Things that should not go down the gully traps
The gully traps are the drains outside your house with a little wall around them.
Don't treat gully traps and laundry tubs as "black holes"!
They are not provided so that you can conveniently dump all kinds of everything into the sewer. The water from your gully traps and laundry tub goes into the sewerage system and, after treatment, the river or sea.
Unlike the "black holes" in space, the matter that goes in does come out again!
What does it matter if you pollute?
It costs the Local Authority lots of money to remove pollutants from sewage, and you pay them to do it in your rates, so you are increasing your rates.
It is impossible to remove all pollutants from sewage, so some ends up in the river or sea.
Pollution in the rivers and sea sickens or kills plants or makes them grow and take over, and sickens or kills the creatures that live in or swim in the water – which includes you and your family.
How can you pollute the Wastewater system?
You pollute the sewerage system by putting or pouring your "unnatural" waste into it.
There's very little that you should be putting into a gully trap. You can wash your paint brushes over it and pour dirty water into it, but if that water is from washing the car then you should throw it over a lawn or borders. The detergent in it harms the Treatment Plant bacteria.
What's the harm?
Chemicals can make dangerous mixes in the sewers, so don't put any in the sewers. This is especially dangerous if someone "downstream" from you puts in a chemical that reacts with yours. No chemicals can be extracted or neutralised at the Treatment Plant. They all go through to the river or sea.
Chemicals will upset the treatment processing, where bacteria are used to clean up the human waste before it is trucked to landfill. When the chemicals kill the bacteria, the treatment stops working and has to be restarted.
Garden refuse will cause blockages when it reaches pipes that are narrowed by fat, oil and grease and cause sewage flooding.
See our Waste-Wise flyer (81k pdf) for more information.
Next
Click here for the Gully Trap/Stormwater Do's page to find out what you should do instead.
Click here for the Stormwater Don'ts.