The River Wandle is a cleaner place after silt traps used to stop harmful materials getting into the water were emptied for the first time.

Silt traps which were installed a year ago were emptied for the first time this month, removing large volumes of pollutants from the waterways.

The emptying is a milestone for the Wandle Trust, a charity dedicated to restoring the health of the River Wandle, as part of a new project to reduce pollution in the river.

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Tyresome: The haul pulled out of the river by volunteers

In another river project, volunteers from the trust and the Wandle Valley Regional Park found stacks of tyres in parts of the river during a clean-up day in Poulter Park, Mitcham, earlier this month.

Volunteers have given over 3,700 hours of their time to cleaning the river in the past few years, and last year 8.5 tonnes of rubbish was removed from the river by them.

As recently as the 1960s the River Wandle was considered to be biologically dead, according to the Wandle Trust.

However, as a result of the silt traps project and other initiatives, aquatic animal and plant life has now returned to the river.

Olly van Biervliet, projects officer at the trust, said: "Rainwater carries large volumes of oils, silts and detritus into rivers and harms them ecologically.

"Our traps stop these materials reaching the Wandle and FM Conway can remove them and dispose of them in an environmentally-friendly manner.

"Analysis of the trapped sediments found concentrations of contaminants within them to be several tens or hundreds times higher than the thresholds for environmental safety.

Thanks to projects such as ours with FM Conway, we have come a long way and now the river is teeming with plant and animal life."

The three silt traps were installed near the river’s source at Carshalton.

They separate oils and silts out from the run-off and allow only clean water to pass into the river which then flows through Sutton, Merton and into the Thames at Wandsworth.