Was it former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, Australian Democrat Senator Andrew Bartlett or Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull?
Who convinced Queensland’s Premier Beattie to change his mind on recycling sewage as a source of drinking water?
They have each visited my home town of Brisbane over the last week and each publicly announced their support for the concept.
Now the Premier says he’s going to put the idea to the people of Brisbane.
That is quite a back flip.
Until recently Peter Beattie had been promising new dams, desalination plants and even piping water over 1,000 kms from the Burdekin to fix Brisbane’s water shortage, but had ruled out waste water recycling. Now he says recycling is a possibility – that he will make it an election issue.
You can read about Andrew Bartlett’s petition in favor of recycling at his website and Mikhail Gorbachev and Malcolm Turnbull’s comments in The Australian here, here and here.
I attended the Brisbane Institute last night to hear Malcolm Turnbull speak and he really was eloquent. On the subject of recycled water he suggested that:
“We must learn to judge water by its quality, not its history”.
He also commented that permanent water restrictions in Brisbane make no more sense than would permanent electricity restrictions. He indicated that the current water restrictions reflected a lack of investment in infrastructure by state governments and spoke about the referendum on waste water recycling in Toowoomba this Saturday.
I wrote in support of sipping sewage in last week’s The Land and blogged on the issue last August.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
I saw last night’s 7.30 report – apparently the recycled water is pure enough for dialysis.
That’s good enough for me.
Perrier is recycled dinosaur pee. Maybe the issue is whether the water is “aged” properly.
Schiller.
So urbanites will drink their own piss but won’t trust water that has come all the way from the Coral Sea to land on their roof and flow into their own water tank.
They will drink their own piss rather than pump stormwater up into the Dam.
They would rather spend millions taking the fertiliser out of their waste water rather than swapping it for clean water from a farmer who values the NPK.
And they would rather drink piss than thin the regrowth in the catchment for fear of “impacting on water quality” in the dam.
And they then expect me to mask my contempt for their collective cognitive deficits?
Poetic justice, don’t you think?
Unfortunately, Sydney people have been drinking piss for years. I can remember years ago, bushwalking in the Blue Mountains and the Cox’s River was considered unfit to drink. The Cox’s River flows into Warragamba Dam, the main supply for Sydney.
Or as Gough said when he was told of Ghandi’s habit of drinking a glass of his own urine every day – ” let’s all get on the piss”!
Well Ian, given the heavy metal traces and various organics on Brissy roofs yes it it safer !
Poo-etic justice more like it.
Most people only think recycled thoughts so why get precious about drinking recycled water?
Improved capture & on-site storage should come before recycling or desal.
Pee would be one of the more innocuous substances– Is there any danger re ‘prion’ disease contamination? I would never drink my city roof water due to the abundant flying fox poo from the neighbours passion for overplanted tall storey trees, over which I have no control, unlike my rural tanks previously. Also, I have concerns re failures in systems, human error being usually behind most disaster or equipment failures. Things are everchanging and previous lauded systems may not adequately address new scenarios and diseases initially.
Domestic tank siting is hampered by council regs; mandated distances from boundaries and sewer lines leave little room for good collection and storage.
Why not decentralise the stormwater collection points?– the large creek thru here is always empty except when briefly(wasteing)flash stormwater; and large roof-concrete collection areas -like local shopping centres- aren’t utilised.
Thanks for the mention in the same bracket as Gorbachev – not surprisingly I agree with you completely.
It’s very disappoitning – although not that surprising that the Libs and the Nats have both opposed Beattie’s possible support for full recycling. Their immediate undermining of the most obvious alternative to the Mary River mega-dam shows that their opposition to the dam is also just cyncial opportunism.
By the way, I do actually live in Brisbane, so I’m not sure it’s accurate to say I was “visiting” Brisbane (even though I’m away from home so much it sort of feels like it sometimes).
Trace elements of heavy metals, Luke? So how about providing a test of significance for your claimed threat.
What are they, exactly?
How do they get there and over what time period?
What are the maximum accepted levels for these?
And what concentration of them will be found in a 5,000 litre tank vs a 13,500 litre tank?
