Have you visited sewagemap.co.uk? If you care about your local rivers, lakes and seas, you might want to take a look at this very graphic display of where sewage is being discharged across England.

If you’re wondering which sense of ‘graphic’ we mean, well, it’s both: first, it’s easy to see the information at a glance. And second, if there’s an active discharge right now, you’ll see an unapologetic poo emoji hovering above your postcode, alongside a brown river to show how the sewage will spread.

So this is a very useful site that makes it easy to understand the current picture around sewage discharges in your area. But if you’re hoping to understand how the situation is changing, you’re out of luck. You can’t see historic data, and that’s because — with the exception of Thames Water — the water companies don’t make it publicly available.

Infuriating, right? Good! Because, thanks to incorporation of our WriteToThem service into the site’s workflow, you can email your MP and let them know why you think this data is important.

And it’s working — we became aware of the site because of the number of messages it refers through to WriteToThem. Curious to know more, we spoke to Alex Lipp, one of the site’s two creators, to find out how it had come about, and what it has achieved.

“It’s kind of a pet project,” Alex explains. “One day I was was playing around and I noticed there was live sewage data being published by water companies. 

“Now, the data itself might be quite dull, but I realised that if you could make the link between sewage stats and the rivers that people know and love, they would be more likely to take an interest. 

“I work in fresh water science so I could handle the technical side of things; and Johnny, a friend from uni, works in geodata visualisation: he did the design. The set-up isn’t exactly high-tech: it’s literally running off my old laptop, plugged into an Ethernet port at work. 

“But it works — it performs well in search engines, and it had 350,000 views last year. We just want to present what would normally be very boring environmental data in a way that engages and makes sense to regular people. Existing sites only showed the points of discharge. It just seemed really obvious to me that what people wanted was information about impacted rivers, which was not included in the other visualisations at all. So I added it in!”

And that historic data would be useful too, right, so people could see whether things were improving or declining?

“Yes! Perhaps surprisingly, Thames Water are much better than other providers, when it comes to data transparency. They published data before all the others, and they have a live API you can query. 

“The other water companies make it difficult to query historical data – you generally have to send them an EIR request, because the law technically only requires them to share live data. It’s an oversight of the 2021 Environment Act that water companies aren’t required to publish historical data. So we note on the site where a company doesn’t make it available, and that’s the prompt for people to email their MP and explain why it’s needed.”

Why does the site only cover England? “The Environment Act doesn’t apply to Scotland or Wales – so that’s even more complicated. In Scotland and Wales, water companies are nationalised. They voluntarily publish similar data, but aren’t required to, and it’s in a different format.”

And so – with the site encouraging users to email their MPs, what makes for an effective message? Alex reckons it’s two things:

“Personal stories, and local stories. Just at a fundamental level it feels wrong for sewage to be going into rivers”. So, if you can explain what it means to you — maybe you’d like to take your kids swimming in that river, or you remember it being a clean place to play when you were a kid yourself? “Yes. It’s actually an issue most people can agree on, and there’s strong cross-party support.

“And I think this is a mutable thing that could be fixed…well, lets see if that’s true!”

What impacts has Alex seen so far? “We have a lot of users, and I get a lot of contact from members of the public — anglers, swimmers, campaign groups — who use the data we present and our visualisations to help gauge whether the rivers are safe. 

“I’m also fairly confident (but can’t directly prove) that MPs are using the site to get data for discussions that have taken place in Parliament, and are recorded in Hansard. And, most recently, the press team for the recent Dirty Business documentary used the site to get information for their campaign. 

“So, we have in general had a distributed impact via widespread use. I confidently think we have contributed to the wider discussion, applying pressure to fix the issue of sewage spills.”

We very much hope so! If you agree that data is the key to understanding the sewage spills issue, and being able to do something about it, head over to sewagemap.co.uk, check out your own postcode and then drop a line to your MP (you’ll find the link in the ‘discharge history’ tab when you click on an icon) to let them know.