Sewage flowing through the Jubilee river in Windsor, UK, threatening wildlife Maureen McLean/Shutterstock
TENS of metres under central London a tunnel has been dug that stretches 25 kilometres at a cost of £4.3 billion. Boring was completed in April 2022 and the passage should start operation in 2025. The 7.2-metre-wide Thames Tideway won’t carry people or vehicles though, but sewage.
This “super sewer” will collect the huge volumes of stormwater and waste that often overwhelm London’s ageing sewage system. Instead of being dumped into the Thames estuary, as happens now, the effluent will gush through the new tunnel to Europe’s largest sewage treatment works at Beckton, on the outskirts of the city.
The Thames Tideway is the most conspicuous example of the UK’s attempts to stop dumping sewage into rivers, amid growing outrage towards the privatised water companies responsible for the waste system. But this new infrastructure is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to solving this crisis, which is linked to wider issues of how water is managed and even climate change. The good news is that technical solutions already exist, many of which are win-wins: helping to solve sewage overflows as well as problems such as flooding and drought.
While many forms of pollution foul Britain’s rivers, sewage has grabbed the limelight. News programmes have repeatedly shown footage of dirty slurry tumbling into pristine river waters. The main culprits are combined sewer overflows (CSOs), designed for when water from heavy rain is carried into the sewage system and must be discharged due to its high volume – taking waste with it.…
