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Mixed water retention basin in Hamburg
Photo:
Christian Charisius / picture alliance / dpa
On a summer's day 15 years ago, conservationist Jürgen Hellgardt discovered something unsettling.
He went for a walk in his hometown Lauffen am Neckar, a small town in Baden-Württemberg known for its wine.
Not far from a pasture, on the bank of a river, he saw tomato plants.
As he got closer, he saw boggy ground.
It smelled foul.
Hellgardt is a chemical engineer and has headed the local association of the environmental organization BUND for 14 years.
Tomato seeds are often not digested in the human intestine.
Via toilets, they end up in wastewater and sewage treatment plants.
They can survive them too, Hellgardt knows that.
In Lauffen, a sewage treatment plant channels purified water into the Neckar.
Hellgardt, however, was standing at the narrow Zaber.
He had thought that no sewage would be discharged there.
Until he saw the tomatoes.
Today Hellgardt runs across a meadow, past plum trees, behind which vineyards tower up.
An idyll.
If it weren't for the pipe.
Hellgardt stops at a canal.
A barred concrete pipe protrudes from the ground, big enough that a child could stand in it.
Toilet paper hangs in the grate.
In blackberry bushes, in the branches of a white willow, in nettles: scraps of paper are caught everywhere.
A sanitary napkin floats in the water.
The water from the pipe flows directly into the Zaber.
It comes from a concrete chamber under the ground, the rain overflow basin III.
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