EVER flushed the toilet and wondered where it all goes?
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First guess might not have been somebody’s paddock, but by September that’s exactly where your effluent will be going, albeit well treated.
After some time in the planning, work is now underway on MidCoast Water’s $1.2 million water recycling scheme, attached to the Gloucester Sewage Treatment Plant.
The project is designed to meet licence conditions imposed by the Environment Protection Authority (EPA), which is seeking to limit the amount of treated effluent entering waterways all over the state due to the heightened nutrient levels and subsequent impacts on water health it can cause.
“Certainly as an organisation MidCoast Water is fully supportive of it. I suspect even without the EPA licence and deadline conditions we would have been considering doing something like this in the near future,” MidCoast Water’s project manager David Morse said, citing it as best practice.
The project will see approximately 98 million litres of treated recycled water used for agricultural recycling each year. That’s at least 25 to 40 per cent of the usual output that is currently put back into the river system, meeting the minimum requirements of the licence - although Mr Morse suspects they will recycle more.
“It’s hard to tell until we’re actually up and running,” he said, adding that the figures take into account wet weather impacts.
Construction on the scheme started in mid-March, with work expected to take up to six months to complete.
Work includes modifications to the sewage treatment plant as well as the installation of an irrigation system on a nearby agricultural area.
“The Department of Primary Industries has very stringent guidelines on the treatment processes, and on the ways it can be reused or applied,” Mr Morse said.
One of the options considered initially by MidCoast Water included
irrigating the sporting fields but the costs to comply to much heavier restrictions made it financially unviable. Subsequently MidCoast Water has entered into an agreement with a local landholder to irrigate on paddocks close by and flat. This lowers both pumping costs and run-off issues.
“There’s a strict irrigation and rotation process for livestock,” he said, citing a 14 day rotational policy.
“We also need to fit around the landholder’s needs”.
The minimum time to keep cattle off after irrigating is five days. Regular groundwater and soil monitoring will be conducted. The project is one of several reuse projects implemented by the water authority, which already runs them in Hawks Nest, Tuncurry, Harrington and Taree.