SEWAGE teams have revealed the “grim job” they must do when filtering out bizarre items found in Reading Festival loos.

Thames Water’s Waste team found an inflatable horse and a child’s doll flushed down the toilets this year.

The water company also found wallets, mobile phones, wigs, wellies, underwear and even tents in 750,000 litres of sewage collected from the music festival loos.

READ MORE: Reading Festival 2019 picture gallery.

Thames Water worked night and day to process and treat the huge quantity of poo and pee generated by the thousands of music fans who attended the festival over the Bank Holiday weekend.

Andrew Glover, from Thames Water's waste team, said: "We always encourage festival-goers, like all our customers, to only put the three Ps down the loos - pee, poo and paper - but it's amazing to see what else people flush down there each year.

"This year was no exception, with an inflatable horse and a child's doll among the more bizarre objects we found.

"Thankfully we have special screens at Reading Sewage Works to filter out objects larger than a garden pea, so they don't break our treatment machines.

“It's a grim job for the team that then have to rake out the objects from the sewage by hand, but fascinating in equal measure."

Nine tankers, which each carry almost 19,000 litres of sewage, worked from 6am until 10pm every day sucking up the waste from the toilets, before transporting it to Reading Sewage Works where it was turned into electricity to help power the site.

READ MORE: Reading Festival 'poo power': Sewage to be turned into electricity.

Special screens at the plant ensured foreign objects were filtered out before they got into the treatment process, with anything that was found then raked out by hand.

Any lost wallets containing ID have been handed back to the festival organisers.

The sewage is then transformed into renewable energy by extracting gas from a by-product called sludge to generate electricity for the Island Road plant. What's left is sold to farmers as fertiliser.

Reading Sewage Works produces 50 per cent of all the electricity it uses, while Thames Water as a whole generates around a quarter of the power it needs from waste.

A Thames Water spokesman said: "Sewage sludge is an energy rich resource, with a high calorific content which we extract as biogas and use to generate electricity.

"As well as reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and our reliance on buying non-renewable energy from the grid, generating our own electricity helps us improve the quality of the sludge we recycle to agricultural land.

"This saves money and provides a more sustainable solution for our customers."