Glowing tampons can detect sewage leaks, study says

A new study suggests that an odd tool such as a tampon, can be effective in detecting sewage leaks in rivers and streams.

The Times Gazette noted that the study, which was published in the Water and Environment Journal, was led by British environmental engineers David Lerner and Dave Chandler from the University of Sheffield.

Testing for sewage pollution can be expensive and time-consuming so the engineers tried using ordinary tampons to do the job and according to their findings, it worked.

For the study, the tampons were placed on a rod above more than a dozen waterways that ran into rivers. They were then dipped into the water sample and placed under a UV light. Nine of them glowed to show optical brighteners or chemical compounds, which meant that the sample was polluted.

“The main difficulty with detecting sewage pollution by searching for optical brighteners is finding cotton that does not already contain these chemicals,” said Lerner. “That’s why tampons, being explicitly untreated, provide such a neat solution. Our new method may be unconventional — but it’s cheap and it works.”

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