The UK has a trouble : thanks to bad plumbing and a groaning sewer system , ‘ gray piddle ’ — the stuff that comes out of your dishwashers and washing machines — is terminate up in river , bringing all sorting of contamination with it . Hi - technical school solution survive to monitor the job , but a much cheaper ( and more amusing ) option exists : tampon .
Working out where grey piddle is coming from is commonly an expensive and time - take in process . you may sum dye to the source , to try a specific building to see if it ’s the reason , or , you ’ve catch the option of expensive fiber - optic cable television , or repeated H2O sampling .
But thanks to the specific character of contaminants found in grey water , a childlike solution exists . Optical brighteners are compound put into laundry detergents to make your whites whiter . They do this by engross invisible UV luminosity , and re - emitting it as a blue - white color . The compounds also tend to stick to cloth like a leech sucking the last leg in town .
Together , that means that if you dip a piece of absorbent material , untreated cotton plant into contaminated body of water , it should glow under UV light . So , a squad from the University of Sheffield did just that : they stuck tampon into 16 surface water sewers , tying the tampons to bamboo celestial pole with the oh - so - ready to hand affiliated chain . The result : 9 sampling shine under UV lighter , confirming Sheffield ’s waste - water problem .
Once a contaminated toilet has been identified , it ’s a wide-eyed ( and flashy ) matter to progressively test upstream , until you find the particular family that ’s the cause of the problem . All in all , it ’s an clever result to a very real problem — and proof that tampon are way more useful than you ’d think . [ Water and Environment Journal ]
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