Every time untreated sewage is dumped in our rivers millions of microplastic particles also make their way into the water. When these discharges take place during low river flows, the microplastics settle on the riverbed, coated in a cocktail of chemicals and pathogens. These particles can be mistaken for food by hungry fish, thereby threatening fish populations and the wider river ecosystem.
Professor Jamie Woodward from The University of Manchester has been investigating just how deep this problem runs. It was his team's research that revealed the River Tame in Greater Manchester has the highest concentration of channel bed microscopic particles ever recorded.
Professor Woodward's research showed more than just the level of contamination. It revealed that the only way such high levels of microplastics could be found on the river bed was through the dumping of untreated wastewater outside of permitted conditions - that's because conventional sewage treatment is very effective at removing the microplastic particles from wastewater. Water companies dispute his findings, although he is world-renowned as a physical geographer with expertise in river catchment systems and his microplastic research has been published in Nature journals where peer review and editorial scrutiny are of the highest order. Two years after the publication of this work the water companies have not come up with a better explanation for these microplastic data.
DEFRA and United Utilities were invited to join us on this podcast to discuss the issue of microplastics, but both declined. You can hear their statements.
Professor Woodward asserts that untreated wastewater must be being discharged into rivers during low flows and dry weather. This is not permitted and should only happen in "exceptional circumstances". The implications of his work on microplastics are in good agreement with other independent studies of water company behaviour that have identified dry weather spilling of wastewater as widespread.
As we delve deeper into this pressing environmental crisis, we tackle the UK's consideration of a wet wipe ban and explore potential strategies to staunch the flow of microplastics at source. Professor Woodward's innovative sampling methods are put under the spotlight, and we grapple with the troubling role of microbeads from personal care products and industrial processes in contributing to microplastic pollution. We're not just here to expose the problem - join us as we champion the noble cause of cleaner rivers and consider practical solutions to this urgent issue. Tune in to this eye-opening discussion for an insight into the silent threat lurking in our waterways and how we can fight back.
Every time untreated sewage is dumped in our rivers millions of microplastic particles also make their way into the water. When these discharges take place during low river flows, the microplastics settle on the riverbed, coated in a cocktail of chemicals and pathogens. These particles can be mistaken for food by hungry fish, thereby threatening fish populations and the wider river ecosystem.
Professor Jamie Woodward from The University of Manchester has been investigating just how deep this problem runs. It was his team's research that revealed the River Tame in Greater Manchester has the highest concentration of channel bed microscopic particles ever recorded.
Professor Woodward's research showed more than just the level of contamination. It revealed that the only way such high levels of microplastics could be found on the river bed was through the dumping of untreated wastewater outside of permitted conditions - that's because conventional sewage treatment is very effective at removing the microplastic particles from wastewater. Water companies dispute his findings, although he is world-renowned as a physical geographer with expertise in river catchment systems and his microplastic research has been published in Nature journals where peer review and editorial scrutiny are of the highest order. Two years after the publication of this work the water companies have not come up with a better explanation for these microplastic data.
DEFRA and United Utilities were invited to join us on this podcast to discuss the issue of microplastics, but both declined. You can hear their statements.
Professor Woodward asserts that untreated wastewater must be being discharged into rivers during low flows and dry weather. This is not permitted and should only happen in "exceptional circumstances". The implications of his work on microplastics are in good agreement with other independent studies of water company behaviour that have identified dry weather spilling of wastewater as widespread.
As we delve deeper into this pressing environmental crisis, we tackle the UK's consideration of a wet wipe ban and explore potential strategies to staunch the flow of microplastics at source. Professor Woodward's innovative sampling methods are put under the spotlight, and we grapple with the troubling role of microbeads from personal care products and industrial processes in contributing to microplastic pollution. We're not just here to expose the problem - join us as we champion the noble cause of cleaner rivers and consider practical solutions to this urgent issue. Tune in to this eye-opening discussion for an insight into the silent threat lurking in our waterways and how we can fight back.
Microplastics are killing our rivers. That's the view of my guest today, who's found the highest concentration of microplastics ever recorded in the bed of the River Tame in Greater Manchester. I'm journalist, Angela Walker, and in this podcast I talk to inspirational people and discuss under-reported issues. Today I'm in conversation with Professor Jamie Woodward from the Geography Department of the University of Manchester. Thank you very much for joining me today.
