If you've spotted pollution in a water course, please call us on 0800 138 3484 so that we can investigate as a priority.
How to spot pollution
Signs of a suspected pollution in rivers, water courses or coastal areas could include:
- The appearance of toilet paper, tissues, wipes, faecal matter, condoms and/or sanitary products
- A river or stream appearing to look cloudy or milky
- The appearance of soap suds or foam
- The presence of a slimy grey sewage fungus
- Dead or gasping fish
- Noticeable sewage odour.
Our Pollution Incident Reduction Plan 2025-2029
We’ve been doing extensive research to understand what you’d like us to improve on over the next 5 years. We know that you need us to prevent sewage escapes from damaging your homes and the environment, and that you’re wanting to see improvements to Yorkshire’s rivers across the region. Our pollution incident reduction plan explains how we’ll be reducing pollution incidents across our operations. We’re aiming to reduce pollution incidents by 30% between 2025 and 2029, and we’ll be actively working towards having zero serious pollution incidents during this time too.
Our plan is aspirational and will be dynamic as it evolves to meet the scale of the challenge and develop and deploy the most cost-effective solutions.
What we're doing
Where we identify the incident to be our responsibility, our commitment is to:
- take immediate action to stop the pollution
- perform a detailed assessment of the cause of the pollution and any environmental impact
- inform the Environment Agency of the incident
- clean up in the affected areas
- ensure that we do everything we can to prevent the problem from happening again
What you can do
You can help us protect the environment by:
- Only flushing pee, paper and poo down the loo. Wipes, no matter what they say on the packet shouldn’t be flushed
- Allow fat, oil and grease to cool before putting it in the bin. Don’t pour it down the sink or flush it away in the loo
- Make sure your sinks, washing machine and dishwasher are connected to the correct waste drain and not the drain for that’s for rain water – one in five homes has a connection to the wrong drain