www.SewageMap.co.uk and POOPy: Open-source tools for understanding and communicating the impacts of sewage pollution on waterways in real-time

Pollution of English waterways by untreated sewage discharged through Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) has become one of the most high-profile environmental issues in the UK. It is now a major political topic, featuring prominently in election campaigns, parliamentary inquiries, and resulting in new legislation. To better communicate this environmental issue and empower the public to take action against it, we created www.SewageMap.co.uk a user-friendly, real-time visualisation of sewage spills across England. SewageMap uniquely combines live CSO data with a hydrological model to identify rivers downstream of recent spills, making it particularly valuable for recreational water users such as swimmers, kayakers, and rowers. The platform is recommended by organisations representing these groups and is widely used by citizen scientists and campaigners.

To make the experience engaging and relatable, SewageMap makes prodigious use of playful design elements, including the ‘poop’ and other emojis to highlight the ‘gross’ nature of sewage pollution. Behind the scenes, SewageMap is powered by 'POOPy' (Pollution Discharge Monitoring in Object-Oriented Python), an open-source toolkit that standardises diverse CSO datasets and enables historical spill analysis. Data generated by POOPy has supported river protection groups and informed local planning meetings; we believe that data from SewageMap has even featured in parliamentary debates.

The website was developed with both desktop and mobile users in mind, validated by the fact that ~80% of users access SewageMap via mobile or tablet devices. This ensures accessibility for the majority of users and highlights that this should be a consideration for other web visualisations. Furthermore, SewageMap can be embedded within external pages, which has enabled major news organisations to integrate the map into articles, significantly amplifying its reach.

The impact of this tool has been substantial, and greater than expected when the project was started informally. The site has received over 300,000 visitors in the past 12 months, financial support from major NGOs such as RiverAction, and resulted in new collaborations across academic and non-academic sectors. Overall, these projects have emphasised, to us, how engaging design, accessibility & proactive engagement with a user-base can result in significant impact stemming from a relatively ‘simple’ scientific principle.