Toowoomba, water recycleing

[ozwinner]

Isnt that the Lexus center your talking about:confused:

No.

I can find out if you want, its just down the road, as is all Melbournes developement.

Al

[Auld Bassoon]

Isnt that the Lexus center your talking about:confused:

Said waste will be turned into Camrys

[Lignum]

No.

I can find out if you want, its just down the road, as is all Melbournes developement.

Al

I have always been curious as to what they do with all the crap that comes out of their

[Clinton1]

'Midge,
instead of taking 10 pages to end up agreeing that we are both chasing the same point (and boring everyone), I'll go back to my first post.

The Yes campaign was closely associated with a push for further population growth. There was/is an argument that all of SEQ is too densly populated, and there is this big, wet, rich, undeveloped area just up the road

I happen to share this view.
I don't think that continual 'growth' through population growth in one area of 1.72 million square km state is particularly desirable. 81.5% of Qld's population is in the Brisbane/Moreton area. I believe that this area has exceeded its natural 'carrying capacity'.

I have absolutely no idea why continual population growth in SEQ is so strongly promoted and pursued by the Qld Govt. (actually I do, but thats another thread)

To me it would make much more sense to plan for and to promote population growth in other QLD regional centres, particularly those that are coastal.

This also opens the potential to properly plan for that increased growth, allowing us to get away from haphazard sprawl based on zoning decisions made by idiotically, sorry that should be popularly, elected local council officials.

[Bushmiller]

Only just seen ths thread. Just taking a few isolated points.

The major population centres rarely seem to catch water from their own area , but ironcally rely on drier hinterlands (eg Brisbane and Sydney).

The situation is aggravated by increased population levels without increased water storage arrangements.

My subjective observations are that it is drier than it used to be and while it may well be part of a weather cycle, that is no consolation if you are at the bottom of a 25 year trough.

The tanks people are installng are nowhere near large enough and my impression is that they are bought purely to reap their share of any rebate on offer. 5000gal to my mind is an absolute minimum. I appreciate space can be an issue.

I think the NO vote got up in Toowoomba because people are not short enough of water and neither is it too expensive.....yet!

You are short of water when...

You never ever wash the car.
You never ever water the garden.
You never bath... only shower.
When you shower you get wet for 20 seconds and turn off the water, soap up and then turn it on again for up to 60 seconds to rinse off.
You don't always flush the toilet each time you use it.
You travel to nearby towns to do your laundry.
Once a fortnight you travel to a town and bring back water in drums in your ute or trailer ( or you buy it at approx $130 a pop)

The previous scenario was in NSW, but very comparable to the Toowoomba situation.

Our water storage there was 8,000 gals for five people. Nowhere near enough. Nowadays we have 22,000 gals for two people but don't live there full time. Currently we live near Toowoomba. A son does lives in Toowoomba and a daughter in Brissy.

I feel sufficiently close to the issue to be incensed by the reactionary attitudes.

Cheers (watery toast)
Paul

[journeyman Mick]

................I think its time to get away for SEQ being further developed and start to apply a little Strategic Planning and pushing the population to north QLd..........................

Hey, you keep all that population down there! Some "visionary" government planning team designated the area around here as a "growth node" and pencilled us in for 30K extra people, with another similar area about 20 mins away with 30K extra people. Never mind that water supplies are low and there's no town water to these areas and the fact that the road up the hill from Cairns is overloaded as it is. I'm all for BM's model of Manhattan-like density - as long as it's Not In My Back Yard.

Mick

[goat]

WATER...... It has been scientifically proven that if we drink litre of water each day, at the end of the year we would have absorbed more than 1 kilo of escherichia coli bacteria found in faeces, in other words, we are consuming 1 kilo of sh!#!

However, we do not run that risk when drinking BEER because alcohol has to go through a distillation process of boiling, filtering and fermenting.

