SEVERN Trent is offering to donate millions to charities on the frontline of the fight against Covid-19 – with the help of households in the region.
The recent hot weather has seen demand for water rocket to near record levels of more than 2billion litres a day.
With no sign of the sun going in any time soon Severn Trent has challenged customers to slash their daily demand to earn money for local charities and to help protect supplies during the coronavirus crisis.
Bosses are offering to donate £1million to charities for every 150 million litres of water demand reduces to the end of June.
That amount of water is roughly enough for 1.9million baths or flushing a normal toilet almost 11million times.
Chief executive Liv Garfield said: “We know it’s hot, and people need to use more water than normal, but over the last few weeks, we’ve seen demand spike, increasing hundreds of millions of litres every day above normal.
“Some of the increase in usage is down to more handwashing due to coronavirus, which is completely understandable, but we can see that huge increase in recent weeks is because people are using things like sprinklers and pressure washers far more than before, especially as industry is nowhere near back to normal.
“We’re flat out treating loads of extra water for everyone, and we’re happy to do that, but we wanted to encourage everyone to reduce their water consumption just a little bit and we’ll then donate the money we would’ve spent producing more water to the local charities which are doing such a wonderful job during the coronavirus crisis.
“We’ve already got regional branches of Age UK and Mind signed up, and we really want to make that donation. So we’re calling on the people in all of the counties we cover to help us help them and to let us donate that money to local charities.
“We think it’s a fab idea and we hope our customers feel the same way and pick up the challenge. Everyone’s got the chance here to do their bit to both make sure there’s enough water to go round, and to help us donate to your local charities.”
Some top ways to help save water and make money for a local charity, include:
* Putting the garden hose or sprinkler away – a brown lawn quickly bounces back to green when it rains again.
* Have fun in the garden but keep an eye on how much is being used by the paddling pool – an average pool uses as much as three people would use in a whole day.
* Filthy cars are the new fashion – as long as windows, mirrors and lights are kept clean.
· Who really wants to be pressure washing the patio right now – sit down with a cold drink and enjoy the weather instead.
Visit www.stwater.co.uk for handy water saving tips.
