Toowoomba’s toxic 2006 poll put recycled water off the drinking table – but there is a push to bring it back
Right now, country towns in New South Wales and Queensland are
heading for that fateful “day zero” where the supplies of drinking water
end and the desperate contingency plans begin.
Pipelines are one solution and daily truck arrivals are another.
But unlike about 35 cities around the world, one thing none of those towns will be able to draw on will be drinking water recycled from local wastewater.
That option, used in parts of the United States since the 1960s, has been off the table thanks, say some water industry experts, to poor planning, politicisation and the legacy of a 2006 referendum in the rural Queensland town of Toowoomba.
“In Toowoomba, they put it to a vote over the space of three months.
That’s like putting a gun to people’s heads,” says Adam Lovell, chief
executive of the Water Services Association of Australia.Pipelines are one solution and daily truck arrivals are another.
But unlike about 35 cities around the world, one thing none of those towns will be able to draw on will be drinking water recycled from local wastewater.
That option, used in parts of the United States since the 1960s, has been off the table thanks, say some water industry experts, to poor planning, politicisation and the legacy of a 2006 referendum in the rural Queensland town of Toowoomba.
At the time, Australia was still in the grip of the Millennium Drought that would last four more years.
Despite the widespread use of recycled water in other countries, in Toowoomba campaigners and some politicians ignored the proposal of the town’s then mayor, Di Thornley, and decided to literally play dirty.
Phrases like “Poowoomba” were thrown around in interviews. A campaign group called “Citizens Against Drinking Sewage” was created. The town, perhaps not surprisingly, voted no.
“We haven’t done very well in the past at putting all the options on the table to the community,” Lovell says. “It could be dams, it could be desalination plants, but what’s not currently allowed is purified recycled water.
“Yet there are 35 cities around the world [with recycled water schemes] with more coming on line, including Thames Water in London.”
Australia has only two schemes built to treat wastewater to the standards needed for drinking, and Lovell wants to see more.
Queensland has its $2.6bn Western Corridor Recycled Water Scheme near Brisbane that can filter wastewater and add it to its main water supply at Wivenhoe Dam. At capacity, the scheme can add an extra 180 million litres a day to the dam, but it has never been completely turned on and is currently in “care and maintenance mode”.
That leaves Perth’s Groundwater Replenishment Scheme as the only operational scheme. It adds about 14 billion litres of recycled water to the city’s aquifers every year, with work to double capacity due for completion next year.
According to Perth’s Water Corporation, before 1975 the city’s dams would get an average of 420 billion litres of streamflow each year. So far this year, Perth’s dams have received only 37.7 billion litres.
But as well as dams, about 40% of the water for the city’s main supply scheme comes from groundwater that acts as a long-term storage for the recycled water.
Lovell says the way Perth’s Water Corporation presented the option of purified recycled water to the community is seen as a model of how it should be done – a patient three-year trial, widespread community consultation, the creation of a community advisory panel and more than 70 briefings to stakeholders.
About 11,000 people have walked through a purpose-built visitor’s centre down the access road to the Beenyup Wastewater Treatment Plant.
Perth’s groundwater replenishment scheme takes wastewater and puts it through filtration to take out suspended materials, then uses reverse osmosis to remove dissolved materials before blasting the water with ultraviolet light to kill micro-organisms.
Then, the water is fed into the aquifer. All the water drawn from the aquifer is treated again before it’s released for drinking water.
Prof Stuart Khan, of the University of New South Wales, says the kind of patient and inclusive approach taken in Perth should be a model for how recycled water schemes are presented to communities.
Instead, communities have been left with the only option of waiting for rain or building desalination plants, which are roughly twice as expensive as recycling water.
“When you leave it late, the easiest option is seawater desalination,” he says. “But that’s what you do when you run out of time.
“In Australia, we’ve never been prepared to be all that patient – at least on the east coast. You don’t make plans for water when you are running out. You have to look at the longer-term horizon.”
Khan co-authored a report earlier this year on recycling drinking water for the industry-funded group Water Research Australia.
He highlighted a host of pioneering schemes around the world using wastewater to supplement drinking water, in Belgium, Singapore, South Africa, Namibia and projects across the United States.e
Lovell has been taking examples like this in to meetings in Canberra. Earlier this year, he was touting a report that called for the federal government to “recognise the importance of having all water supply options on the table, including purified recycled water for drinking.”
Lovell says recycled water for drinking should be the “next frontier” as communities try to build their resilience to drought and climate change.
Khan says Australia is already at the point where it has to rethink its relationship with recycled water.
“If we leave this any later, we will have a disaster with cities running out of water. That’s not the kind of environment that lets you have a sensible conversation about water recycling.
“In many ways, Toowoomba scared the politicians. The politicians still remember it – they saw it as a poison chalice and didn’t want what happened to the mayor of Toowoomba to happen to them.”
Perhaps ironically, if Brisbane’s water dam levels drop from their current levels of 63.5% to below 60%, then Queensland will start a two-year program to restart its wastewater recycling scheme flowing into Wivenhoe dam that now also feeds Toowoomba.
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