Charity Joins to Protect the River Wandle

The Wandle Trust, a charity dedicated to restoring the health of South London's River Wandle, has completed a major milestone in a new project to reduce pollution in the river. 

Silt traps, installed by infrastructure services firm FM Conway to stop harmful materials entering the river were emptied for the first time this month, removing large volumes of pollutants from the waterway.  As recently as the 1960s the Wandle was considered to be biologically dead. However, as a result of this project and other initiatives aquatic animal and plant life has now returned to the river.

Olly van Biervliet, projects officer at the Wandle Trust, explains further: “Rainwater carries large volumes of oils, silts and detritus into rivers and harms them ecologically. Our traps stop these materials reaching the Wandle and FM Conway can remove them and dispose of them in an environmentally-friendly manner.

“Analysis of the trapped sediments found concentrations of contaminants within them to be several tens or hundreds times higher than the thresholds for environmental safety. Thanks to projects such as ours with FM Conway, we have come a long way and now the river is teeming with plant and animal life.”

Tristan Miles, head of cleansing services at FM Conway, said: “We are proud to be part of a project that is having such a positive environmental impact on one of London’s waterways.  The silt traps are a highly-effective way of improving water quality in cities and others should consider adopting them for their projects.”

Local volunteers have also played a large part in improving the river in recent years. Volunteers have given over 3,700 hours of their time to cleaning the river in the past few years, and in 2014 8.5 tonnes of rubbish was removed from the river by people from the community.

The three silt traps were installed near the river’s source at Carshalton. They separate oils and silts out from the runoff and allow only clean water to pass into the river which then flows through Sutton, Merton and into the Thames at Wandsworth.