Around 5m wet wipes cleared from Thames as work to remove ‘island’ completed

Evening Standard

Congealed rubbish equivalent to around five million wet wipes has been cleared from the banks of the River Thames as a major project to remove the so-called “wet wipe island” reaches completion.Last month, diggers began dredging up muddy waste that had settled along a 250-metre stretch of the foreshore near Hammersmith Bridge in west London.The two eight-tonne excavators used a “rake and shake” method to scoop out wet wipes from the natural sediment and riverbed, but also dug up towels, scarves, trousers, a car’s engine timing belt and a set of false teeth.The island, which was about the size of two tennis courts and up to one metre deep in places, is thought to have changed the course of the river and potentially harmed nearby aquatic wildlife and ecology.

Transcript

00:00So my name is Grace Ronsley and I'm the Director of Sustainability for the Port of London Authority.

00:17I'm here on the foreshore today, just above Hammersmith Bridge, where we've just launched our wet wipe island cleanup project.

00:24Where we're aiming to take 180 tonnes of wet wipes off of the foreshore that have accumulated over the last 10 years.

00:31So this is a great project for the local community.

00:33It's going to improve the water quality of the river for the rowing community and any other recreational users.

00:39It's also going to improve the ecology of the area.

00:42And it's also going to get rid of what is quite an unsightly mess on the foreshore that residents have rightly been concerned about for a long time.

00:49I think that a true measure of success on this project is going to be that the wet wipes don't reaccumulate in this site.

00:55But the reality is it's new. It's the first time we've ever done something like this.

00:58It's the first time I think anyone has ever done something like this in the country.

01:01And so we're learning lessons constantly about this project as we go through it.

01:05And we will continue to work with Thames 21 volunteers to monitor the site so that if we do start to see reaccumulations,

01:12that we'll be able to take quick action and remove them as quickly as we can.

01:16We also hope to learn a lot of lessons about this site that we could potentially use on other parts of the river as well.

01:23Hello, I'm Felicity from Thames 21 and we're here on the Hammersmith foreshore,

01:28where volunteers have been counting and collecting wet wipes since 2017.

01:33The volunteers have collected more than 140,000 wet wipes in that time.

01:38And today we're seeing the result of that effort drawing attention to the issue of plastic pollution in the river.

01:45My name is John Sullivan. I work with Thames Water.

01:49And my role within Thames is the head of the Tideway Integration Group.

01:52I'm really excited to be talking to you today on the south bank of the Thames near Hammersmith Bridge,

01:57where we're working with the PLA on removing Wet Wipe Island.

02:00I'd also really like to thank the volunteers of Thames 21 who spotted Wet Wipe Island first in 2017

02:07and have been monitoring its presence ever since.

02:09It's really a good time to be starting to remove Wet Wipe Island now that the Thames Tideway tunnel is now complete,

02:15but because this is the third and final stage of a three-stage improvement that we started back in 2015.

02:21Now we're stopping 95% of the volume of the combined sewer overflows that are going into the River Thames.

02:27PLA now are removing Wet Wipe Island with a scrape and shake technique,

02:31which is using a comb on the river to be able to pick out the wet wipes from the riverbank itself,

02:37and then put it into skips and then take it away.

02:39.

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