Professor Jamie Woodward:
Thanks for inviting me, Angela. Nice to see you.
Angela Walker:
So we're hearing a lot about sewage and water pollution at the moment, but today we're going to be talking about microplastics. What exactly are they?
Professor Jamie Woodward:
Well, microplastics. The technical definition is they're pieces of plastic particle that are smaller than five millimetres. So that's half a centimetre, which is actually quite big, but most of the microplastics that we see in the rivers around Manchester are actually much smaller than that. They're smaller than half a millimetre.
Angela Walker:
So what damage do they cause and how are they getting into our rivers then?
Speaker 3:
Well, we started looking at microplastics about six or seven years ago, just a curiosity driven piece of environmental research to see what the levels of microplastic contamination were in the riverbeds around Manchester. We didn't know that and in fact there's been very little work on microplastics in rivers globally, but particularly in the UK. We were surprised to find very high levels of microplastic contamination on riverbeds at certain locations on ten rivers around Greater Manchester. So we started thinking then about how these microplastics were getting into the river channels. But in terms of their ecological impact, there's a steady increase of papers now that have shown that microplastics can have negative consequences on fish populations.
Speaker 3:
Most of that research has been done in the laboratories, showing that microplastics can get stuck in the gastrointinal tract. For example, they can damage the intestinal walls. Microplastics can also have impacts on fish in terms of presenting them from feeding, encouraging malnutrition, etc. So there's a variety of sort of physical impacts. But also microplastics also can get stuck in the gut and start to break down, and plastics are a whole set of polymers and a whole range of chemicals involved and they can have toxic consequences as well. So there's a variety of reasons why it's not good that our rivers are contaminated with microplastics. There's also, of course, a lot of evidence to show that microplastics are moving through the food chain and microplastics are being detected in humans. So there's a variety of reasons why we want to make sure our rivers have good ecological status and they're not contaminated with microplastics.
Angela Walker:
And by their very nature they're so tiny and microscopic normally, aren't they? How do you go about measuring them, the density and the size of them?
Speaker 3:
Well, we've developed a method at Manchester whereby we sample the microplastics that are actually stored on the channel beds, and the reason we do that is because many creatures live on the channel bed. It's a really important part of the riverine ecosystem. So many creatures feed on the channel bed, whether it's birds or fish or invertebrates. They reproduce or they live on the riverbed. So if the riverbed is contaminated with microplastics, there's a much greater chance of those microplastics getting into the food chain. Greenpeace did a national survey a few years ago, mainly focused on microplastics in water, and in many rivers they didn't find hardly any microplastics. We've looked at water as well and found low concentration of microplastics, but at the same sites found very heavy levels of contamination, actually on the channel bed. So we think in ecological terms, looking at microplastics on the riverbed is perhaps the most important place to focus on.
Angela Walker:
So is it your thought that you know the microplastics are in the water. They sink down to the bed, they settle there. Is that what's happening?
Speaker 3:
Well, that's an interesting point because our first phase of research I had a PhD student called Rachel Hurley, who's now based in Oslo working on plastic projects across Europe, and a colleague of mine, James Rothwell. We first started looking at microplastics in 2015 and we found microplastics on 40 sites around Manchester. And then in the winter of 1516, we got extensive flooding. There were big storms in the northwest. Storm either came across the northwest of England and particularly the rivers to the north of Manchester saw very heavy flooding indeed.
Speaker 3:
So we thought, well, we'll go back out in the new year, in spring, and resample all those 40 sites to see those microplastics have been washed away. So, and we found that at most of the sites that microplastics have been reduced significantly. So the rivers will wash the microplastics away. So that got us thinking then okay, well, how are these microplastics getting into the river in the first place? We know that microplastics are high concentrations of microplastics in wastewater, but wastewater is only supposed to be discharged into rivers when rivers are in flood or rivers are in high flow what we call exceptional conditions. So the very presence of microplastics on the riverbeds suggested that they were being introduced in wastewater when the rivers were actually at low flow. So that started thinking about, got us thinking about whether there was a relationship here between wastewater practice and the occurrence of microplastics on river channel beds.
