[Poll] Recycled/Desalinated water - your thoughts?

[katmeow]

There is an old thread on the topic, but I can't work out how to add a poll to it. In light of the fact that NSW is planning desalination trials I thought it was timely to bring the topic up for discussion again.

Green light for Sydney desalination trials
October 31, 2005 - 12:29PM


Small desalination trials will take place next year before a full-scale plant is constructed on Sydney's Kurnell Peninsula.

The NSW Government today said the final two tenderers for the $2 billion plant's construction would run small pilot desalination plants for at least six months to test and finetune their technologies.

Utilities Minister Carl Scully - who as Roads Minister negotiated the contract for the controversial, privately run Cross City Tunnel - said all contracts relating to the desalination plant would be made public in accordance with Government rules.

"I anticipate a transparent process that will involve the release of documents at some point in time," Mr Scully said.

Sydney Water will pay for the infrastructure for the pilot plants, including an underground pipeline located 400 metres off the coast of Kurnell.

Three consortia are on a short list to build the desalination plant, which will supply up to 500 megalitres of drinking water per day - enough to fill about 500 Olympic swimming pools.

The State Government is yet to decide if the plant will be publicly or privately financed.

Sydney Water chief David Evans said the trial plants, to be located at Kurnell, would each be about the size of a shipping container and capable of treating about 250,000 litres of sea water a day.

Salt water processed in the plants by reverse osmosis will become safe for human consumption but will not go into the general water supply.

Mr Evans said the trials would allow the final two consortia bidding for the contract to finetune their designs for a full-scale plant by working with the sea water off Kurnell.

"Sea water is sea water but there are different levels of saltiness in sea water around the world, there are different temperatures, there are different levels of suspended solids in the water," Mr Evans told reporters.

Mr Scully said Premier Morris Iemma was determined the desalination plant would be built even if the drought ended.

"The Premier's made a decision that we will build this come what may, because if the drought breaks we may have another drought," Mr Scully told reporters.

From here

So, the poll is for what of the following options you would be happy to drink.

*Treated waste water
*Treated storm water
*Desalinated sea water
*None of the above

Public surveys done around the time of the old thread showed 90% of people had issues with drinking recycled water. I'd be interested to see how much of a problem people really do have with the idea of treated waste/storm water, given that scientists have said that the treatment process will leave it cleaner than what comes through the catchment areas intially. I think that this perceived barrier is one of the reasons why the Government is moving towards desalination as a preference.

Anyway, as before, I'm still concerned about the environmental impact of desal - including the necessity for heavy use of energy & the excess salt being pumped back out into the ocean which may affect marine life. The fact that the government isn't going to undertake a full environmental impact statement worries me greatly. I still believe that desal should be an option which is considered after the treatment of storm water and waste water as there is huge amounts going down the drain every day which could potentially be reused.

Thoughts?

 

[katmeow]

Desalination is a quick fix that could have long-term problems
November 4, 2005


It may affect the marine world and sends the wrong message to the community, writes Ian Kiernan.

THE NSW Government's rush to build a desalination plant and its token gesture of consultation makes it clear that it does not trust the public to make an informed decision about our water use. It has also ignored industry's ability to deliver sustainable solutions.

Solving Sydney's water supply crisis should be above politics, but it appears an election quick fix has been chosen. Desalination will not encourage water conservation. It will not help Sydney become a sustainable city.

Desalination, it appears, has been chosen for the political expediency of easing water restrictions.

More than two years of water restrictions have taught people to make more out of less. Rainwater tanks are popular, water-saving toilets are in demand and shorter showers are the norm. A desalination plant would ruin those gains because it would send a message that we do not need to save water.

Questions about the Government's plans for a desalination plant remain unanswered. Keeping its plans secret raises concerns about the assessment being done and how adequate this may be in considering the impact.

With so many public and scientific concerns about the environmental impact of the plant, why isn't the Government prepared to do a full environmental impact statement, rather than the less thorough environmental assessment report?

There has been no indication of or discussion about oceanographic studies of currents around the proposed site. Without this, how can the impact be assessed?

Equally, the Government's plan to use ferric chloride as a flocculant, to clean the water produced, raises concerns about what this will do to the marine environment.

What is the immediate impact and long-term damage to Bate Bay, Wanda and Cronulla beaches - notably safe Liberal seats?

Making water reuse and recycling strategies a priority is not a tough decision. It is logical and responsible. The Government's claim that it is committed to water reuse and recycling is hollow as Sydney's rate of recycling, at only 2 per cent, lags behind the rest of the country. The Government is not doing enough to improve this.

Perth reuses 3 per cent, Brisbane 6 per cent and Adelaide 11 per cent. In Melbourne, where the rate is also about 2 per cent, the Government's plan to recycle stormwater from the Yarra River will lift this significantly.

Sydney Water discharges more than 450 gigalitres, or 225,000 Olympic-size swimming pools of waste water each year into the ocean, almost as much water as Sydneysiders consume each year. Only 11 gigalitres of this is recycled.

It is realistic to substitute drinking water with recycled water for industry, parks and gardens, agriculture, irrigation and in housing developments. Recycled water can be used to supplement environmental flows.

This substitution will not only save millions of litres of drinking water but can also reduce the rate of depletion of our dams and the cost and environmental impact of dealing with the waste-water stream that is rising as Sydney's population grows.

Substitution is possible. Business and industry is already using the equivalent of 3386 Olympic swimming pools of treated effluent from sewage treatment plants every year.

The Government has made commitments to reducing the state's greenhouse emissions and has targets to meet by 2020. However, it also intends to build a desalination plant that is greenhouse polluting.

Desalination is energy intensiveand the proposed plant would increase electricity use by 1.5 per cent. The greenhouse emissions generated would be the equivalent of putting another 200,000 cars on the road.

