River-swimming

### Reader’s Letter to The Guardian, 20th August 2024 ###

Dear Editor,

I read Oliver Wainwright’s article on river-swimming (The Guardian, 19th August 2024, link below) and, indeed yes, it is a joy to be able to come out of work and have a dip in a local lake or river: I do this in the Rhine here in Cologne and also in lakes near Munich and in the Limmat river in Zürich, when I worked in those cities. Absolutely glorious!

But we need to pause for a minute to consider why those rivers are clean? In the case of Zürich it is because the water comes straight off the mountains but for most other rivers it is because we have exported and outsourced our “noxious processes”. 

So, as we happily swim or prepare to swim in our rivers, let’s bear a thought for rivers in China, Vietnam, India, Bangladesh and elsewhere where factories, producing the cheap, throw-away “stuff” that we so crave, dump toxic waste into their rivers.

So, we might have clean rivers but I don’t think we have clean consciences!

Yours,
Alan Mitcham

Link to original article: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/article/2024/aug/19/splashing-in-the-seine-diving-in-the-danube-the-drive-to-make-cities-swimmable