A study published in the Water and Environment Journal suggests that glow-in-the-dark tampons can help fight pollution. Co-author and environmental engineer at the University of Sheffield in England David Lerner told American Live Wire: "More than a million homes have their waste water incorrectly connected into the surface water network, which means their sewage is being discharged into a river, rather than going to a treatment plant. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to detect where this is happening, as the discharge is intermittent, can't always be seen with the naked eye and existing tests are complex and expensive."
Gray water, or waste water from laundry machines, showers and sinks, is supposed to go into sewers to be treated, but sometimes the untreated water ends up in storm drains. The waste water is contaminated by cleaning products and detergents, according to American Live Wire.
Lerner told American Live Wire: "The main difficulty with detecting sewage pollution by searching for optical brighteners is finding cotton that does not already contain these chemicals. 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."
The new tampons can glow for a month after a five-second dip in a liquid that contains as little as 0.01 ml of detergent per liter of water.
According to American Live Wire, Lerner concluded: "Often the only way to be sure a house is misconnected is through a dye test - putting dye down a sink or toilet and seeing where the colored water appears in the sewer. It's clearly impractical for water companies to do this for all the households they supply, but by working back from where pollution is identified and narrowing it down to a particular section of the network, the final step of identifying the source then becomes feasible."
