• 9 months ago
Southern Water has announced that it has spent £333 million in four years on major waste and water improvement projects in Sussex, – including £157m on improving wastewater treatment processes to improve the quality of final effluent discharge at 37 sites.
Interview by Lawrence Smith

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Transcript
00:00 My name is Chris Brayne, I'm the Head of Asset Strategy and Planning at Southern Water.
00:04 So since 2020 we've spent £333 million in the Sussex area
00:14 and we've got plans for another £137 million in the coming year.
00:23 So we're investing about £156 million improving the wastewater treatment processes on about 37
00:32 different sites in the Sussex area and this is all about removing the nutrients that go into our
00:37 rivers. Another project as well we've got making some large investments into some of our major
00:44 water supply works such as this one near Pallborough. So that's £32 million and it's
00:50 about improving the treatment processes, improving the standby generation to reduce the likelihood of
00:58 interruptions for customers but also future-proofing them for the more extreme weather that we can
01:04 expect now and going into the future such as droughts and flooding.
01:08 There's always a place for post pipe bands within a drought scenario but they should be
01:20 unusual and more extreme and that's where we're really trying to improve the resilience of our
01:25 water supplies for drought periods and that's partly why we're investing a lot of money into
01:31 the area. We're looking to invest up to £1.5 billion since 2020 but this time next year.
01:40 We are experiencing droughts more frequently and that's why we're producing our water resource
01:47 management plan which takes the look forward for about 50 to 70 years and we're creating the plans
01:54 that we need to do to build that more resilience and going in to that area. Some of the features
02:01 that we'd be looking at would be there's the new reservoir down near Portsmouth and looking at the
02:07 use of recycling water to improve the flow in some of our rivers.
02:13 What are your expectations for the future?
02:18 I understand that we're not currently meeting the expectations that our customers might
02:23 have of us but that's exactly why we are investing in our infrastructure. We're looking to
02:29 improve the treatment on our resilience of our water supply works but also some significant
02:36 investment in improving our environment through the wastewater treatment and the storm overflows
02:42 which is one of our key priorities. We know the environment is really important to our customers
02:47 and we also understand that we're not meeting their expectations in terms of pollution and
02:54 flooding and this is why we're investing heavily in our infrastructure in the current five-year
03:00 period and we'll be doing even more in the next five-year period from 2025.
03:05 What are the improvements you'd like to see in the future?
03:10 So a lot of the improvements we're doing will are focused around improving the environment.
03:16 So we are removing a lot of nutrients that go into our rivers which should improve their
03:20 ecological status. There's a large focus on the reduction of storm overflows which
03:26 can impact both the rivers and local bathing areas but we're also then building the resilience to
03:36 our water treatment and that will reduce the amount that we abstract from the rivers
03:41 and again that will improve the rivers and bathing waters.
03:44 What are the challenges facing the environment?
03:49 It's removing things like phosphorus and nitrogen from our fine left land and they can be the cause
03:56 of what's called eutrophication in rivers and it can cause them to reduce the amount of oxygen for
04:04 fish and for wildlife. So it should have a significant improvement on the overall ecology
04:10 and biodiversity in our rivers.
04:12 What are the challenges facing the environment?
04:17 For our water supplies we abstract a lot of water from both the ground where we have the large chalk
04:24 hills and things like this but also from the rivers. So what we're looking at is finding
04:29 alternative sources of water so we don't have to take so much water out of our rivers.
04:33 These would include such as water recycling where we would recycle some of the wastewater
04:41 and return it to the water but it should enhance the amount of water in the environment
04:47 and improve the biodiversity and the ecology of the environment.

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