Sewage pollution: Citizen eco-warriors armed with budget shed tech patrol whiffy river frontline
What can you do with varnish, plywood, a wheelbarrow inner tube and a solar panel not much bigger than a mobile phone?
The answer, if you are a computer genius with a conscience, is to fight back against sewage pollution.
John Clifford has created an early warning system.
He said: “When pollution spikes, if it goes up more than 10%, we know that something’s gone on in the river.
“When several sensors all at once that are telling us the same thing, then we know that there’s a big problem.
“The app on my phone will update regularly and quite often.
“It’s the first thing I check in the morning.”
Mr Clifford lives in west London and the kit will float on the River Brent which, like so many of our rivers, is regularly polluted.
Alongside colleagues he’s making at least 30 of these sensors which measure what’s called TDS or total dissolvable solids – shorthand for faeces, food waste and soap residue.
They send data on the level of these unwanted ingredients in real time to an app, but despite that sophistication they are cheap.
The floating gadgets, which are able to monitor pollution levels around the clock, are cheap
At around £100 per sensor they are a fraction of the cost of professional kit which typically can cost £6,000.
The team behind the tech, CURB (Clean Up River Brent), got together after local resident Ben Morris was outraged by an incident in 2021, which turned the river grey with sewage sludge bordered by soapy white residue and was very smelly.
They began with campaigning and clean ups, but he feels their gadgets will make the biggest difference.
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Mr Morris said: “Once you know what’s in the river, you can then start to have a conversation about what should be done about it.
“At the moment, there are too many unknowns about the sewerage system, too many unknowns about water quality.
“You get something like this in nationwide, we can really raise public awareness and political awareness, and then we have to have that tough conversation about what we’re going to do about it.”
Across England, there were over 300,000 sewage spills in 2022
And he is perfectly happy to get to grips with the dirty end of the stick too.
I join him mid-stream, up to our waists in the River Brent just beside a massive drainage pipe.
The water around us is flecked with fragmented toilet paper and twigs trapped beneath the surface are draped with a flowing beard of dirty tissue.
‘It does whiff’
Thankfully we are in waders, but it does whiff.
We are installing two types of sensor.
One is static, fixed to a stake hammered into the river bed, the other their new floating design.
It is tethered to a paving slab on a length of rope.
It has a solar panel on the top, a box of electronics beneath, sitting on the inflated inner tube while dangling below in the water are the actual sensors.
When the river rises after heavy rain, it remains on the surface and able to communicate 24/7.
This is important as pollution is often worse when the sewerage system is overwhelmed in a downpour.
Across England, there were over 300,000 sewage spills in 2022.
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The Environment Agency faces accusations of failing to protect our waterways but its budget has been cut by half in the past decade and Lewis Elmes, the area catchment coordinator, says they will gladly accept help from talented amateurs.
He said: “It complements what we’re doing, as it really increases the scope of what we’re able to achieve by producing a bit of equipment that’s so much cheaper than our much more expensive bits of kit.
“It really allows us to work to expand the boundaries of what we can look at in our rivers and the amount of outfalls that we can keep an eye on.”
River Brent’s own ‘Q branch’
The Environment Agency is trialling the brilliant shed tech from the River Brent’s own “Q branch” over the next year.
If it works the idea could go nationwide giving a much clearer, immediate picture of water pollution.
When it comes to fighting back, knowledge is power.
The last blast furnaces left operating in Britain could see their fate sealed within days, after their Chinese owners took the decision to cut off the crucial supply of ingredients keeping them running.
Jingye, the owner of British Steel in Scunthorpe, has, according to union representatives, cancelled future orders for the iron ore, coal and other raw materials needed to keep the furnaces running.
The upshot is that they may have to close next month – even sooner than the earliest date suggested for its closure.
Read more: Thousands of jobs at risk as British Steel consults unions over closure
The fate of the blast furnaces – the last two domestic sources of virgin steel, made from iron ore rather than recycled – is likely to be determined in a matter of days, with the Department for Business and Trade now actively pondering nationalisation.
The upshot is that even as Britain contends with a trade war across the Atlantic, it is now working against the clock to secure the future of steelmaking at Scunthorpe.
The talks between the government and Jingye broke down last week after the Chinese company, which bought British Steel out of receivership in 2020, rejected a £500m offer of public money to replace the existing furnaces with electric arc furnaces.
The sum is the same one it offered to Tata Steel, which has shut down the other remaining UK blast furnaces in Port Talbot and is planning to build electric furnaces – which have far lower carbon emissions.
These steel workers could soon be out of work
However, the owners argue that the amount is too little to justify extra investment at Scunthorpe, and said last week they were now consulting on the date of shutting both the blast furnaces and the attached steelworks.
