Concerns expressed over DIY and waste water

Experts have expressed concern that homeowners carrying out DIY projects could be inadvertently causing water pollution in their local areas.

Indeed, according to the Marine Conservation Society (MCS), the popular DIY programmes on television are leading to people attempting plumbing and water-based jobs which are then not executed properly.

This, in turn, is often leading to raw sewage and waste water being pumped into local habitats and wildlife areas.

It's a serious problem too, given that it is causing the degradation of many of the UK's smallest rivers which is threatening to harm ecosystems and fish stocks.

To give a scale of how widespread the problem is,Thames Water recently suggested that in its area, which serves 14 million customers in London and the Thames Valley, around one in every ten homes has poorly connected drains.

Dr Robert Keirle, pollution programme manager at the MCS, said that as well as DIY shows, another major issue was people looking to cut corners and save money, with times remaining tight.

"As DIY has become more popular over the years, aided by an explosion in property programmes on television, the problem has been growing," he said.

"People see a pipe, think it's the right one to attach to, and untreated water from washing machines, but also toilets, ends up going to the wrong place.

"It is also probably a result of the times we live in, with people unable to afford to call in tradesmen to do the plumbing."

It doesn't look as though the problem will go away anytime soon either, with figures from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) suggesting the problem could become more widespread.

In 2009, the organisation said that around 300,000 properties in England and Wales were suffering from poorly connected pipeworks, but this figure could be closer to half a million by 2015.

According to Thames Water, since 2010 it has had to identify and then fix around 3,170 properties that were potentially causing problems for the local environment.

This equates to around 16 Olympic swimming pools' worth of waste water entering habitats every single day.