Question: Why do you work in sewage engineering, it must not be very nice?

Harriet Fletcher answered on 15 Mar 2012:

Well I wanted to work in clean water engineering at first because, like you, I assumed that sewage stuff would be horrible. When I started studying I found that wastewater is really interesting and there is so much potential to do great stuff with sewage. For example, until recently all the nutrients in the sewage were just washed in to the sea or rivers and that killed fish but also wasted all the useful stuff. Now we are working to capture the nutrients and sell them to farmers to grow crops in a sustainable way.
I don’t ever swim in the sewage, generally I keep well away from raw sewage because it is minging. As I mum I have a lot more to do with poo and wee than I ever have to deal with in work.