After a good breakfast we made our final pledges, shared our departing thoughts then boarded the coach.But it wasn’t straight to Geneva, instead we stopped at the Chamonix water treatment works where all of the water used in the Chamonix valley is recycled.

It is a fascinating facility hidden beneath a green roof. In the shadow of the mighty mountains the four staff here oversee the cleansing 100,000 m3 of water daily, that’s 100 million litres or a billion (1000 million) 100ml glasses of drinking water! In energy terms they use 35,000 kw a week to run the plant making it the second biggest user of energy in the valley after the Companie de Mont Blanc which operates all the ski lifts, cable cars and the train up to the Mer de Glace.

All very interesting when yesterday we were watching vast water falls pouring pure mountain water into the valley.

The children loved the smell of the raw sewage . . . Not . . . and were able to see in the works laboratory just how the cleaning process works.

While it was clearly quite smelly inside the building, particularly at the beginning of the process! we all appreciated just how important it is to recycle waste and wondered what the environment might have been like without this place.