I chaired a water seminar for Martin Leet of The Brisbane Institute a couple of weeks ago. Martin has put a report together on the event, click here. I introduced the seminar by suggesting there was nothing more important, after water, than the exchange of information. The first speaker, Blair Nancarrow from CSIRO Land and Water, promptly explained how you could provide people with all the information in the world, but if they didn’t trust you, or the process, you would get nowhere.
Blair was specifically talking about the difficulty of getting people to accept that recycled waste water from sewerage treatment plants can be made safe to drink.
Various studies have indicated that recycling is a real option for many Australian cities and probably one of the best option for securing Brisbane’s water supply in the medium term. But it is politically difficult.
The Mayor of Toowoomba, a regional centre 100 odd kilometers to the west of Brisbane, is trying to force the concept on residents and she is encountering a heap of resistance.
Interestingly, according to Blair’s survey work people are more likely to accept recycled waste water if it comes via an underground aquifer – rather than straight from the treatment plant.
The Western Australian Government has perhaps picked up on this finding with an announcement today that it is considering “injecting” treated waste water into a local aquifer:
The Western Australian Government is examining ways to convert waste water into drinking water. The Managed Aquifer Recharge Project will look at the potential to inject treated waste water into aquifers and then reclaim the water for irrigation and hopefully for drinking. Premier Geoff Gallop says 100 gigalitres of waste water is pumped into the ocean each year. Dr Gallop says while $3 million will be spent on the study, similar schemes are already in operation across the world.
I was interested to read that this recycling project could recover perhaps 100 gigalitres of water. The proposed Perth desalination plant was only going to deliver 45 gigalitres – about the same amount that could be produced by reducing tree cover in the catchment.
And a cautionary note on water restrictions:
Before it started raining here in Brisbane, the local city council introduced water restrictions with much fanfare about how we should all do the right thing by the environment and not water our gardens, shower together, etcetera, etcetera. Anyway, the restrictions have proven so popular we have saved twice as much water as intended. The Mayor is now complaining because there will be a hole in his budget from all the water savings – water Brisbane residents won’t be paying for.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Message from Rog:
Pennant Hills Golf course is calling for EOI from contractors to instal a sewer mining and treatment plant. The intention is to extract and
treat water from the sewer and use it to irrigate the course. They use 86-100 mL pa.
http://www.phillsgolf.com.au/EOI_PHGC.pdf
………..
Rog and others seem to be having trouble posting comment directly and my site was down for some of yesterday and this morning. I have alerted my web site provider and hopefully it will all sort itself out. I am sorry for the inconvenience.
Name the recycling plant Sapphire Springs or something equally pleasing and bottle the product as pure drinking water. The public pays much more for the illusion of purity when marketed thus, regardless of its true origins.
Knowledge, practice and professionalism rather than mateship and biologically motivated preferences posses a significant part and have been vital for APPLIED activities, among which engineering and medicine are the most visible by a general public.
Water supply/sanitation issues combine both of them.
Despite all the computing and pills available, ridiculous incompetency of Australian doctors becomes nowadays a matter of concern at the highest level in Victoria at least.
Hopefully, engineering is a next issue.
Can we at least first resolve the research issues relating to recycled water that are highlighted in 3 reports in the past 5 months for the Federal government before we make the people of Toowoomba drink it?
Hi Geoff, Could you please provide links to the 3 reports or tell us something about them?
Michael Kerjman raises an interesting point, the doctors’ alleged incompetency is surely a function of the medical system in which they work.
You can extend that to the environment; imagine a central committee (a bureaucracy similar to that running the existing health system) deciding what happens where and when in all human activity.
Sounds like the USSR all over again, or worse.
This article and string have missed the key point. There is no need to completely purify sewerage water for drinking purposes because another name for sewerage is “fertiliser”. My brother looked into the feasibility of using Lismore’s effluent water for agriculture and found that each megalitre had $9 worth of nitrogen and would save another $9 in spreading costs.
We were unable to calculate the value of alkaline soaps etc as an alternative to dolomite in addressing the widespread acidic soils of the area but this would be of similar value. My own cows will run 500 metres to quaff the flow of suds from my rental house, obviously to improve the PH of their rumens.
A waste product for one is anothers resource. So there is unlikely to be a single farmer in the country who would not gladly exchange his almost potable irrigation and bore water for an equal volume of urban waste water.
Urban water is only 8% of national water use so there is ample scope for finding conveniently located rural users.
But what has Brisbane done recently? The lamentable Gerard James Soorley spent $40 million on a plant to extract all the nitrogen (value stripping) from this product before trying to sell it at a reduced profit to a domestic buyer who doesn’t want it.
And I understand that the mayor of Toowoomba has actually been offered such a trade by local farmers and she declined. Presumably because she prefers the possibility of federal funds to spend on a pointless but high profile project.
It is pure urban narcissism with an overburden of ignorance.
“This article and string have missed the key point. There is no need to completely purify sewerage water for drinking purposes because another name for sewerage is “fertiliser” ”
– a passage forgivable for experts in agriculture, roughly speaking, farmers mentioned by Ian Mott: maybe, this stuff is a topic for another well-connected mate from some Australian uni to milk dozens of thousands of dollars from governments at all levels for next “research issues relating to recycled water that are highlighted in 3 reports in the past 5 months”.
Surely, one supposes “discovering America once again” by fooling as usual general public with a worth of own academic word-playing, at the time when “a central committee (a bureaucracy similar to that running the existing health system) deciding what happens where and when in all human activity” had already achieved topic-related results in the USA, Israel and Europe (Germany,for instance).