As well as getting safe, clean and reliable water to you, we also have to take it away once you have used it. So, when you empty the bath, flush the toilet or use your washing machine, it’s our job to make sure that all that used water – now called ‘sewage’ or ‘wastewater’ – is put safely back into rivers.

When you flush the toilet or empty the sink, the wastewater goes down the drain and into a pipe, which takes it to a larger sewer pipe under the road. The sewer then joins our network of other sewers and takes the wastewater to a sewage treatment works – sometimes it needs to be pumped there. At the sewage works we put the wastewater through several cleaning processes so that it can be put back safely into rivers.