Glow-in-the dark tampons help identify sewage pollution in rivers

Engineers from the University of Sheffield have discovered that glow-in-the-dark tampons can be used to stop sewage leaking into rivers. The untreated white cotton used in tampons glows under UV light when they're soaked in dirty or polluted river water.

This works because chemicals called optical brighteners are used in things like laundry detergent, shampoos and toilet paper to enhance whites and brighten colours. When a tampon comes into contact with water contaminated with even a small amount of optical brighteners, it will absorb the chemical and glow under the light. Researchers suspended tampons for three days in 16 pipes that ran into streams and rivers in Sheffield and then tested them under UV light.



Nine of the tampons glowed, showing that the water running into the rivers was polluted. Going back through the pipe network system with the help of Yorkshire Water, they dipped a tampon in at each manhole to see where the sewage was entering the system and households that had a problem. The team now wants to trial it on a wider scale in Bradford. Professor David Lerner who led the study explained that more than a million homes had sewage running into the river rather than going to a treatment plant.

He said that using tampons was a cheap and effective solution to a difficult problem which is hard to detect. He said: "The main difficulty with detecting sewage pollution by searching for optical brighteners is finding cotton that does not already contain these chemicals. That's why tampons, being explicitly untreated, provide such a neat solution. Our new method may be unconventional but it's cheap and it works."