Angela Walker:
And how exactly are the microplastics getting into the wastewater? Is it fibres from our clothes? That kind of thing.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, the microplastics come from a whole range of sources. So you mentioned domestic wastewater, domestic laundries, commercial laundries. That all produces millions of microplastics which will get into wastewater and get into the sewerage system. Microplastics can also be washed off roads, from tire particles, for example, and brake dust, and also there's industrial sources of microplastics, a range of microplastic fragments of microbeads that find their way into the drainage system. But of course, all these microplastics from this whole variety of sources ultimately should make their way to a wastewater treatment plant. And there's a big literature now from across the world which has shown that if wastewater treatment is done properly and done effectively, it can remove a significant proportion of those microplastics and under optimal conditions it can actually move up to 99% of the microplastics. So the very fact that wastewater treatment is effective at removing microplastics tells us that once we see microplastics in high concentrations on riverbeds, that suggests that wastewater treatment that isn't happening as it should.
Angela Walker:
So, in layman's terms, what you're saying is that water companies are releasing waste water into our rivers when they shouldn't be and that, as a result, is contaminating the rivers and riverbeds with microplastics.
Speaker 3:
Indeed. So we're currently embroiled in a sewage scandal, in England and Wales primarily, and it's well established now that discharges of untreated wastewater Sewage is getting most of the attention, for obvious reasons. But sewage is basically a part of untreated wastewater and that untreated wastewater includes a whole cocktail of pollutants, heavy metals, but also microplastics. So treating wastewater obviously to reduce sewage pollution, to stop rivers becoming over enriched with nutrients, to stop people getting ill We've also found that that's also a key part of tackling the microplastic problem is keeping the microplastics out of rivers. Now we mentioned a whole range of microplastic sources. The obvious solution to this is to stop producing plastics and to stop putting plastics into the sewage system. But that isn't going to happen anytime soon and the water companies have a statutory responsibility to deal with whatever's in the sewage system. So the best strategy we have at the moment is to treat that wastewater, because we know that full treatment of the wastewater is actually very effective at removing the microplastics.
Angela Walker:
Now I know you mentioned to me earlier that around about the same time that you did your study and realised that a lot of wastewater was being discharged at certain times and polluting the rivers, there was another study which had similar results but used totally different methods. Talk us through those two studies and how they differed and what they were showing.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, Professor Peter Hammond, who's part of the Windrush Against Sewage Pollution Group. He's a mathematician and he'd been doing forensic analysis of the water company's own data, basically the flow data that goes for the wastewater coming in and treated or untreated wastewater leaving wastewater treatment plants. He was doing forensic analysis of those data and he looked at a number of wastewater treatment plants and looked at data over a number of years and showed very, very clearly that many wastewater treatment plants was basically spilling illegally. They were releasing untreated wastewater, they were often spilling early and this was a problem in terms of creating sewage pollution in rivers. His first paper was published in March 2021 and just a few weeks later we published our paper on microplastics in a journal called Nature Sustainability, which basically made this link between microplastic pollution and the release of untreated wastewater.
Speaker 3:
So that was quite exciting. So Peter got in touch with me, sent me an email, we had a Zoom call, we had a conversation and we basically come to exactly the same conclusion, but from completely different approaches. One was the forensic analysis of flow data and we were using a proxy for wastewater, which was basically the presence of microplastic at high concentrations on riverbeds, and both of those sets of evidence pointed to water companies releasing untreated wastewater into rivers at low flow. So yeah, it was a meeting of minds and it was very satisfying actually that there's a completely independent verification of what we were arguing.
Angela Walker:
And so what happened when you presented your evidence to the water companies?
Speaker 3:
Well, n terms of presenting our evidence, our strategy has been to publish our evidence in the best journals that we can so that those data is out there for people to scrutinise, and so far, we've published a couple of papers in Nature Journals and it's well known in the community that they have a very, very high standard of peer review and editorial scrutiny. So we wanted to publish the papers in the best places we can so that then the community whether it's the industry or the science community can look at those papers and evaluate them. When our paper was published in 2021, United Utilities released a statement. Of course, the water companies didn't like another big problem being parked at their front door, so United Utilities released a statement criticising our sampling strategy, criticising our conclusions, but that's a common strategy of big corporate organisations. But what's interesting is, two and a half years later, after that paper was published, United Utilities haven't come up with a better explanation of the data sets that we presented. So we stand by those findings.
