Water & Wastewater Treatment Magazine
Issue link: https://fhpublishing.uberflip.com/i/996476
26 | JULY 2018 | WWT | www.wwtonline.co.uk The Works: catchment management WATER COMPANY VIEW " Our water and farming partnership initiative 'Together we know h2ow' – named Water Resilience Initiative of the Year at the 2018 Water Industry Awards – was launched in April 2015 but has its roots in events that unfolded a decade ago. "In 2008, we started to see increased levels of metaldehyde in some of our catchments and looked at blending to ensure we were compliant with the European Drinking Water Directive. For a long-term solution, we looked at a water treatment process called reverse osmosis, but that was very expensive and carbon- hungry. "We started thinking that if we could do something in the catchment, that would be far more sustainable. We did a lot of modelling work with the agricultural and environmental consultancy ˆ rm ADAS UK Ltd (now RSK ADAS Ltd) to look at the geology of the catchment and rainfall. They outlined the methods we could use to reduce metaldehyde in conjunction with farmers, helping us to understand land use, crops and the times of year where pesticide application may cause us a problem. "We could have looked at the whole of our catchments, but they're huge, so trying to get water quality data would be expensive, time-consuming and quite di" cult to achieve. "Using the ADAS work, we looked at the key parts of our catchments where, if we had metaldehyde failures, that would cause a big issue. Rather than just utilising Environment Agency baseline data, we started to create our own. Instead of only looking at water quality at the point of extraction, we looked at "Farmers don't want to be seen as polluters – they want to be part of the solution" Emma Goddard, Head of Environment, South East Water, speaks to WWT about the company's award-winning catchment management initiative which targeted the use of the slug pellet metaldehyde in catchments WINNER South East Water's Simon Lohrey leads on surface water catchment management work for the utility