Water Matters
The NRN's water business is booming.
As part of Green Week 2022, a Workshop 'Bugs in Brooks' led by our local expert, Dr. Maarten van Hardenbroek van Ammerstol, introduced a group of 7-to-70 yr olds to the mysteries of aquatic life in our streams and how it is impacted by pollution. Our resident water quality lab. leader, Dr. Lucy DIckinson, updates us on the ongoing project to analyse chemically the pollutants in our waterways. Her recent tour of the Witney Sewage Treatment Works revealed it operates similar infrastructure to the Cassington Sewage Treatment Works, which we have reported on previously. Both Cassington and Witney set a low bar for effluent quality. To discover the state-of-the-art, our itinerant wastewater treatment correspondent toured the largest Swiss sewage treatment works in Zürich, whose impressively modern infrastructure treats huge volumes of waste water, yet produces a very high quality effluent.
Of course, UK concerns about water quality are snowballing and more and more negative events are hitting the headlines almost daily
Windrush Against Sewage Pollution (WASP) are at the forefront of local efforts to stop sewage pollution - see e.g.:
Astonishingly, the water companies and regulators seem increasingly ineffectual in monitoring the pollution.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/02/river-testing-england-fallen-sharply-decade-data
Thus, as in the NRN, 'citizen scientists' are stepping up to do the jobs that the water companies and the regulators should be doing.
We all deserve clean water, so please join in and help us monitor out local watercourses.