IF you regularly get pleasure from looking at the River Stour as it wends its way through Kidderminster, you will have been happy this summer to have seen all the waterweed, particularly the attractive water crowfoot with its myriad flowers, held above the water, rather like white buttercups.
It depends on where and when you look though.
Just in the approach to Christmas the river level rose and brown torrents made their way through the town, out beneath the Falling Sands Viaduct to the flatter floodplain as it approaches Wilden.
Here, it’s not the joys of nature that catch the eye but hundreds of plastic bottles and other debris, caught on trees and along the river bank.
Where did they all come from and where are they going?
In the UK, around 14 billion plastic bottles are used annually but a significant portion becomes rubbish with estimates suggesting 16 million bottles per day (over 5.8 billion yearly) are not recycled, ending up as litter or in general waste, highlighting a major gap between usage and recycling efforts.
Empty plastic bottles are a major rubbish problem due to their long decomposition time (around 450 years), often ending up as plastic pollution in oceans and landfills — and our River Stour.
Many of us are concerned about the effect of sewage on life in our rivers and even make the effort to seek out and report such pollution.
But what about plastic and other floating debris?
It is rare to see any where the river enters the town behind The Range and yet it is so common and widespread downstream of Kidderminster.
I sample the river’s water regularly.
Would it be so difficult to track down the source and for our competent authorities to take action?
If they don’t it means the burden falls on concerned people to spend hours cleaning it up only to find that next time the river rises it is simply replaced with more.
Some think it is not a problem as it will all be washed away by the next wave of high water — to somewhere else — and finally into the sea.
And that, of course, is another story as it ends up in the stomachs of dolphins or washes up along the shore as an unsightly slick.
It would be interesting to know how many of the bottles found along the Gower beaches or those of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall came from Kidderminster and who put them there in the first place.
Roger Meade
Bewdley
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