Toilet waste at one of the UK’s largest music festivals will be turned into renewable energy as Thames Water prepares to process hundreds of thousands of litres of sewage.
More than 750,000 litres of faeces and urine are expected to be collected over the bank holiday weekend at Reading Festival from the 105,000 revellers expected.
Thames Water is working with A1 Group contractors, who will transport waste away from the site in 19,000 litre tankers, which will take the waste to Reading sewage works for processing.
Gas will be extracted from the waste’s sludge to generate electricity for Reading’s Island Road sewage plant. The plant produces 50 per cent of the electricity it uses from waste.
Andrew Glover, from Thames Water’s commercial operations team, said: “Reading Festival is one of the biggest events in our calendar, but we’re raring to go. We’ll be working 16 hours a day for five days, collecting and treating a total of 750,000 litres of sewage from the site’s toilets.
Revellers attending the long-running music festival are urged to be careful not to drop anything other than the three P’s into the toilets.
Glover said the team has previously had to remove tents, clothes, sleeping bags and mobile phones as well as beer cans from the waste before it could be processed.
Thames Water recycles 15 million people’s wastewater back to the environment, which equates to 4.4 billion litres of sewage a day.