Water in Wiltshire rivers among UK's worst, report finds
Less than 30% of the county's river water is of an acceptable quality
A wildlife charity in Wiltshire is urging us to do our bit to improve the quality of freshwater in the county's rivers.
Alice Eley from Wiltshire Wildlife Trust (WWT) says there are three 'pillars' that help foster a healthy river environment - habitat, water quantity and water quality.
"If you've got any of those kind of pillars lacking, you're going to have have a river that's struggling and we definitely struggle with all three of those in Wiltshire," she said.
Much of the low quality is attributed to agricultural run off, which carries fertilisers and sediment into rivers, while road run-off also provides a lot of pollution, while sewage pollution is also a major problem.
All of this leads to a process called nutrification, where the habitat gets enriched with phosphates and nitrates in the water, allowing algae and plants to bloom.
They will then suck all the oxygen out of the water - having a massive impact on wildlife forming the basis of a rivers ecosystem.
"All that life that's living in the river or the invertebrates or the fish will suffer and that has knock on impacts for everything that feeds on those," said Alice.
WWT has a team dedicated to improving and restoring rivers in the county.
They achieve this through small scale habitat interventions and working with farmers on a larger scale.
Alice said: "In order to really make a difference, we need to do this at at a big scale. We need to have collaborative working at a landscape scale to improve the kind of the whole catchment. And that comes with working with land owners and farmers."
She added that legislation ensuring there's less pollution hitting rivers and improved funding are also needed at Government level.
Alice is urging us to be conscious of how we might be polluting rivers through the sewage system.
She says we need to be watchful of our water usage, with more water being used by us one factor in damaging river health, while we need to be warry of whats going down our drains and whether it could cause a blockage or a leak.
"Rivers are suffering at the moment. Obviously the changing climate is putting a lot of pressure on our rivers.
"We're getting really extreme wet winters and some very, very low flows in the summer, so the less water we can use our house, the less extracted from our rivers and allows them to kind of maintain healthy flows all year round," Alice said.
Groundwater is another factor in potential leaks.
"A lot of the reasons that we get spills from our water treatment works is because we have so much groundwater infiltrating the system that the system just can't cope," Alice said.
She advises us to use a water butt to catch rainwater from gutters, should they drain into the same place as our kitchen sinks and toilets.