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2006/22: Should Australia use recycled water for human consumption?

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What they said ...
'Too long we have been living like we might live in Europe and not in accordance with dry climate conditions. Most people who balk at reusing sewage water should be educated about recycling'
Leigh Martin of the Total Environment Centre in Sydney

'There is no community on this planet that deliberately sources [as much of] its drinking water from a sewage treatment plant. Therefore it's a new technology, it's an experiment, and Toowoomba is the guinea pig'
Snow Manners, a 'no' vote campaigner in Toowoomba

The issue at a glance
On July 29, 2006, voters in Queensland's largest inland city, Toowoomba, overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to add recycled effluent to the city's water supply.
Toowoomba residents were asked to approve a plan to draw 25 per cent of the city's water from recycled effluent. More than 62 per cent of voters said no to the idea in a referendum.
The city is suffering a major water shortage and severe water restrictions. Toowoomba's mayor, Di Thorley, who had supported the use of recycled water commented, 'At the end of the day, we still don't have a water project.'
Lyle Shelton, one of three councillors who campaigned against the proposal, stated that he was confident a new solution to the city's water shortage could be found.
In New South Wales, the Goulburn Mulwaree Council is also facing major water restrictions. The Pejar Dam has fallen below 9 per cent of its capacity.
The Newcastle and the Goulburn Mulwaree Council are both considering using recycled water.
The Goulburn Mulwaree Council's director of engineering services, Phil Hansen, has said, 'The job of this water management planning process is to identify all options. They could be a whole range of things, they could be surface water options, they could be ground water options, they could be ... conservation options with the water that we currently have. Certainly the recycled water options sits there as one of those options.'
The Toowoomba vote will also influence the Queensland Government's policies.
Premier Peter Beattie has indicated he is considering campaigning in the next election on a plan to pipe treated effluent into Brisbane's major water source, Wivenhoe Dam.

Background
Reclaimed water is treated effluent or sewage that - instead of being discharged into a natural body of water - is treated to a higher degree (depending on the location) and is used for a broad range of practical purposes, most commonly irrigation. It is frequently used to irrigate golf courses and parks, fill decorative fountains, and fight fires. It can also be used to irrigate crops, as long as the produce will be peeled or boiled before human consumption.
Treated effluent from wastewater treatment facilities is typically discharged directly into a stream, river, or other body. This recharges the water supply and promotes the natural decomposition of materials in the water that standard treatment practices would not normally be able to remove. But due to increasing population and increasing demand for reliable fresh water sources, many areas around the world are now using reclaimed water to decrease potable water demands. (Potable water is water used by people for drinking.)
In some cities in the United States there are dual pipe networks, with recycled water being delivered in different coloured pipes for uses other than drinking, cooking and washing. This reduces domestic demand on the potable water supply.
New developments in water purification have seen reclaimed or recycled water being used or considered for human consumption. Singapore is using a dual membrane process to recycle domestic waste water (sewage) to levels that approach the quality of distilled water. These recycling plants use two membranes, one with larger holes to remove micro-organisms such as protozoa and bacteria that cause infection, while the second separates salt from water. Singapore has built three plants and has plans to build a fourth which will recycle 20 per cent of water discharged into the ocean. Water that is not used by industry is delivered to the island's reservoirs where it sits for six months. It is then treated again before making its way back into the water supply. Currently one percent of the water used for domestic purposes in Singapore, including drinking, is recycled. The city plans to increase that level to 2.5 percent.
Many other cities world wide are now investigating either potable or indirect potable use of reclaimed water.

Internet information
On November 8, 2004, Britain's The Guardian newspaper published a valuable analysis of Australia's supposed water shortage problem. The author, David Fickling, suggested that a large measure of the problem is the inappropriate, water-hungry crops that Australia continues to grow. The full text of this article, titled, 'Plunder down under', can be found at http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,1346106,00.html

Savewater.com.au is a government-sponsored, private enterprise initiative intended to spread information about Australia's water problems and how to address them. The site can be found at http://www.savewater.com.au/

On July 23, 2006, Channel Nine's current affairs program, Sixty Minutes, ran a treatment of the then immanent Toowoomba recycled water referendum titled, 'Waste water'. The program canvasses a wide range of opinions.
A full transcript of the program can be found at http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/sixtyminutes/stories/2006_07_23/story_1716.asp
It is currently possible to view the program online using a link from the page just given.

