‘We are not going away’: the volunteers fighting back against England’s polluted rivers

theguardian.com:

If you go down to quiet stretches of river in the UK at the right time of year, you are likely to find people peacefully standing there with a fishing rod, gazing into the sparkling, steady flow, hoping to get a nibble.

Anglers, of which there are at least 2 million in England, go down to their treasured slices of waterway whenever they can to tend them, trimming vegetation, creating wetland spawning habitats, and even painstakingly cleaning the gravel. It sounds like a pretty peaceful pursuit, but when the Guardian went to visit some Angling Trust members at their clubs around Reading, there was palpable anger in the air.

This is because water companies have been spewing waste into many of these stretches, destroying the hard work, money, and hours of time anglers put in to keeping the rivers healthy. Now, they are fighting back with determined fishers all over the country testing their stretches of river for pollution using kits supplied by the Angling Trust. Often no one else will do it – reductions in testing by the Environment Agency mean many sites are not regularly tested, making it impossible to know the true state of sewage pollution in England.

150 volunteers have so far signed up to the sampling scheme in England, covering 50 rivers across 18 catchments, and more clubs are signing up every day. Their results so far are pretty grim – half of all samples exceeded the upper limit for phosphate, and 60% for nitrate. These are levels that can seriously damage rivers, as they promote algal growth and harm fish health. Elevated phosphate and nitrate levels are telltale signs of a potential sewage spill.

“It’s sad but necessary that anglers have to do this,” Martin Salter, the former Reading MP who is now head of policy