We’re committed to being as ethical, open, and honest as we can with our customers, and we’ve published our plan for reducing pollutions from 2020-25 to help us meet our ambitious goal to have zero pollutions.
We’re maintaining industry leading levels of wastewater pollutions through our transformative pollution management programme and Pollution Incident Reduction Plan (PIRP), which outline what we’ll do to reduce the risk of these incidents and what we’ll do if an incident occurs. By developing a culture focused on all aspects of pollution risk, our approach has resulted in a real transformation in our pollution performance. Since 2017, we’ve been at the frontier with industry-leading performance on pollution and in 2018 and 2020 we received a four-star rating in the Environment Agency’s Environmental Performance Assessment.
Through effective, targeted, and open conversations with our customers, we are involving them in reducing pollution by keeping our wastewater network free-flowing and working at capacity. In 2020, we launched the Bin the Wipe campaign. The campaign uses innovative tools to track wrongly flushed items back to the homes they came from and helps customers to understand that flushing wipes can cause sewer flooding in homes and damage to the environment, such as rivers and beaches. Our Bin the Wipe team focuses on hot spot areas, clearing blockages and identifying where wipes have been flushed. The campaign, which has been adopted nationally by Water UK, has reduced the number wipes found in the sewer network by more than 60%, without the need for us to charge or prosecute any customers.
Bin the Wipe success so far . . .
Moment of Change results in hotspot areas (to 30 March 2023)
- Sewer blockage reduction – 48%
- Internal flooding reduction – 68%
- External flooding reduction – 50%