Wessex Water has secured funding from the industry regulator to help make better use of rainwater where it lands.
The company has been awarded £2 million via the Ofwat Innovation Fund to develop the national Rainwater Management Platform, a one-stop digital tool designed to ensure what falls from the sky is properly valued and treated as a resource before being returned, uncontaminated, to the environment.
With unprecedented support from all other water and sewerage companies in the UK and Ireland, the platform will also tap into knowledge of experts – from small charities to major consultants – with the aim of boosting water efficiency, reducing pollution and lowering the industry’s carbon footprint while enhancing biodiversity and wellbeing.
Wessex Water has long argued that rainwater should not be mixed with sewage. This causes the sewerage system to become full and then overflow, which has led to widespread criticism and scrutiny of the industry.
Rainwater should instead be discharged back to the environment as close as possible to where it lands – one of the fundamental principles set out in the Government’s Storm Overflows Discharge Reduction Plan.
Matt Wheeldon, Wessex Water’s Infrastructure Development Director, said: “Rainwater plays a critical role in supporting all of humankind and is a plentiful resource in the UK, yet it is ubiquitously wasted and undervalued.
“Our infrastructure is just not designed to manage it well where it lands. Yet with a changing climate, with weather patterns moving from ‘drizzle’ to ‘drought and deluge’, this is exactly what needs to happen.
“Nationally, property-level rainwater management is fragmented, inefficient and often non-existent.
“The Rainwater Management Platform will replace the outdated SuDS (Sustainable Drainage Systems) Manual with a modern, user-friendly digital resource that can be tailored to users – from homeowners to drainage engineers.
“We need to see a national philosophical shift that sees rainwater treated firstly as a resource before we return it to the environment”
David Black, CEO of Ofwat, said: “Water underpins our society and economy, and the water sector faces a range of challenges requiring urgent solutions.
“The Ofwat Innovation Fund was established five years ago to incentivise the water sector to collaborate with partners across industry, charities and academia to accelerate the pace of transformation and create lasting benefits for customers and the environment.
“The level of ambition of this year’s winners is remarkable. We are supporting these projects to prove their impact so that they can be scaled, not only here in England and Wales but exported around the world as a driver of economic growth.”
The Ofwat Innovation Fund is a key pillar in Ofwat’s mission to drive innovation that ensures the water sector is ready for the challenges of the future and results in better outcomes for customers and the environment. It is delivered by innovation prize experts Challenge Works (part of the Nesta group), in partnership with Arup and Isle Utilities.
To find out more about all 16 winners of the fifth Water Breakthrough Challenge or to discover previous winners visit waterinnovation.challenges.org
