Making our region’s rivers the healthiest they can be
Since Get River Positive was launched, our industry leading action plans are already making a positive impact.
Our hardworking teams are delivering excellent results – this year Severn Trent again received the highest four-star rating from the Environment Agency – and we're moving faster and quicker, in some cases 20 years ahead, of sector targets to improve the quality of our region’s rivers.
We very much welcome the current focus on the health of rivers as the optimists here at Severn Trent believe the focus could be the very tipping point we as a country need for sustained improvements. So what have we been doing since we launched?
Let’s first provide a bit of context. Severn Trent takes away 3.1 billion litres of waste water from homes and businesses every day, including the rainwater drainage from roads, highways and public spaces. The water flows through 93,000km of pipes and goes to our treatment works, of which we have more than 1,000. Combined sewer systems transport rainwater runoff and waste water, including sewage, in the same pipe to the sewage treatment works.
The combined network can accommodate most of the rain water but not all. When more storm and ground water enter the sewer system than the pipes were designed for, combined storm overflows (CSOs) act essentially as safety valves to stop people’s homes and businesses flooding after heavy rain. These overflows were widely constructed up until the 1970s and are prevalent across all of Europe.
If we were designing a sewer network today, we would not create this combined system that we have inherited. If we could start fresh, we’d separate the sewer and surface water systems. But sadly, we can’t replace the system overnight it would cause untold road disruption and cost many tens of billions.
The problem is not uniquely ours; colleagues working in the water industry around the world they suffer from the same problem. Indeed, despite having the longest length of combined sewer within our comparator group across Europe, England has the lowest number of storm overflows.
So, instead our plan is to dramatically reduce the use of overflows, increase the capacity of sewer storage and install more monitoring capability to ensure rivers are protected even when storm water from our pipes enters them.
In addition, we’re working with councils to create innovative solutions to help prevent surface flooding, which impacts the use of storm overflows, for example our £76million investment in Mansfield, which you can read more about it here.
Pledges
The good news is that there is much we can and should do. We have been working with environmental groups to understand what good looks like and have been delivering to a clear and actionable plan for some time with very encouraging results. With public interest growing in the topic in March 2022, Severn Trent launched five “Get River Positive” pledges to help reduce the use of CSOs and accelerate improvements to our rivers. We know of no other European company going further or faster.
At Severn Trent, we’ve committed that our operations will not be the reason for any river stretch in our region to be classified as Not Good by 2030, using the openly published Environment Agency measures.
Already that's the case for over 41% of our 6803km of rivers and we are confident by December 2022 we will be responsible for at worst case 15% of the reasons our region's rivers are not ecologically good; with the remaining 85% of reasons attributed to agriculture, industrials, house building, local councils and quarries.
We are open and transparent about our progress and we're moving faster and quicker, in some cases 20 years ahead, of targets set out by regulators to improve the quality of our region’s rivers.
In summary we are committed to doing whatever it takes to:
As a great example, to help people enjoy our natural environment, by 2025 we will have helped move two stretches of river (River leam and Teme) towards bathing quality. By 2030, we will also have planted 1.3million trees – 1% of the whole UK target – as part of our Great Big Nature Boost.
Trees not only have huge climate benefits, but when planted in the right places they can also help to reduce flooding and improve water quality by capturing rainfall and gradually releasing it, so it contributes less to river flows and prevents diffuse pollution from agricultural land.
We’re already investing around £100m a year to meet these commitments and improve rivers. This builds on the £600m of additional spending we announced last year as part of our Green Recovery initiative. The bottom line is that we will do whatever it takes to meet the pledges we have made.
Agriculture
But we don’t own our region’s rivers so we know we can’t tackle river pollution on our own; we need to work with others. Agriculture and rural management is the biggest cause of river pollution.
We have built good relationships with farmers over many years to help mitigate the impacts of pesticides and other run off from agricultural land on water quality and, in May, we announced that 9,000 farmers in the Severn Trent region would be offered match funding of up to £30,000 to encourage environmentally friendly farming practices and protect water quality.
Blockages
Equally, sewage pollution can be caused by blockages in the sewer network – and wet wipes and other unflushables are often a major source of these blockages. Preventing our sewers being blocked could save numerous pollutions each year and would be a key step in our journey to halving pollutions and eliminating serious pollutions.
The simplest and most environmentally friendly solution and one that we are campaigning for is the Government to ban single use wet wipes that contain plastic (as they don’t break down like toilet paper does). At the very least, we believe that ministers should require such products to carry clear, bold warnings about the harm they cause to the environment and the increased risk they pose to the environment.
Get River Positive is more than an ambition, it’s a firm commitment by us to take action.
As a water company, the natural environment is an essential part of our business and caring for our region’s rivers is extremely important. We have listened to our customers, local communities and campaign groups and we want - and welcome - everyone holding us to account. We’ll continue to publish our data and clear measurements for success so you can do just that.
It would be good to keep you in touch with progress as we make it! Please take a look through the rest of our content and if you’d like to stay up to date, please sign up to our regular newsletter.
Thanks for reading
Get River Positive Team