Things that should not go down the stormwater drains
The stormwater drains are the ones without a little wall around them.
Don't treat stormwater drains as "black holes"!
The stormwater drains are not provided so that you can conveniently dump all kinds of everything. Water from stormwater drains goes directly to the nearby stream or river, unfiltered, untreated.
Unlike the "black holes" in space, the matter that goes in does come out again!
What does it matter if you pollute?
There's no attempt to remove pollutants from stormwater because stormwater should contain nothing but rain.
Pollution in the rivers and sea either sickens and kills plants or makes them grow and take over. It also sickens or kills the creatures that live in or swim in the water – which includes you and your family.
All of your stormwater pollution goes into the rivers and sea.
How can you pollute the Stormwater system?
You pollute the Stormwater system by putting or pouring your "unnatural" waste or garden rubbish into it.
The stormwater system is easy to pollute – just washing your car on the driveway or street does it. The detergent will run into the nearest stormwater drain. If the stream, lake or sea looks a little frothy, that's someone's fault. Wash the car when it's parked on some grass. The detergent will be lost in the soil and won't damage your grass, though you should avoid putting detergent onto native plants. Or do it at the car-wash, where the water is recycled.
Don't let garden waste such as leaves go into stormwater drains and block them. Don't pour chemicals into them. If you go to wash your paint brushes over a gully trap, don't make a mistake and use a stormwater drain.
What's the harm?
We breath our oxygen through lungs from the air. If there isn't enough oxygen in the air, we suffocate and can die. Many creatures that live underwater – fish, shellfish and insects – breath oxygen through gills from the water. Water is like air to water creatures.
The oxygen gets into the water from the air. If you do something to stop the air from touching the water, or put something in the water which uses up the oxygen, then they suffocate and can die.
Even a very small quantity of a pollutant, or just one accidental discharge of sewage, can drastically alter the water quality of a stream. Fish, insects and plant life can be killed, habitats destroyed, and the affected stream can take many years to recover. It makes a wasteland of the stream, instead of something to enjoy.
Only rain should go down the stormwater drains. Nothing else at all.
See our Waste-Wise flyer (81k pdf) for more information.
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Click here for the Gully Trap Do's page to find out what you should do instead.
Click here for the Gully Trap Don'ts.