South East Water has completed the construction of the new £50 million state-of-the-art water treatment works on the site of the old Aylesford Newsprint.
The project will see 20 million litres of fresh drinking water treated per day for the Ashford and Maidstone area.
From the M20 you can see the large, grey building that houses the equipment that carries out the filtration and disinfection processes as well as doubling as an office space for staff on site.
Boreholes have been drilled at several key points around the site, either side of the motorway. These supply the treatment works with the raw water to process and turn into safe, wholesome drinking water before it is pumped to our customers’ properties.
A large concrete tank has also been constructed on site. This is for the final element of the treatment process, where we hold the treated drinking water for a short period in a contact tank to ensure that it is ready to be pumped out.
The tank has been designed to provide resilience and contingency measures for the treatment process and was leak-tested before being brought into supply
We are pleased that Butler Water Treatment Works is now supplying water to the Kent area and we will be posting more content across our platforms for more information.
Watch this video to see the progress of the site.
FAQs
When Aylesford Newsprint was in operation it had its own water storage tank and sourced water from a number of onsite and offsite boreholes. By upgrading the infrastructure already in place to ensure it reaches drinking water quality standards, we are able to efficiently make use of these existing facilities – reducing costs and impact on the area.
Plans for the new treatment works were initially put forward in our Water Resources Management Plan 2019.(opens in a new tab)
Yes. We have purchased a parcel of land surrounding the existing water storage tank enabling us to build a new water treatment works, we have also purchased the abstraction licence Aylesford Newsprint had for abstracting water at this location.
The temporary water treatment works is used during periods of hot weather to provide additional water to the area. Equipment will be dismantled once the new treatment works is built.
We have been planning the new works since 2019. Plans for the new treatment works were initially put forward in our Water Resources Management Plan 2019(opens in a new tab), which sets out how we will continue supplying drinking water to the area’s growing population.
Costs for the new water treatment works are included within our commitment to invest more than £567 million into the network between 2020 and 2025 and so has already been accounted for within customer bills.
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