Now the river keeps its own record

By Earth to Sea News · August 2026

A monitor powered by the river it sits in, reading the water every ten minutes and seeing trouble three days out.

There is a device sitting in twenty rivers in Poland that runs on the river itself. A small hydrogenerator inside its housing turns the flow of the water into the electricity that powers the instrument, so it is fed by the very thing it is measuring, and it never needs anybody to come out and change a battery.

It is called WaterSense, and it was built by Filip Budny, a nanotechnology PhD candidate at the Warsaw University of Technology, who won the global Sustainability prize in the James Dyson Award for it last year.

Here is what it does. It reads more than twenty measures of water quality, among them pH, dissolved oxygen, nitrates, chlorides and conductivity, and it draws its samples from three adjustable depths, so whatever is moving below the surface is found as well as whatever is floating on top. It takes a reading every ten minutes. And it uses artificial intelligence to project what the water is about to do up to seventy two hours ahead, so the warning arrives before the trouble does.

The sensors are the loveliest part. They are low cost recyclable paper rather than the usual plastic and metal probes, and they wind on automatically each day like film through a camera, which means the instrument holds laboratory grade accuracy for weeks with nobody standing beside it. It is not a prototype in a drawer either: it is in testing across twenty locations with water companies and local councils, the data it gathers is published openly rather than kept, and Budny has said he is looking for partners beyond Europe.

Now, why this matters here.

Anyone who has stood beside a Sydney creek knows the problem with water: most of what goes into it goes in unseen. Building waste washed off a site in the rain, a load tipped down a stormwater drain after dark, silt from a job with no controls on it. It travels quietly, it takes the life in the creek with it, and it keeps going until it reaches the harbour and then the sea.

None of that is legal. New South Wales has rules and it has real penalties. The trouble is that acting on them usually depends on somebody being there to see it happen, and rivers are long and nights are dark. What we cannot see, we end up treating as acceptable, not because anybody decided to, but because nobody could prove otherwise.

A river with a monitor in it keeps its own record. It does not need somebody on the bank at three in the morning with a phone, and it does not depend on a neighbour happening to look up at the right moment. The water simply notices, every ten minutes, and says so. Something that was invisible becomes ordinary information.

That is a change in what is possible, and it tends to be followed by a change in what is normal. Most people do the right thing more easily when the right thing is the visible one, and most councils act faster on a number than on a rumour. The practices we have quietly tolerated because nobody could see them are exactly the ones that improve first once somebody can.

We would love to see one of these in an Australian creek. If you know a council, a Landcare group or a catchment authority who would like to talk to him, tell us, and we will happily make the introduction.