It's a Dirty Business

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Company Summary

Scottish Water

632,227 hours of sewage

Since privatisation, every year, Scottish Water has allowed its 'Sewage Overflows' to pour raw or minimally filtered sewage, combined with rainwater, into rivers, streams, and seas. We have some data since 2020 to understand how much this is happening.

Water Companies are allowed under exceptional circumstances to do this. Does this seem exceptional, or business as usual?

What does this huge number even mean? It's like a single sewage pipe dumping continuously for 73.17 years.

Map showing CSO locations for Scottish Water

Continuous Sewage Dumps by Scottish Water

2020 - 2026

We are not finished with 2026 yet. Think that things have improved? Scroll down, you can find the rainfall graphs for the UK. The sewage overflows and rainfall seem to be very correlated. When it rains, they pollute. Also, when it doesn't rain, a lot of the time.

Special Note regarding Scottish Water

Scottish Water simply does not monitor the overflows of many of its CSO Combined Sewage Overflow - a device that, when operating, pours combined rainwater & sewage into a waterway , - so the numbers here are artificially low, the real situation is far worse.

Of the 702 CSO Combined Sewage Overflow - a device that, when operating, pours combined rainwater & sewage into a waterway locations we know about for Scottish Water, 452 of them have ZERO reporting.

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Annual Report 2024

Scottish Water

Worst Locations

The locations with the worst sewage overflows in 2024

Rivers Polluted

Rivers most polluted by Scottish Water in 2024

All Sewage By Water Company

How does each water company compare? These are the totals by company for each. The totals are really high, counting things in hours doesn't make it very easy to think about. Here we show how many years of continuous sewage dumps happened in a single year, by water company.

Please note: 2025 & 2026 numbers do not include Scottish Water and are estimates based on so-called 'live data' from the Water Industry.

Here is the rainfall data from the Met Office - Overflows follow the same pattern!

2025 - Asset Spill Duration Comparison

It isn't like there are just a few outliers... the problem exists across the entire estate of water assets. Here we show a 'cumulative frequency diagram' - where the number of CSO Combined Sewage Overflow - a device that, when operating, pours combined rainwater & sewage into a waterway s that dumped sewage for a time, or longer, is shown. You can see that many CSO Combined Sewage Overflow - a device that, when operating, pours combined rainwater & sewage into a waterway s dumped sewage into a river for months and months.

Scottish Water is highlighted in the plot below

Water Companies

These water companies are responsible for managing sewage treatment and preventing pollution in our waterways.

Anglian Water

Dwr Cymru Welsh Water

Northumbrian Water

Scottish Water

Severn Trent Water

South West Water

Southern Water

Thames Water

United Utilities

Wessex Water

Yorkshire Water

Data Sources & Accuracy

EDM (Event Duration Monitoring) data and Consented Discharges to Controlled Waters with Conditions from Environment Agency & Data Map Wales, and Scottish Water

Experimental derived data from Thames Water API, Some data may be missing or inaccurate. Live sewage data from Stream Water API

Uses Environment Agency rainfall data from the real-time data API (Beta) - Rainfall data is delayed by up to two days.

This website is intended to provide an accurate representation of the Environment Agency data. The data is hard to use, and thus some errors may have been made. If you find something that is incorrect, please raise an issue at the GitHub issues page and we'll endeavour to fix it quickly.

This project is not associated, approved or endorsed by any of the companies whose logos you see here.

Analysing sewage pollution by the Water Industry

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© 2020-2025 Top-Of-The-Poops CC-BY-SA 4.0,
© Openstreetmap contributors, Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2021-2025,
Contains Water UK National Storm Overflow Hub Data CC-BY-SA 4.0 and analysis © 2025 Top-Of-The-Poops

Some data reproduced under Open Government Licence

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