Angela Walker:
I did invite United Utilities to join us on this podcast but they said they didn't have anybody available. But they have sent this statement so I'll share that with you today. And it says "Professor Woodward's research did not consider all sources of microplastics in the immediate study area, such as the presence of plastics recycling plants. It goes on to say it's important society increases its understanding of microplastic pollution, so meaningful solutions can be developed to tackle the issue. That's why we're supporting independent scientific research in North Manchester to better understand the sources of microplastic pollution, including from wastewater assets and other river catchment sources. And so they're saying that you weren't considering other sources of microplastics. What would you say in response to that?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, that statement was released the day that our paper was published. That was in May 2021. So, yeah, there are multiple sources of microplastics in the capturement. But if microplastics are coming from what the United States has haven't explained, if microplastics are coming from recycling plants, how do those microplastics get into the river? They're probably going to get into the drainage system and come to their sewerage system and end up in the river. So ultimately, they should be treated at wastewater treatment plants and, in terms of criticising our sampling strategy, we stand by that. And they're still promising this research that they're doing in North Manchester. They were talking about that two and a half years ago. We still haven't seen any of those data. I'd be fascinated to see what data they have on microplastics.
Angela Walker:
It's really interesting that you say that that's an old statement, because that's the one that they've provided me with this morning, this very day. So they're still using the same wording, are they?
Speaker 3:
Well, it's nice to know that they're doing some recycling, but we'd like to get some fresh information.
Angela Walker:
That's interesting. Yeah, so they said it was too short notice for them to find a guest to come on, unfortunately. So while we've been talking, I've just had a statement drop from DEFRA which I've been waiting for and I'll read it out for you now. It says "the UK is a global leader in combating plastic waste. We've taken major steps to tackle plastic pollution, including microplastics. Just last week, we launched a UK-wide consultation on banning wet wipes containing plastic, which will help reduce the amount of microplastics entering wastewater treatment plants. More widely, we've restricted the supply of several single-use plastic items such as straws, drink stirrers and cotton buds, and introduced a world-leading plastic packaging tax that's stopping microplastics at source. What do you make of that statement?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, there's nothing in there about treating wastewater and making sure the water companies do what they're obliged to do to follow the permits that they're issued with for their wastewater treatment sites. Treating wastewater is the most important strategy to reduce microplastics entering rivers. Yeah, I welcome the consultation on wet wipes. I don't know how many consultations we've had on wet wipes, but if this finally happens wet wipes are obliged in many urban rivers I would ban wet wipes tomorrow. Absolutely. The government has made some important steps plastic bags, etc. But in terms of microplastics, what I want to hear is we have to come up with a way to make the water companies treat the wastewater, not create their infrastructure so that it happens. That's the most important things in terms of keeping microplastics out of rivers.
Angela Walker:
Regulation. You're calling for that. Why do you think that we're not seeing a tightening up of regulation?
Speaker 3:
Well, it's regulation, but also a sustained investment package. That should have happened decades ago, because the money has been in the system to do that. Now the water companies are recently announced saying they can reduce spills by 140,000 per year. So what was this intractable, insolvable Victorian problem a few years ago is now suddenly solvable. So if that investment had happened 10, 15 years ago, we wouldn't be in the mess that we're in now.
Angela Walker:
So, when you talk about these samples that you take, how do you do this? Do you literally get into the river and you're waders with a big bucket, and how does it work?
Speaker 3:
We absolutely get into the river with our waders. We have a sampling cylinder, could you imagine? About the same size of an aluminium bin. So it's a cylinder, a metal cylinder. We push it into the riverbed so that we can isolate a portion of the riverbed, and then we use a metal trowel to disturb the gravels, disturb the sands in the riverbed, so the fine sediments and microplastics come up into suspension. And then we collect samples of that muddy water and take it back to the laboratory in large containers and then in the laboratory we extract the sediments and extract the microplastics. We do various density separations and then we physically identify the microplastics under a microscope and we count them. We identify every single one and we count them. So we have a very rigorous procedure to sample the microplastics from the riverbed, take them back to the laboratory and then we count them.
