Andrew Bridgen, MP for North West Leicestershire, has visited Severn Trent's Packington Sewage Treatment Works to take a look at some of the ground breaking work the company is doing on phosphorus removal.

Severn Trent is currently trialling five technologies at Packington, two of which are world firsts, to find out the best way to reduce the amount of phosphorus at treatment works in order to meet new legislation.

"Sewage treatment is something that everyone takes for granted but it's actually a very complicated job that Severn Trent carries out," said Mr Bridgen.

"It was especially eye opening to see all of the new technology being trialled at Packington as a result of the new legislation on phosphorus removal. The technology Severn Trent is looking at includes some real state-of-the-art activity and it'll be interesting to see what ends up being added to works all over the Midlands."

Phosphorus is a normal part of domestic sewage but usual treatment processes only remove part of it.  New legislation has called for more to be removed in the future, leading to Severn Trent's trials at Packington.

Pete Vale, technical lead for innovation at Severn Trent, said:

"We're always looking at new ways to make our systems better in order to offer the best possible service to our customers and it was a great opportunity to share some of our experiences with Andrew.”

"We're still evaluating which technology will work best for us, especially considering that we have more than 1,000 sewage treatment works, ranging in size from small local ones to one of the biggest in Europe."

The technologies being evaluated are:

• membrane filtration;
• nano-particle embedded ion exchange;
•  immobilised algal bioreactor;
• absorption media reed beds;
• and iron dosed sand filtration.

The ion exchange and algal bioreactor, both of which were developed by Cranfield University, are being put into practical application for the first time.