Video: Rubbish in the river near Clifton, found on Thursday by Jack Perks and Notts TV.
Fish including Salmon are returning to the River Trent as pollution levels fall – but conditions are still not good enough, wildlife campaigners say.
Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust says there are still problems despite progress which has seen some wildlife start to return after years of not being seen.
A third of rivers in England and Wales are polluted, with four out of five failing to achieve a ‘good’ ecological status, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) said this week.
And the Trent is no exception – in 2009 sewage pollution caused the death of 15,000 fish on the river upstream in the West Midlands – and the quality of the river is only graded ‘moderate’.
Wildlife enthusiasts have since reported seeing waste in the river, although the trust says conditions have also improved to the point Otters and Salmon have returned to the river in Notts.
“The river has got better – but it’s still pretty bad,” said Wildlife photographer Jack Perks.
“There’s lots of things I’ve seen when photographing or even swimming – sewage is the worst thing. You get drainage pipes.
“It is an issue which really relies on people reporting it – if you see something bad like pollution or sewage you need to report it to the Environment Agency.”
Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust Conservation assistant Claire Sambridge said: “We may be saying it’s not brilliant at the moment, but if you think about where we’ve come from, back in the seventies, it was just common practice to dump anything in to the rivers, so we’ve come a long way.
“We’ve now got otters back in the Trent, and salmon, so it’s indications that things are moving in the right direction.”