Angela Walker:
And I know that you were shocked, weren't you, with the measurements that you came up with in the River Tame in Greater Manchester. Walk me through the levels of contamination that you found and how they compared with other studies globally which were looking at the same kind of pollution.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, United Utilities have pointed this out. The first paper we published in 2018 got a lot of press attention. Of course, journalists, Angela, love superlatives. They like the highest, the biggest, so at that time, that was the highest concentration of microplastic that had ever been found, and then we published another site in 2021 that had even higher concentrations. I think we had 138,000 microplastic particles per kilogram of fine bed sediment on the riverbed. Now I'm less interested in the fact that that's the highest concentration that anybody's ever found, but I'm interested in the significance of that.
Speaker 3:
However, the first paper that we published, United Utilities just said that they're not sure how much work's been done elsewhere. That paper's now been cited by other scientists over 630 times, so there's quite a big body now of work on microplastics in rivers that's taking place across the world. Now there may well be a site that's more contaminated than that. I don't know of it, but I'm happy to be corrected on that. The main point is, though, is not whether it's the highest. The main point is that the rivers around Greater Manchester and then the rivers in urban environments across the UK have high levels of microplastic contamination, very often because wastewater isn't being treated as it should.
Angela Walker:
And what's going to happen if this continues?
Speaker 3:
Well, you asked me earlier about what was happening in terms of when we were disseminating this information. There are a number of positive things happening. I gave evidence to the Environmental Audit Committee in the Commons, who were doing a major inquiry into river pollution across England, and Philip Dunn shared that committee. So I gave written evidence and I gave a presentation to that committee. So they've made a series of recommendations. They published a very substantial report with a large number of recommendations in January 2022. One of those recommendations was that we should have a national survey of rivers across England to look at levels of microplastic contamination, because we haven't been collecting baseline data. The Environment Agency, up to this point, is overstretched, underfunded and they haven't been collecting data on microplastics. But they're currently developing a national strategy to do that and we're helping them when we're providing advice with the way we collect our samples etc. So we're contributing to the development of that national strategy. So that's a positive thing. So we'll be able to get much better information about you know to what levels of contamination we have in river systems across England and beyond. So that's a positive.
Speaker 3:
And also there's a lot of pressure now on the water companies to clean up their act. This has been a public relations disaster for them. You may have noticed that in early this year, in May, the water companies actually apologized. They apologized for the frequency of sewage spills and untreated wastewater spills that have been happening across England and Wales primarily, and they're trying to clean up their act. So their investment is going ahead. So these are all positive things.
Speaker 3:
However, there's still room for much more transparency across the industry. I would argue that currently, we get data on how often they dump sewage or they spill sewage and how long those sewage spills last. So we get data on hours, the duration of the spills and how often they last. The water companies should be able to provide us with much more information on the volumes of those discharges, because we get data on a spill. We don't know whether a spill, for example, is 10 litres or 10 billion litres, so the water companies are still able to hide very, very substantial discharges of untreated wastewater and sewage into our rivers within the existing metrics, and I think those metrics are flawed. There's scope to make them much more informative.
Angela Walker:
So what do you want to see? Do you want to see more regulation to try and force water companies to be more thorough in their reporting of sewage discharges? What do you want to see happen?
Speaker 3:
Well, regulation clearly needs tightening up because the water companies have effectively I would argue, have effectively been operating in a regulation-free environment for the last five years possibly the last decade and many of them have ruthlessly exploited that. So the Environment Agency has many dedicated professionals who want to do the right thing, who care passionately about the environment and many of my former students work for the Environment Agency but they've been severely underfunded. Their monitoring budget was effectively slashed in half a few years ago and also they've suffered from poor leadership. They've set the wrong priorities and they've completely dropped the ball on river water quality and river habitats.
Speaker 3:
In England in the last few years Ofwat's big debate about you know what has Ofwat been doing. The water companies have apologized for not investing sufficiently, so that's been happening on off-Wats watch. So certainly the Environment Agency and Ofwat need to get their acts together. The Environment Agency needs more funding. The water companies aren't going to be taken back into public ownership. There's a big debate about that in the moment. People are arguing for that, but I don't think that's going to happen. The solution at this stage is to better fund the Environment Agency and to make sure regulation and monitoring is happening effectively across the country.
