The average person flushes their loo around 5 times a day and whilst most people don’t think about what happens to their waste – we do. At over 1000 water recycling centres across our region, our teams work around-the-clock to clean and test wastewater thoroughly to make sure it is safe to be recycled back to nature.

Filtering

 

The first step in the wastewater treatment process is filtering and separating any items that shouldn’t be there. The number of skips we fill with junk like wipes, nappies, period products and much more, from the sewers each year, would stack up to be almost as high has Everest. ​

 

These filters are as tall as one double decker bus, but anything that we can recycle doesn’t get binned, so even items like grit and stones are put to good use and reused for new roads.​

Next, we separate the solid waste from the water by putting it into large settlement tanks where the organic solids (poo) sink to the bottom and are removed and recycled too, generating new fertiliser for our region's farmlands. ​​​

To make it even cleaner, we pass the water through large natural rock beds full of bacteria loving bugs and micro-animals who remove the nasties from the water. And without these little guys, the water recycling process would be much more difficult and costly.

Treating & testing​
Finally, the water enters a final settlement tank, where all the remaining bacteria settles and sinks to the bottom to be removed. The clean water is then safely recycled back to nature. Putting clean water back into the river is very important to us so we test it regularly to protect the environment, keep water flowing and wildlife thriving.