What we do with your waste water
Getting water into your home is only half the story. Once it's been used, we collect, treat and return it safely to the environment.
Collecting waste water
We've a network of around 20,000 miles of underground pipes, collecting waste water from Yorkshire's homes, liquid waste from industry, and rainwater that falls on roofs and roads.
After you've used your water it enters a waste pipe, travels into a drain, then into a sewer pipe that joins others to form something we call a trunk sewer. Eventually it reaches one of our 631 waste water treatment works across the region.
Treating waste water
We remove debris and large objects by passing the waste water through specially designed filter screens. - Sewage is transferred into a settlement tank where solid matter sinks to form sludge.
- The liquid sewage flows on to stage three which involves biological treatment. Here, filters of stone containing billions of bacteria and small organisms remove any organic pollutants.
- Finally, the sewage enters our settlement tanks where any remaining micro-organisms and sludge sink to the bottom. From here, the treated water can be returned to the environment. Most of the sludge produced can either be spread onto farmland to improve soil quality or may be burnt harmlessly in our sewage sludge incinerators.
Putting our water back
It's important for our environment that the water we use is returned safely to the rivers and the sea. Many of our rivers are cleaner now than at any time in the last 100 years. This is because we've been hard at work updating and modernising many of our waste water treatment plants in the region. We also played a massive part in improving Yorkshire's coastal bathing waters with our to a multimillion-pound investment in our waste water treatment in these areas.
