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For many
Kenyan women, fetching clean water means a walk of six kilometres
or more with a 20 litre container.
In Kenyan villages, clean water is needed to ensure good health and
combat disease.
But in a neighbouring beach hotel, water is on tap, and for
economic reasons, tourists can take it for granted. Each one uses
ten times the quantity of a villager, for whom polluted water can
be a killer.
We use extravagant quantities of clean water in the UK, which makes
great demands on an antiquated sewer system. The water from the
50,000 miles of sewers under London has to be cleaned and filtered
before it is re-used.
Downstream at the Isle of Dogs, 25 tonnes of floating rubbish are
pulled from the River Thames every day.
The Thames is now the cleanest river of any city in the world -
with 115 different kinds of fish.
The quality of water in our rivers is improving, but the River
Holme in Yorkshire is completely dead - the bottom coated with an
orange sludge of contamination from an abandoned mine
shaft.
On the neighbouring River Don, a treatment plant has cleaned the
water and hugely increased the range of fish and invertebrates. The
River Don has been cleaned up with the help of biologists, who have
monitored the wide range of wildlife and recorded the improvements
to the river.
They catch, measure, age and release the river's fish. The range of
invertebrates is a marker of the river's cleanliness.
In Brighton, Surfers against Sewage protest about an outfall of raw
sewage. A group of young surfers describe the symptoms of illnesses
blamed on dirty sea water. But they are unable to confront the
water board responsible for beach pollution, who refuse an
interview or statement.
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