New stats show just how much crap poured into the Thames in recent years.
"Thames Water pumped at least 72bn litres of sewage into Thames since 2020," reckons the Guardian headline. That sounds like an awful lot. But exactly how much of an awful lot is it?
Happily, most of us can't visualise 72bn litres of sewage. But there is a standard unit of large volume — the Olympic-sized swimming pool — that feels a bit more manageable. In those terms, it's 29,000.
To be honest, though, I can't really visualise 29,000 feculent pools, either. What I can visualise is my bathtub which, as a writer, I spend quite a bit of time in. If a typical bath uses 80 litres, then Thames Water's discharges since 2020 could fill over 900 million bathtubs. That's a lot of baths. If you did nothing with your life except hop from one bath of sludge to another, spending just one second in each tub, then by the time you reached the age of 100 you'd be about a third of the way through your task and seriously questioning your life choices.
More succinctly, 900 million bathtubs is roughly 100 bathtubs for every London citizen. Remember, the figure included discharges since 2020, which covers roughly four years. So, for every person living in London, at least 25 bathtubs of shitty water goes into the Thames each year. What a ghastly conclusion.
Now, it's important to note that much of the discharge is neither shit nor piss. Normally (and it's a horrid kind of normally), sewage is only released into the Thames following heavy rain. The Victorian sewer system, built for a much smaller population in a less paved-over city, cannot cope with the sudden run-off and the excess is dumped into the river. Even before the rain, the human waste is heavily diluted by bath, shower and laundry water, and the many litres of flush that accompany your turd on its epic post-rectal adventure.
But while the grim stuff is heavily diluted, it's still enough to kill fish and pose a risk to human health. Thames Water now pumps oxygen into the river to give the fish more of a chance — the Thames is literally on life support.
We're lucky to have the data. Water companies — you'll be alarmed to learn — do not generally monitor or report on volumes of discharge. They instead focus on the number of hours over which discharge occurs. The volume estimates come from new equipment installed as part of the Thames Tideway "supersewer" project. And we only have the figures because of some digging by the Liberal Democrats, who are campaigning for cleaner waters.
The picture should get better in 2025 when the Thames Tideway tunnel comes online. It's designed to ingest 95% of the waste water that would previously have been discharged.
That still leaves 5%. Every Londoner could fill their bathtub with the shitty water we will still pump out each year.