WATER = sh!#
BEER = HEALTH

Free yourself of sh!#, drink BEER!!!

It is better to drink beer and talk sh!# than to drink water and be full of sh!#.

There is no need to thank me for this valuable information; I am doing it as a public service.

[reeves]

ahh what a sad and sorry debate, all the confusion and opinionating. And the government wants people to vote again, whilst anyone on mains water is tiill flushing good drinking water down the toilet.

The shame about the recycling vote is that we probably need to recycle water, to not recycle is stupid and wasteful. To promote sewage recycling as drinkning water is the dumbest political stance i have seen, it doomed them from the get go.

So what is the solution ?

Upgrade water management practices to suit current situation, lots of people, little water.

As mains water is used domesticly for 3 main uses, drinking/cooking, washing, people clothes etc, and then toilets and gardening, it would suggest a situation whereby the actualuse of water is seperated going into any given building. So we need 3 pipes in not one...

one pipe carries drinking water only
one pipe carries lower grade domestic water for washing etc
one pipe carries recycled water for use in toilets and gardens etc..

you would only need recycled water for drinkning when things got really low.

Now i know the cost and strategy behind this would be huge, even in Toowooomba but it seems we need to upgrade our brains as to how we actually manage water and what we need from it.

cheeeeeeers
john

[Bob Willson]

So where does the local council store all the

" lower grade domestic water for washing etc
recycled water for use in toilets and gardens etc.."

until we need to use it.

They must be storing it if we are going to need another two pipes into each building to use it

[Bob Willson]

Just thought; we would also need another two pipes out again to carry the various types of sullage to the various storage areas.

[silentC]

So where does the local council store all the...

In tanks in each household's backyard

Recently someone told me they are being charged $7000 by the council to connect to the new sewer, in addition our council is about to put up sewerage rates to subsidise infrastructure improvements. All that does is to put the problem off for another few years. Instead, if they subsidised each new house to install a grey water treatment plant (less than $7000), then get people to flush their bogs, wash their cars and hose their gardens with that, they would only be using fresh water for drinking and showering/washing.

This is a scalable solution because every new development would automatically include the required sewerage capacity, rather than spending millions every decade to install more pipes and bigger holding tanks. The technology is almost there where it is safe for this treated water to be sprayed on gardens without any environmental impact. The only limitation at present is that you need 200 sq. metres to disperse it over. When they can do away with that, I don't see why a suburban house couldn't do something similar.

We flush our bogs with recycled sewerage and to date there is no sign of any smell. The water is a bit cloudy but we put a blue loo through it once every now and then and we find it turns the water green for weeks after the thing has run out. Still working on a filter for it.

[bitingmidge]

we probably need to recycle water, to not recycle is stupid and wasteful.

Except for water used in specific chemical reactions where its molecular chemistry changes, all water is currently recycled at the moment.

The problem with the whole debate is that it's not about recycling, it's actually about consumption.

If the provision of treated drinking water was charged according to its value as a scarce commodity, then consumption would be reduced and people would look to more frugal usage.

To say it is wasteful to for instance: wash my car, is not correct when water is available and is provided in sufficient quantity for me to do that.

All of the runoff finds its way into the water table or into the sky through evaporation or even transpiration, where it is recycled in a closed system (there are no losses in that process).

I think the term "waste" is bandied around just as incorrectly and emotionally as the term "treated sewage" which of course the treated water is not.

Treated sewage is the effluent left after the water has been extracted.

Perhaps if indeed the Toowoomba city fathers had really intended (as has been widely reported) that treated sewage be reticulated, it is just as well the vote was lost! :eek:


P

[Bob Willson]

Except for water used in specific chemical reactions where its molecular chemistry changes, all water is currently recycled at the moment. P

We haven't always had water on the earth, so where does absolutely brand new water come from then?

[bitingmidge]

Specific chemical reactions!



P

[silentC]

We haven't always had water on the earth

Haven't we?