I agree with your point on council impediments, Disgruntled, but diverters eliminate most of that problem. It is also worth remembering that this is Brisbane where even a single day on a hot tin roof is more than enough to bake the odd flying fox turd to a point where it is a hard as enamel paint. It then takes weeks to break down but when it does it is little more than powdered carbon.
If you think about the physical conditions that are applied to it you will see that it goes through a process that is almost the same, but very much longer, than microwave/UV sterilisation.
So a single Bat turd will end up as only a gram of UV treated powder which, when mixed with a 5,000 litre tank will amount to only 0.2 parts per million assuming no flushing from an over flowing tank. In a 13,500 litre tank this inert powder will only be 0.074ppm and even then it is likely to settle on the bottom of the tank in the space below the point where water is extracted.
Just think about it. Beattie wants to spend millions on a high cost UV sterilisation process when we have a cheap, energy neutral, solar powered facility already in place on every house in the region.
And it makes a lot more sense to break down the contaminant before the water is even added to it.
But don’t tell Beattie. I’m enjoying watching bilge water achieve it’s own level.
Making it an election issue means that the people don’t really get a say. Elections after all essentially offer a choice of just two package deals – the Liberal package deal, or the Labor package deal.
At the moment, the main problem with recycled water is the perception that it is unaccepable to the public. The best way of finding out the truth is to do a randomised survey.
If it is found that it is, after all, acceptable, then there is no problem. If it is not acceptable, then some education is required.
Sylvia.
Ian – Trace elements – haven’t got any definitive numbers as work is preliminary and it depends where you live – but Pb, Cu, Zn, Cr, As, Cd, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, and phalates. And first flush doesn’t necessarily remove them. Will they harm you – who knows (for now).
Let’s drink to it !
Talking of sterilising water, we have always used untreated unfiltered tank water and it can be home to all sorts of critters, alive or dead. Just take a peek at what lies in the gutters. Horror of horrors. A dead frog can make a bit of a stink, but you just run the tap a bit longer.
We probably get our water from an anaerobic digester (the process differs from aerobic digestion which is what you need for synchronised swimming).
TOOWOOMBA RECYCLING VOTE LOST
And there you have it – should put the sword through any other politicians trying to run the agenda for some time. A powerful option gone from the toolkit.
ABC says “Toowoomba knocks back recycled water plan
The Mayor of Toowoomba, Queensland’s biggest inland city, has conceded defeat over a proposal to add recycled water to drinking supplies.
Toowoomba residents were asked to approve a plan to draw 25 per cent of the city’s water from recycled effluent.
With 52,000 of 60,000 votes counted, 62 per cent of residents have voted against the proposal.
Lyle Shelton is one of three councillors who campaigned against the proposal and is encouraged by the early result.
“That’s probably about what the ‘no’ case was expecting,” he said.
He says he is confident a new solution to the city’s water shortage can be found.
A short time ago, Mayor Di Thorley conceded the city would not be drinking recycled water.
“It looks like the vote has gone down about 60-40,” she said.
“At the end of the day, we still don’t have a water project.”
She says it is now up to the Queensland Government to drought-proof the city.”
It appears to me that the cost, effort, & technique for purifying waste water for recycling, is not much different to whats involved in desalination of sea water.
That being the case, why would you want to use an unpopular feed stock for this expinsive water in coastal regions? It makes more sence to use the lower treated sewerage for agriculture, where its wanted.
It will probably be easier to talk country people to putting more dependence on tanks. After all, they are used to getting by, with a lot less servives from government.
When you put up with shit from government every day , you are less likely to want to drink your own.
Funny, isn’t it? We all know about the bird shit on the roof, but we manage to forget about it, when we drink our tank water.
hi my name is jeorgia kidd and i agree on what the people of queensland say we must judge water on it’s quality not it’s history being because it is one of lifes most natural recources and infact the one resource we cant live without… recycled or not
Hi i might be a little uneducated in the topic of recycled water. Im a yr 12 student in a brisbane school. We have just been given an assingment to debate why we would or wouldnt drink recycled water. I have a question that i hope can be answered; if for example a person who has a disease waste is recycled and another drinks it after its been recycled, is there any chance of recieving that disease? thankyou for your time.
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