In response to the bio-bead spill from the Eastbourne wastewater treatment plant, Southern Water have announced that they have now installed cameras in all five of their plants that use the beads – at Eastbourne, Peacehaven, Sandown in the Isle of Wight, Beckley near Rye and Broomfield Bank near Dover. This will enable the operators to monitor the tanks and respond more quickly to any release. In addition, the screens in the tanks that contain the beads have been strengthened.
The company is also rolling out the use of AI which will be used to monitor any releases. A spokesman for Southern Water said, “We’ve moved from volunteers with dustpans to innovative new machines in our long term clean-up plan for Camber Sands. The latest development is a towed sieve which, in its first trial, cleared more beads than a four-person team using the electric sieves can do in a day. Ensuring we prevent any further bead release is just as important – we’ve already strengthened containment at treatment sites that use beads and cameras are helping site operators to monitor what is happening in real time. The next development will be training machine learning systems to recognise when beads are present in parts of the process where they shouldn’t be so the area affected can be automatically shut down.”
The AI will be trained at the Broomfield Bank site as it is above ground and easier to access, whereas the others are underground.
Helena Dollimore, MP for Hastings and Rye, is calling on Southern Water to stop using bio-beads in their treatment works. Her campaign to Bin the Beads has been supported by the Sussex Wildlife Trust, and their online petition for the campaign has reached nearly 10,000 signatures.
In response to the call to end the use of the beads, Southern Water say that replacing them with other cleaning methods would “have major cost and engineering challenges”. Southern Water have pledged to continue cleaning the beach for at least the next three years.
Image Credits: Carolyn Gould .