ll take 30 years, what order to do things in.”

Thames promised customers access to near real-time information about sewage discharges in local rivers to decide if they want to go for a paddle. Sarah Bentley, chief executive, said this would go live by the end of 2022, and true to her word at the end of December the interactive map of 465 combined sewer overflow points across London and the Thames Valley was published. It hit national news early January as heavy rains triggering permitted overflows lit the map up like Christmas tree lights. One headline declared the map showed Thames’ activities using “Streams as toilets” as customers, news outlets and politicians alike expressed outrage being presented with the information.

Southern Water and South West have each gone live with bathing water quality information along the coastal parts of their respective regions – and faced backlash for it – but Thames is the first to map each discharge.

The narrative on river health shifted in the past few years from an uncomfortable fact that was downplayed, and indeed something Defra discouraged mentions of how the system was designed. But by the end of this year, companies are required to fit event duration monitors (EDMs) to all CSOs and make data available publicly.

Sarah Bentley said the company must be honest about CSOs, but also explain why they are used. Under her guidance the company set out a plan to reduce harm to rivers

The first part of the plan was to speak up that CSOs are unacceptable to the company, customers and environment, while explaining why they exist. Crucially the company wanted the public to understand it would take time to change.

“You can fine companies millions of pounds a day or lock up their CEOs,” Aylard says as he shares his experiences at the WWT Wastewater Conference. “But that’s not going to fix this quickly. It takes time and careful planning. When you want to upgrade a sewage works it’s one of the pieces of infrastructure you can’t shut so it’ll take time and planning.”

Thames, along with the sector, made a commitment to cut the total duration of overflows by 2030 by 50% and 80% in most sensitive catchments.

Thirdly, the company decided it would offer customers live notifications. This was in 2020, before the Environment Act set out that these would, at a non-specified date, be mandatory for all companies.

The team decided the data from EDMs should be presented in real-time and made really user friendly – with the imagined user being a young parent wanting to quickly and easily make an informed decision about taking their children paddling in the local river.

The map went live on 30 December and on 5 January the Guardian ran a story that Aylard says “launched this very conveniently – we couldn’t have paid for that kind of advertising of 70,000 page views.” This is now averaging 10,000 a day.

Being live, website visitors know at the same moment as operational managers whether there is a spill happening. The team decided it was important to have information accessible for customers quickly and run the risk of needing to make corrections, rather than verifying data first that would have stopped the map being a live resource.

The website includes river health pages alongside the EDM map and additional information. “This was our chance to build context about not only what is happening, but why it is happening,” Aylard explains.

Customer teams were involved to advise on the style of user friendly language and what kind of information to include that customers would want to ask about.

Anyone accessing it can search the 465 consented discharges by postcode or zoom in on an area. Red dots are discharging, green dots are not, orange have discharged in the past 48 hours.

“We are not giving public health advice and are very clear there are other nasty things in rivers besides what comes out of a storm discharge. But this is helpful information for people.”

The map tells users when an overflow last discharged and which river it would discharge into. Talks are underway with stakeholders about the kind of information that would be useful to include in the future.

Aylard attributes the relatively muted reaction to the map on the the company’s decision to get ahead of any potential backlash by working with frequent critics.

“We explained what it was and answered questions in advance,” he says. “We got feedback and tweaked it from organisations viewing it and kicking the tires so we could tweak it before the launch.”

This, together with inviting media coverage at local and national level to “bust the myths of sewage dumping” meant the company took hold of the story.

“We have to build a narrative, build the context, step by step,” Aylard concludes.