The Swedes love the water. As you stroll along Stockholm’s tree-lined Strandvägen, admiring the assembled yachts, cruisers, ferries and bustling harbour scenes, you come upon unusual sculptures at the water’s edge. Unveiled by King Carl XVI Gustaf, the stems on these tasteful installations measure, minute by minute, air and water quality in central Stockholm.
For air, the display shows levels of PM10 particulates and nitrogen dioxide in the inner city for the preceding hour. It also displays wind speed and humidity levels.
For water, the readouts show nitrogen (red) and phosphorous (green) levels at Stockholm’s wastewater plants, comparing levels before and after treatment, alongside flow rates.
For Stockholm’s citizens, it is a prominent and immediate reminder of the continuous effort to improve air and water quality on increasingly bicycle- and EV-dominated streets and around its picturesque harbour.
As we in Britain struggle to improve water quality, while private utilities — after years of underinvestment in robust infrastructure — strive to limit the daily discharge of raw sewage into rivers and coastal waters, perhaps this offers some hope. The problem with sewage is that it is often invisible until the absence of pond life, or a trail of dissolved tissues, signals something is wrong. Wild swimmers dice with detritus, bathers paddle in poo-contaminated seas, and fixes, if they come at all, are agonisingly slow.
But transparency could help us. If the riverfront at Witney on the River Windrush — the setting for Dirty Business — had similar stems measuring the quality of water delivered by Thames Water, what would happen? Or if the Thames Embankment sported a comparable display showing the health of the river flowing beneath it?
Public awareness would drive both the companies and their regulators towards urgent action. The same would apply if a statue on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, or installations in towns and cities across the UK, made our air and water quality performance accessible in real time. Indeed, we might even see competition between places seeking to demonstrate environmental purity as a draw for tourism and quality of life.
Is this a load of phooey? Transparency is a powerful driver. Corporate reputations and licences to operate depend upon public confidence. What gets measured, and monitored, gets done. So, for once, maybe a shitshow would be a good thing. A culture of openness might finally bury the septic culture we all want gone — and prove a genuine breath of fresh air.