Glowing Tampons Help Detect Sewer Leaks

http://www.wired.com/2015/03/glowing-tampons-help-detect-sewage-leaks/


That’s Professor David Lerner, explaining what it was like to conduct a research project where feminine hygiene products were inserted into streams and sewers around Yorkshire, UK. Why? It turns out tampons are an accurate and cheap way to sample water quality.

Storm sewers are not designed to handle untreated waste waters so it’s important to keep what goes into them clean. “Grey water” contamination is a common problem — water from dishwashers, showers, and laundry that ends up in the storm sewer via incompetent plumbing or deliberate dumping.

Before you decide that grey wash water isn’t that bad, as an FYI all sorts of non-lovely things live in your washing machine: norovirus and rotavirus; human pathogenic fungi; and of course a wide variety of fecal bacteria. Dishwashers are not much better.


Optical brighteners do not occur naturally in rivers and streams, so they are a handy marker for contamination from human grey water sources. Brightening compounds glow brightly under UV light, so they’re a clear indicator of pollution.

Fibre optic cables can be inserted into sewer systems to monitor contamination, but the cost is quite high–up to 9 £ ($13) per meter of sewer tested. Spectrophotometers can be used to detect contaminants, but they aren’t cheap, and require training and calibration to use reliably. Testing an entire network of drains and sewers in a large urban area would be incredibly expensive in both time and equipment.