What Is Wessex Water Doing To Tackle Wastewater Failures?
Industry regulator Ofwat has issued an £11 million enforcement order for Wessex Water in response to failures to operate, maintain and upgrade wastewater treatment facilities, failures that meant the company wasn’t able to cope with sewage and wastewater flows.
None of the enforcement package will be paid for by customers through bill increases. Instead, the utility company and its shareholders will bear the brunt of the entire £11 million, with the package including:
– Reducing spills at specific storm overflows currently posing significant challenges
– Helping private landowners seal sewer pipes
– Installing monitoring equipment to improve flow management at treatment works and storm overflows
– Helping customers manage rainwater sustainably.
What is Wessex Water’s environmental performance record like?
The 2024 environment performance assessment for Wessex Water was published at the end of October, revealing an overall rating of two out of four stars, indicating that improvement is now required.
Pollution incidents were found to have increased steadily over the last few years, rising from 75 in 2016 to 215 last year. Although the company did perform relatively well across other metrics, it received red scores for its number of pollution incidents, resulting in the two-star rating.
Where sewage discharges and storm overflow use are concerned, Wessex Water’s performance also appears to be lacking.
Liberal Democrat analysis released last year revealed a 105 percent increase in sewage discharges into bathing water in 2023, with effluent being dumped 1,650 times over the course of 12 months… more than double the previous year.
The number of times Wessex Water also pumped sewage into all types of waterway rose by 90 per cent, as well, with 41,453 discharges taking place in 2023.
How is Wessex Water tackling wastewater treatment?
Wessex Water provides water and sewerage services to more than 2.9 million customers all over the south-west. The firm operates a sewer network spanning 35,138km, 398 recycling centres around the region and 2,172 sewage pumping stations.
Over the last five years, almost £100 million has been invested to upgrade sewerage networks, including £39 million in Somerset to improve sewer infrastructure and £50 million in north Bristol.
The company insists that addressing sewage flooding is one of its key objectives and, to this end, it has been striving to improve monitoring and maintenance of its sewers while also helping customers to prevent blockages through awareness campaigns.
For example, it is using StormHarvester Intelligent Sewer Suite machine learning technology to identify blockages and predict potential issues accurately before they begin to form. All critical storm overflows are now covered by this tech.
In terms of actual sewage treatment, 487 million litres is treated every day before being released safely back into the environment.
This is necessary to ensure that harmful contaminants and bacteria are removed to protect public health, ecosystems, biodiversity and the environment, while reducing water pollution and improving water quality.
Wessex Water says it is committed to progressively eliminating discharge of untreated sewage into waterways, which can happen through human error, negligence, faulty infrastructure or during periods of heavy rainfall. To address this, £8.5 million a month is being invested to deal with storm overflows.
Some £515 million will be spent between now and 2030 on 143 overflows to reduce environmental impact, including 31 nature-based solutions, which provide natural alternatives to traditional services that often use lots of energy and chemicals to operate.
Wetlands instead of water recycling centres and wastewater treatment process units can help clean sewage effluent before being released back into the environment, for example.
Other options include swales, reedbeds and floating reedbeds, all of which are effective at treating groundwater-influenced storm overflows and further treating final effluent from water recycling centres, on-farm and in-river wetlands, and those upstream of reservoirs.
Additional areas of focus include:
Increasing treatment capacity
Wastewater treatment capacity at water recycling centres is being improved to ensure that more wastewater is treated during wet weather before being returned to the environment.
Storage tank installation
Storage tanks are being constructed and installed to hold water during periods of heavy rainfall until water recycling centres have the capacity to treat it.
Rain and foul water separation
Currently, there are many older sewers that carry both rain and foul water, which is putting additional pressure on the network. Not all of these sewers can be replaced but Wessex Water is carrying out separation schemes where possible.
Pipework upgrades
To help prevent groundwater infiltration (which can put pressure on the network and contribute to increased use of storm overflows, as well as increasing flood risks), ageing pipes across the network are being lined and sealed.
What else is Wessex Water doing to help the environment?
Wessex Water has various strategies in place to help protect the natural environment, including:
Chalk stream preservation
Water supplies for the utility company’s customers come from the local environment, with around 75 per cent taken from boreholes and springs, tapping into the chalk streams and Upper Greensand aquifers found in Wiltshire and Dorset.
Chalk stream health is affected by water quality, flow, management and morphology, and such sites are important because they support biodiversity, wildlife, fish populations and other specialist species.
Wessex Water has invested over £230 million over the last ten years to reduce the amount of water abstracted from these sources by 25 million litres a day, going some way towards preserving their unique ecology.
Water abstraction
The company has abstraction licensing policies in place to ensure that water supply operations don’t impact the environment unacceptably.
These licences state how much water can be taken each day and annually, with abstraction rates also linked to low thresholds in local waterways in some instances, as well.
Some 19 stream supports are in operation, where water is pumped from underground aquifers and discharged into watercourses to maintain stream flows, which helps mitigate abstraction impacts.
And there are 20 additional sources where abstraction rates for public supplies are reduced when river flows fall below particular thresholds.
Catchment management
Here, raw water quality is influenced at source by building partnerships with local stakeholders, regulators, authorities and farmers in different catchment areas where public water supply boreholes and reservoirs can be found.
This helps to prevent pollutants and impurities from entering water supplies, instead of relying on the use of large treatment works.
Specific measures include covering crops to prevent winter leaching, using less polluting chemicals, using buffer strips to reduce runoff and making improvements to farmyard infrastructure.
Use of detection dogs
Wastewater detection is essential for protecting the environment and part of Wessex Water’s strategy to address this includes the use of detection dogs and handlers, which have been specifically trained to find leaks.
Dogs have up to 300 million scent receptors (compared to humans, with only six million) and much of their brain power is dedicated to analysing scent, so they’re perfectly placed to help identify where wastewater is entering watercourses and the surrounding environment.
What can businesses do to help with wastewater treatment?
While much of the wastewater treatment responsibility does indeed lie with individual utility companies, businesses across all industries and sectors are well placed to help protect the environment in this regard, as well.
Strategies to consider include:
Onsite wastewater treatment
By managing and treating wastewater onsite, before it has a chance to enter public sewers or waterways, you’ll be able to significantly reduce pollutant load.
You can achieve this through the use of filtration systems, water recycling closed-loop systems to treat and reuse water for non-potable purposes, and through advanced treatment technologies like UV treatment, reverse osmosis and membrane bioreactors.
Minimise waste generation
This can be achieved by redesigning operational processes to find more efficient ways of working, as well as installing water-saving technology and prioritising water leak detection and repair.
Remain legally compliant
Make sure that you know what your business responsibilities are where wastewater treatment and disposal are concerned, adhering to all relevant regulations and monitoring processes closely over time to avoid causing environmental damage and potential fines.
Have a water audit carried out
Understanding how and where you use water resources is the first step towards improving water and wastewater management – as well as saving you money over time. If you’d like to find out more, get in touch with the SwitchWaterSupplier.com team today.