Angela Walker:
Yeah, we have seen some finding of water companies by the EA, you know for dumping sewage. But really the amount of money that the companies have been fined has been such a drop in the ocean compared with the amount of actual illegal discharges that some people are saying it's almost just like paying a small token to get away with it.
Speaker 3:
There was a good example a couple of years ago with Southern Water I think they were fined 90 million. That stands out as an exceptional event and that was a result of particularly tenacious Environment Agency officers y ou know holding them to account and getting the information. But elsewhere, you know that there aren't any deterrents. You know water companies are systematically dumping sewage in rivers. They've done it for many, many years and it will continue for many years into the future. So there isn't a sufficient deterrent at the moment to stop them from doing that. The government's there's been a lot of talk about this but nothing has really happened that's taken away that deterrent. Any other industry, Angela, where the CEOs are in charge of an industry that's dumping huge amounts of toxic waste in the environment, those CEOs would go to prison. But the water companies seem to have a you know, a free ticket to do what they're like.
Angela Walker:
There is legal action at the moment, isn't there, for I think it's seven water companies who are accused of under-reporting the amount of sewage that they've discharged. So there is that that's ongoing. From your point of view, what is your latest research? What are you working on at the moment regarding microplastics?
Speaker 3:
Well, yeah, I have a student at the moment. We're now starting to look at microplastics in fish, so that work isn't published yet. We'll be able to say a bit more about that when that work is done. But we're starting looking at the river tame and the obvious thing there to do is to start looking at if those microplastics are getting into the biology. So I don't want to say too much about that right now, but let's just say that there is a microplastic contamination problem with the fish in the river tame. So that's something that we'll be writing on publishing very soon.
Speaker 3:
I've also been looking at the presence of microbeads in the rivers across Greater Manchester. That's some other work that we'll be writing up very soon. The presence of microbeads is important the United Utilities have been arguing about. You know there are other sources of microplastic pollution, but microbeads are primary microplastic particles. You know they're deliberately manufactured. They're spherical particles. They're used for a variety of purposes. So they haven't come from a wastewater treatment. They haven't come from a recycling plant. They haven't come from the degradation of plastics in the river. They're a clear connection with the wastewater treatment system. So when we find microbeads in high concentrations, it's a very, very clear demonstration that wastewater treatment isn't happening as it should. So we've got a lot more data now on the presence of microbeads across the region and we've got very clear relationships with wastewater data. So that's the next stuff that we'll be writing up.
Angela Walker:
That's interesting, because I thought microbeads were banned, or certainly they were banned in face products and things like that, weren't they?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, well, Michael Gove banned personal care products, microbeads and personal care, which that ban came in, I think, in January 2018. The microbeads that we see come from industrial processes, so they're not microbeads in personal care products. So, yeah, they're getting into the sewerage system. They're getting into the drainage network. We're seeing them on the riverbeds in high concentrations, so there's a separate debate there about you know, should there be tighter regulation around the industrial use of those microbeads? But at the moment, we are seeing them and they provide a very clear link between the wastewater system and the contamination on the riverbeds, and we often find them. It's part of other microplastic assemblies as well, so they're part of a tool that we're developing to identify poor wastewater practice.
Angela Walker:
And how does it make you feel you know, when you're doing your research and you're looking at the results and you're seeing all these micro-pastic building up in the riverbeds, what goes through your mind?
Speaker 3:
Well, you know, we started off this work six or seven years ago and it was just a sort of curiosity-driven piece of river catchment science and then suddenly we made the connection between wastewater and microplastic contamination. So it got policy legs and a lot of exposure. So it's been a journey and it's evolved.
Speaker 3:
Me speaking to different audiences, do I get depressed about this?
Speaker 3:
You know it is pretty dispiriting to see many of the rivers around Greater Manchester treated pretty much like open sewers.
Speaker 3:
However, I am an optimist, Angela, and what's interesting about this whole sewage debate and the whole river pollution debate is that the sewage scandal hasn't been revealed by off-what. It hasn't been uncovered by the environment agency. It's been revealed by campaigners and university researchers, the work that Peter Hammond has done, the work that we've done in Manchester, the brilliant campaigning groups at Ilkley on the Wharf and at Wasp down in the Cotswolds, and so that tells me that campaigning works and it is possible to make a difference through university research and through people campaigning because they care passionately about their local rivers. And also I don't think it's a coincidence that, if you meant, much of the serious investment now that the water companies are putting in are in those areas where people are campaigning most heavily and shining a light on poor wastewater practice. So the message there is get out and campaign and, you know, make a noise about your local river, get hold of the data, complain to the water company and be a vehicle for change.
