Clean-up work begins on London's 'wet wipe island'

Local TV

Work has started on the mass excavation of London’s 'wet wipe island' in a first-of-its-kind river clean-up project to further improve the quality of the River Thames.

Transcript

00:00London's so-called Wet Wipe Island is located on the south side of the Thames, just by Hammersmith

00:08Bridge. The thick sludge along that 250-metre stretch of the river's foreshore was named

00:16Wet Wipe Island by campaigners from the charity Thames 21, which have been calling for a major

00:24clean-up as well as a wider crackdown on plastic pollution as its volunteers collected more than

00:32140,000 wet wipes from that area in a period of eight years. The plastic waste has settled

00:39in the slow part of the river after being flushed down toilets and after being released as part of

00:46untreated sewage by Thames Water during periods of heavy rain. It is estimated the garbage-ridden

00:54area is one metre deep in some places and it covers an area equivalent to two tennis courts

01:02while weighing the same amount as 15 double-decker London buses. Once removed, the waste will go to

01:11landfills rather than being recycled due to the high levels of contamination. The clean-up has come after

01:19the new Thames Tideway Tunnel recently started operating with expectations that it will help

01:27catch 250 tonnes of plastic waste a year. It is hoped the new so-called super sewer will also help to

01:35reduce the amount of untreated sewage Thames Water dumps into waterways as part of efforts to stop the

01:46system being overwhelmed. Now the Thames Tideway Tunnel is in operation, we will intercept 95% of the

01:54volume of water going into the river. It's only in the most extreme storms that will ever get an

01:58overflow now. So we anticipate we're going to capture about 250 tonnes of plastics including wet wipes every

02:05year by use of the Tideway Tunnel. At the moment this is a standalone project because of the collection of

02:10wet wipes here is so large. So at the moment it's a standalone but what we're trying to do is to make

02:17sure that we're working for River Health because we know our customers really appreciate the quality

02:22of our waters and we're trying to spend £1.8 billion in the next five years on the tributaries to the Thames.

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