There is no single solution to the water crisis. To have a reliable supply the city must get smarter about how it uses water. And the Government must increase its efforts in wastewater recycling and harvesting stormwater.

Water strategies should not be imposed on people. Recycling has a large role to play in solving water challenges.

Sydney could have a sustainable supply but this will require much greater effort to conserve and recycle water than this Government has made.

Ian Kiernan is chairman of Clean Up Australia.

From here

 

[MoeBro]

I'm not so sure about drinking Yarra water, even if it is treated, filtered, purified, exorcised, but everything else seems like a goer

desalination=win

 

[FaTz]

How is the tally at 225%??? haha

 

[katmeow]

^^^ The poll is a multiple option one. So the tally on the side tells you what percentage of the voters so far have selected that option.

 

[m4dd0g]

No brainer with Adelaide water as comparison. anything is better than that.

You should also get an option of the council for untreated waste so you can get into some marquis de sade action in the convenience of your own home

 

[muzby]

in the long run, all water has been recycled...

 

[Jimity]

As long as its got two hydrogen atoms, an oxygen atom, and not a lot else, I'll drink it.

I dont think a lot of the general public realise what treated means. It isnt just filtered through a coffee filter and then into your taps.

 

[quiet roar]

States should definitely be looking at both desalination and recycling - recycling being the most important IMO.

No reason recycling needs to be for drinking, though, it can simply be used for industry.

 

[Jimity]

^^^^Thats pretty commonplace already though isnt it?

 

[Urbie]

I drink desalinated water pretty much everyday here where I live on a resort island, we have this desalination water plant with this long pipe goes out to the sea, the water plant returns almost 90% of the sea water back to the sea while 10% is drinkable treated water, got no idea how this little science here works.

It has a slight chorline (sp?) aftertaste, but it doesnt really bother me.

 

[flighty]

Where i live there is NO fresh water around.. so desalinated is the only option!
I don't like to drink the tap water, instead i buy bottled water.
Here its only AU$4 for a carton of 12x 1L bottles. Rather cheap!

I do find that showering/washing hair in desalinated water makes your hair a bit bleugh..... my hair is alot finer after 3 years of it!

In response to the poll: None of the above!

 

[plazma]

To be perfectly frank, I'd much rather drink treated water, or treated storm-water than desalinated water. Just due to the tremendous and disproportional environmental impact that desalination has, both in power consumption and in polluting the ocean with supersaline by-product.

-plaz out-

 

[phase_dancer]

I'd be happy to drink water from any of the above options if that's what was on offer. I do agree that desalination is an energy costly exercise and so would not be my first choice by a long shot.

However, one option that's not mentioned, and rarely gets a mention, is water produced from the atmosphere, via dehumidifiers. Employing the new super efficient solar cell panels ( see New Inventors, ABC) a small dehumidifier could be made for portable use, or as a house fixture in areas with exceptionally low rainfall.

This is true recycling in my opinion, as mother nature has already purified it via evaporation. Basically, all that has to be done is to condense it.

While humidity falls very low during the day in many parts of Australia, having a storage medium for the collected solar energy (battery) means that condensation can be optimised at times of the day when humidity is highest i.e. just before dawn.

 

[Chaos Butterfly]

I'm definitively against the desalination plant. I am a Chemical Engineer.

Building a desalination plant is just going to make quite a few people rich, and one of them will be Frank Sartor. Fucking bah. I can't stand that they keep on recycling the same statistics that were collected with a very very dodgy poll. From what I have heard (hence hearsay and I don't have an actual reference for this...) the poll options were something along the lines of:

would you drink desalinated water?
would you drink water that has raw sewage in it?

Nothing about the standards of purification/recycling that are currently in use. It was a bullshit poll that was geared to show exactly what Frank Sartor wanted it to show. That Sydney people don't want recycled water, and that we do want a fucking expensive and stupidly energy consumptive desalination plant. It really isn't required. We have the technology to safely and efficiently recycle a large percentage of the water that we use. I mean if we only recycle grey water, thats fine. Grey water is water from sinks etc. We don't really need black water recycling: water from toilets etc. But fuck, think of all the water that could be recycled from just sinks, dishwashers, washing machines or showers?

Water recycling is a fantastic solution to the current and future water crisis.

One of the reasons that Frank Sartor was against recycling was the need to update a lot of pipe work in the Sydney area to accomodate recycled water, but the thing is, the ENTIRE Sydney pipe network is about 20 years PAST its effective use by date. We are using very very old pipes, which are in the most part still mostly ok, but there will come a critical time very soon where there will need to be a major overhaul of Sydney's entire underground pipe system. The government can't keep ignoring it. It's going to be expensive, but it has to be done.

Well thats enough ranting for one Saturday afternoon

CB

 

[preacha]

i'd drink piss if it was nutritious

 

[Donny Don't]

Rather than converting this recycled water back into drinking water, this recycled water should be diverted back to industry. And the fresh drinking water that's currently being wasted cooling down machines should be diverted to our homes. There's no reason (yet) why we shoud be drinking sewage.

 

[katmeow]

For those who chose none of the above, or didn't select all the options - I'm curious to know what your reasons are?

 

[Karaboudjan]

I'm confused. I live in the UK and have always believed that all our water is recycled and then put back into the taps; piss, shit, radioactive waste, battery acid you name it. Our water isn't the best in the world but it's perfectly safe to drink everywhere. Austria has the best water in the world according to the locals when I've been there on holiday.

Does Australia have a water shortage or something?

 

[phase_dancer]

^^ Sure does, in part because no-one had the sense some 30 years ago (when the idea was discusses in detail) to explore options of diverting local coastal rivers inland. Instead, most of the valuable stormwater is sent out to sea