Angela Walker:
If water companies do clean up their act and they do treat the water before they release it into the waterways and so on, and we do stop microplastics from getting through at that stage, what about the microplastics that are already there? What can be done about it?
Speaker 3:
Well, yeah, things about. Once microplastics are out in the environment, they're pretty much out there and ultimately they will end up in the ocean, on the ocean floor. But yeah, there are. People have talked about various strategies, about sort of you know, cleaning up microplastics in the environment. You know, I haven't seen any methods that are going to be cost effective to do that. The best strategy we have is to keep microplastics out of rivers in the first place.
Speaker 3:
The first phase of our work showed that rivers are a key supplier of microplastics to the oceans. So if you work backwards, one of the key ways of tackling the microplastic problem in the oceans is to keep microplastics out of rivers. The best way we have to keep microplastics out of rivers until we stop using plastic is basically to treat the wastewater, and that is a big part of the problem. So you pay your water bills, angela. You know half of your water bill is for wastewater, to have your wastewater treated. So there's an expectation that that money that you spend will result in the wastewater being treated. And sadly, what's been happening over the last over too long, the last couple of decades is that wastewater infrastructure has been degraded, it hasn't been upgraded, it hasn't been invested in and too much wastewater untreated wastewater has been dumped in rivers because it's been too easy to do that and it's been a way of maintaining profits.
Angela Walker:
On an individual basis. Do you think we can make a difference if we say, right, I'm not going to buy clothes with plastic in that kind of thing?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, getting the right information out to people is important. I mean, one strategy at the moment is to there's a campaign to fit washing machines with filters. For example, alberto Costa, the MP for East Leicester, has got a private member spill in Parliament to have filters fitted to washing machines to trap microplastic fibres at source. So that's just one example of something that can be done, and the solution, of course, is to reduce plastic use and to stop plastic pollution at source. We shouldn't have to rely on the water companies to treat this wastewater. That's kind of an end-of-pipe solution, but the reality is we are where we are and lots of microplastics in the sewer system. The best strategy at the moment is to treat that wastewater, but of course we all have a responsibility to reduce the amount of plastics that we use, whether it's in a domestic situation or an industrial situation. Absolutely.
Angela Walker:
And you mentioned earlier about taking part in some kind of national monitoring scheme. What's the time scale for that and what's the geographical scale? How many kind of riverbeds will you be kind of looking at?
Speaker 3:
Well, that's still being fleshed out at the moment. The environment agency are working on that. They'll get some funding from DEFRA, we hope. I think the plan at the moment is to take a couple of river catchments and to study those in detail to understand the sources of microplastics and also to understand what interventions can make a difference in terms of reducing microplastic contamination, so that the lessons that's learned will be learned from that exercise can be rolled out then across the country to have a sort of nationwide monitoring programme to help us better understand the bigger picture.
Angela Walker:
But there is hope.
Speaker 3:
Absolutely. I'm an optimist and I get huge encouragement and satisfaction from the campaign that goes about, and I see lots of people around Greater Manchester in my local region where people care passionately about their river systems. They're investing in those river systems but they've been badly let down by the system. So, yeah, change is long overdue and we need to move faster.
Angela Walker:
Thank you so much for joining us today and thank you for explaining all about microplastics. It's so fascinating to hear how they're just coming through the sewage network and landing in our riverbeds and then making a journey from there to the sea. I think a lot of people wouldn't realise that that's how it's happening.
Speaker 3:
Thanks, angela, delighted to share our research with you.
Angela Walker:
Today I've been in conversation with Professor Jamie Woodward from the Geography Department of the University of Manchester. I hope you've enjoyed the show. Please rate, review and share the show, as that means algorithms will mean it's made available to more people. This is the last in the current series of Angela Walker in conversation. I'm taking a break for a few weeks, but I will be back soon. Meanwhile, you can get in touch through my website, angiowalkerreportscom. Until next time, take care.