Since British Steel is the main provider of steel rails to Network Rail – as well as other construction steels available from only a few sites in the world – the closure would leave the UK more reliant on imports for critical infrastructure sites.
However, since the site belongs to its Chinese owners, a decision to nationalise the site would involve radical steps government officials are wary of taking.
They also fear leaving taxpayers exposed to a potentially loss-making business for the long run.
The dilemma has been heightened by the sharp turn in geopolitical sentiment following Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
The incipient trade war and threatened cut in American support to Europe have sparked fresh calls for countries to act urgently to secure their own supplies of critical materials, especially those used for defence and infrastructure.
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Gareth Stace, head of UK Steel, the industry lobby group, said: “Talks seem to have broken down between government and British Steel.
“My advice to government is: please, Jonathan Reynolds, Business Secretary, get back round that negotiating table, thrash out a deal, and if a deal can’t be found in the next few days, then I fear for the very future of the sector, but also here for Scunthorpe steelworks.”
British Steel declined to comment.
UK
Prince Andrew’s Pitch@Palace branded ‘crude attempt to enrich himself’ as Chinese spy documents set to be released
Prince Andrew’s efforts to make money from his Pitch@Palace project have been branded as a “crude attempt to enrich himself” at the expense of “unsuspecting tech founders”, as new documents may shed more light on what he and his team have been attempting to sell.
Today is the deadline for documents to be released relating to Prince Andrew‘s former senior adviser Dominic Hampshire and his interactions with the alleged Chinese spy Yang Tengbo.
In February, an immigration tribunal heard how the intelligence services had contacted Mr Hampshire about Mr Yang back in 2022. Mr Yang helped set up Pitch@Palace China, a branch of the duke’s scheme to help young entrepreneurs.
The alleged Chinese spy, Yang Tengbo, has links with Prince Andrew
Yang Tengbo. Pic: Pitch@Palace
Judges banned Mr Yang from the UK, saying his association with a senior royal had made Prince Andrew “vulnerable” and posed a threat to national security. Mr Yang challenged that decision at the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC).
Since that hearing, media organisations have applied for certain documents relating to the case and Mr Hampshire’s support for Mr Yang to be made public. SIAC agreed to release some information of public interest. It is hoped they may include more details on deals that he was trying to do on behalf of Prince Andrew.
So what do we know about potential deals for Pitch@Palace so far?
In February, Sky News confirmed that palace officials had a meeting last summer with tech funding company StartupBootcamp to discuss a potential tie-up between them and Prince Andrew relating to his Pitch@Palace project.
The palace wasn’t involved in the fine details of a deal but wanted guarantees to make sure it wouldn’t impact the Royal Family in the future. Sky News understands from one source that the price being discussed for Pitch was around £750,000 – there are, however, reports that a deal may have stalled.
Photos we found on the Chinese Chamber of Commerce website show an event held in Asia between StartupBootcamp and Innovate Global, believed to be an offshoot of Pitch.
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Who is alleged Chinese spy, Yang Tengbo?
Documents, released in relation to the investigations into Mr Tengbo, have also shown how much the duke has always seen Pitch as a way of potentially making money. One document from 21 August 2021 clearly states “the duke needed money at the time, and saw the relationships with China through Pitch as one possible source of funding”.
But Prince Andrew’s apparent intention to use Pitch to make money has led to concerns about whether he is unfairly using the contacts and information he gained when he was a working royal.
Norman Baker, former MP and author of books on royal finances, believes it is “a crude attempt to enrich himself” and goes against what the tech entrepreneurs thought they were signing up for.
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He told Sky News: “The data given by these business people was given on the basis it was an official operation and not something for Prince Andrew, and so in my view, Prince Andrew had no right legally or morally to take the data which has been collected, a huge amount of data, and sell it…
“And quite clearly if you’re going to sell it off to StartupBootcamp, that is not what people had in mind. The entrepreneurs who joined Pitch@Palace did not do so to enrich Prince Andrew,” he said.
Rich Wilson was one tech entrepreneur who was approached at the start of Pitch@Palace to sign up, but he stepped away when he spotted a clause in the contract saying they’d be entitled to 2% equity in any funding he secured.
He feels Prince Andrew is continuing to use those he made a show of supporting.
He said: “It makes me feel sick. I think it’s terrible – that he is continuing to exploit unsuspecting tech founders in this way. A lot of them, I’m quite grey and old in the tooth now, I saw it coming, but clearly most didn’t. And a lot of them were quite young.
“It’ll be their first venture and you’re learning on the trot, so to speak. So to take advantage of people in such a major way – that’s an awful, sickening thing to do.”
We approached StartupBootcamp who said they had no comment to make, and the Duke of York’s office did not respond.
With reports that a deal may have stalled, it could be a big setback for the duke – especially with questions still about how he’ll continue to pay for his home on the Windsor estate now that the King no longer gives him financial support.
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