Top of the Poops

Rivers Ranked for 2023

Here are the top rivers in England and Wales that had sewage overflows in 2023. As the list is grouped by company, some rivers may feature more than once, being polluted by different companies along their length.

The full list is quite long. You can access that

As there are different rivers with the same name in different parts of the country, it didn't seem sensible to group by river name alone.

The category of "river" is made by the water companies in their "Consent to Discharge with Conditions" - so although there are a number of Seas in this list, that's what they are reporting

Rank	River	Company	Sewage Dumps	Change	Duration (Hours)	Change
1	River Calder	Yorkshire Water	4,177	1,209	32,732	14,653
2	River Avon	Wessex Water	4,719	2,060	32,577	23,486
3	River Severn	Severn Trent Water	3,057	789	30,236	12,741
4	River Aire	Yorkshire Water	4,888	1,317	29,458	15,648
5	River Teifi	Dwr Cymru Welsh Water	2,579	690	28,371	14,292
6	Unknown	South West Water	3,351	1,306	28,279	8,883
7	River Ouse	Yorkshire Water	2,774	1,118	27,386	17,630
8	River Tame	United Utilities	3,180	1,116	25,484	14,472
9	River Wharfe	Yorkshire Water	2,456	769	23,120	12,322
10	River Tawe	Dwr Cymru Welsh Water	2,592	774	22,776	8,795
11	River Trent	Severn Trent Water	2,939	1,026	21,776	12,668
12	River Irwell	United Utilities	3,457	1,072	20,904	7,965
13	River Tamar	South West Water	1,999	476	20,372	4,826
14	River Don	Yorkshire Water	2,231	739	18,312	10,562
15	River Carron	Scottish Water	392	-201	17,781	7,321
16	Solent	Southern Water	1,550	537	16,942	8,279
17	River Eden	United Utilities	2,021	329	16,645	4,865
18	River Derwent	Severn Trent Water	2,732	755	16,576	7,634
19	River Rother	Southern Water	1,237	453	15,730	5,764
20	River Torridge	South West Water	1,406	465	15,610	8,428

Data Sources & Accuracy

EDM (Event Duration Monitoring) data and Consented Discharges to Controlled Waters with Conditions from Environment Agency & Data Map Wales, and Scottish Water

Experimental derived data from Thames Water API, Some data may be missing or inaccurate. This uses Environment Agency rainfall data from the real-time data API (Beta) - Rainfall data is delayed by up to two days.

This website is intended to provide an accurate representation of the Environment Agency data. The data is hard to use, and thus some errors may have been made. If you find something that is incorrect, please raise an issue at the GitHub issues page and we'll endeavour to fix it quickly.

This project is not associated, approved or endorsed by any of the companies whose logos you see here.