Charity bosses say key marine life is coming back to the River Mersey thanks to decades of cleanup work.
The Mersey Rivers Trust has been keeping rivers clean for 38 years, and is now hoping to gain funding to launch a new community engagement programme. The Trust was established after the Mersey Basin Campaign, which aimed to clean up the entire Mersey river system between 1985 to 2010.
Since 2019, the team has had over 1,500 dedicated volunteers working to protect the River Mersey and its tributaries across Greater Manchester and Cheshire and to continue their essential work, the charity has joined the 2023 Green Match Fund.
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The Mersey Rivers Trust IS aiming to raise £10,000 to help organise events in local communities and purchase essential equipment and materials which will tackle pollution, improve river accessibility and deliver more school visits to rivers.
John Sanders, 54, strategic planning director at the charity said: "Our rivers still face a lot of challenges from industrial impacts, so a lot of work is still needed to improve them and we really need help from all the members of the public and local communities to get involved to try and help improve their local river.”
It was revealed earlier this year that the river Mersey was cleaner than it ever has been, but John believes “there’s a long way to go” for other rivers across Merseyside, Cheshire and Greater Manchester. Although water quality across Merseyside is slowly improving, sewage dumping still remains a prominent issue with recent figures showing that raw sewage was dumped in Wallasey 666 times last year, roughly once every 13 hours.
John said: “There’s a long way to go to get back to what the rivers were like before the Industrial Revolution. We do have dolphins, sharks and other fish starting to return into the Mersey estuary, but sewage is a big issue, we've still got these Victorian sewer systems which when heavy rain arrives, overflow into our rivers.
“Although water companies are investing significantly over the next 10 to 15 years to address these overflows by putting in large storage effectively to hold back water in the urban environment, it’s a long-term process.”
Another issue the charity is hoping to address is plastic pollution, which is endangering fish and wildlife which build habitats along the river beds. Microplastics appear in rivers from a range of sources including toiletries, cosmetics, clothing fibres, tyres and raw sewage.
They are smaller than 5mm in diameter and although they break down over time, they are not fully biodegradable, making them hard to clear from our waterways.
Despite this challenge, volunteers at Mersey Rivers Trust are dedicated to collecting every other form of litter - from crisp packets to shopping trolleys.
John said: “We find anything and everything, in general it’s mainly food wrappings, plastic bottles and tin cans but we also find lots of children's toys, dog toys, shopping trolleys and bikes that have been thrown in or dumped into the river. We also found a safe as well, but it was empty unfortunately.”
The charity currently works with the Merseyside Recycling and Waste Authority, which assists in litter collection where possible but they are now reaching out to other local waste authorities in the hope of increasing recycling rates, as most of the plastic litter found is often dirty, meaning it must be incinerated.
Big Give, who coordinate The Green Match Fund have granted The Mersey Rivers Trust £5,000 of match funding which means the public can double their impact as for every one pound donated, funders such as corporates will match that donation meaning a total of £10,000 could be raised.
Explaining how the funding will help the charity, John said: “We’ve been running community events for the past five or six years across the whole of Merseyside, Liverpool and Greater Manchester and we're going to use the money to run similar events over the coming year with our existing groups such as our River Guardians programme which lets people monitor the health of their local river.”
John added: “Rivers are really good for health recreation, so engaging people in their local river hopefully gives some opportunity to enjoy some free exercise and well-being along some of the great rivers that flow through both Liverpool, the wider Merseyside area and beyond.
“There's a benefit in volunteering both to meet new people, to get some exercise outdoors alongside the river and it generally improves their well-being, so it's all good reasons and if you can only spare one day a year, that's still fantastic.”
The Green Match Fund will run from April 20 to April 27 and donations for Mersey Rivers Trust Community Engagement Programme can be made here.
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