We all use water every day but most of us prefer not to think about what happens after we've flushed the toilet, pulled out the plug or switched on the washing machine or dishwasher.

At Southern Water, we think about it all the time. It's our job to take wastewater and make it clean enough to put back into rivers and the sea, returning it to the water cycle.

Every day we treat and recycle 1.3 billion litres of wastewater at our 371 treatment works after it has travelled through our 21,700 kilometres of sewers (that's six times as long as the entire UK motorway network).

Man-made technology and the power of nature are used to make wastewater safe to return to the environment. One by-product of the process is sewage sludge, which is turned into fertiliser and sold to farmers for use on crops.

See one of our wastewater treatment works, where we clean and safely recycle water to the environment every day of the year.