Townsville's state-of-the-art treatment facilities have been designed to produce one of the most valuable resources for any city - recycled water. Council aims to reuse 70% of Townsville's treated effluent by 2008, and 90% of all treated wastewater by 2010, ensuring less noise, odour and emissions and significant benefits for the community and environment. This will:
- Help protect the local environment - by reducing wastewater overflows into waterways
- Enable irrigation of local sports fields and other green spaces, including establishing and maintaining the Dry Tropics Rainforest
- Conserve valuable drinking water supplies
- Provide higher quality recycled wastewater in lower volumes for discharge into the environment
- BioReactor Membranes - Membranes act as a barrier to solids including bacteria, high molecular weight soluble organics and other microorganisms. MBR technology offers operational savings and potential commercial recovery of water and biosolids.
Recycled wastewater discharged into our waterways will contain significantly less nitrogen and phosphorus, therefore reducing the chance of algal blooms and the death of valuable seagrasses.
Council is also actively pursuing reuse possibilities for wastewater by-products, such as biosolids and methane gas, to harness the full benefit of the upgrades and further protect our environment.
Biosolids can be reused as a ground conditioner in sugar cane farms, while methane gas (produced during the treatment process) can power the operation of the facilities and even put electricity back into the public power grid.
What is wastewater?
Wastewater, or sewage, is the used water from toilets, showers, baths, kitchen sinks, laundries and industrial processes.
An average domestic household can produce up to 300L of wastewater per person a day, and just 1% of this is contaminating waste. The other 99% is pure water which can be harvested and recycled with the appropriate equipment.
Our upgrades have dramatically improved the treatment quality of this wastewater, by applying the latest technology to refine treatment processes.
High quality recycled water is now available for civic and industrial use both as irrigation and "process" water which reduces non-drinking usage of our scarce water supplies.