On February 27 2006 On-line Opinion published the views of the mayor of Toowoomba, Dianne Thorley, on the issue of whether the town should augment its drinking water supply with 25 percent recycled water. The mayor is a strong supporter of the scheme. Her views can be found at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=4201

On July 28, the ABC's Lateline program presented a segment looking at the issues surrounding the referendum on recycled water use to be held in Toowoomba the next day. The program presented interviews and comments from people holding a range of views on the issue.
A full transcript can be found at http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2006/s1700189.htm

The on-line encyclopedia, Wikipedia's, main entry on reclaimed water can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reclaimed_water

Arguments in favour of recycled water being used for human consumption
1. Recycled water is safe for human consumption
It has been repeatedly claimed that modern water treatment methods are so effective that recycled water can be brought to a level of purity where it carries fewer contaminants than water usually used for human consumption.
Experts agree that a multiple barrier system employing appropriate treatment technologies is capable of reducing the concentrations of bacterial contaminants to such a low level that any risk becomes negligible. This approach is supported by highly credible agencies such as the US Environmental Protection Authority and World Health Organization in their guideline documents.
Even water treated less vigorously and used to irrigate food crops has been deemed safe. Health, environment and water authorities say the reclaimed water used to irrigate Werribee's market gardens in Victoria is completely safe as are the area's crops of mainly lettuce, broccoli and cauliflowers. Some say the class-A water is cleaner than the water from the Werribee River, which has been used to irrigate the district for more than 80 years.
Referring to the double filtered water proposed for human consumption, Queensland's premier, Peter Beattie has insisted that recycled water is safe at any level, citing London and Singapore as examples. 'It doesn't matter whether it's 1 per cent, or 12 per cent or 25 per cent. If it's safe at 1 per cent, it's safe at 20 per cent - it's just water," Mr Beattie said.

2. Many countries use recycled water
Supporters of the use of recycled water note that it is used for a range of purposes in other parts of the world. Israel, Singapore, the United States and parts of Europe all use recycled water for irrigation and domestic uses.
In 2003 Singapore began pumping water reclaimed from sewage and sewers into its public water system in a bid to reduce its dependence on neighbouring Malaysia for its water supply. It has started introducing two million gallons per day of what it refers to as NEWater into reservoirs, which is slightly less than one percent of the amount of water that Singapore consumes daily. It plans to increase the amount progressively to 10 million gallons per day by 2011 - about 2.5 percent of the city-state's daily consumption. Most of the reclaimed water is being piped directly for non-potable purposes such as in wafer fabrication industries and for air conditioner cooling. Singapore plans to have a total of four water reclamation plants.
Israel, its neighbours, and many other arid or semi-arid regions, use reclaimed wastewater as a source of water for agriculture. Israel reuses 60 percent of its wastewater.
Though treated to less rigorous standards, recycled water is already being used in Australia. In 2005, Melbourne Water began pumping treated water to Werribee's market gardens. The recycled water - the first to be used on vegetable crops in Victoria - comes from sewage collected at the Western Treatment Plant, which treats waste from 1.6 million people in the central, northern and western suburbs. The class-A water is produced after several processes, which include chlorination and ultraviolet disinfection

3. Australia has a serious shortage of water
Australia is the driest inhabited continent on earth, but also the greatest consumer of water per capita. Australians use more than 260,000 gallons of fresh water per person per year, or 24,000 gigalitres. About 70 percent goes to agricultural irrigation, 9 percent to other rural uses, 9 percent to industry, and 12 percent to domestic use.
The average annual rainfall in Australia is 469 mm/yr, well below the global average of 746mm/yr. 70% of our continent is classified as desert or semi-desert, with little or no precipitation. Between 80 and 90 per cent of Australia's water falls north of the tropic of Capricorn, in the largely unsettled Top End areas of Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Queensland. More than 50 per cent runs to evaporation and the sea.
Many cities in the country are now considering recycling on a large scale. Perth is already moving to desalinate seawater, even though it would bring enormous environmental consequences. While desalination plants are not rain dependent and can be built quickly, they use large amounts of power and contribute significantly to greenhouse gases.
To conserve, restrictions operating in many areas now require that dishwashing is done in batches, plants are watered with runoff from showers, and cars are cleaned with gray water from washing machines. It is likely that such adjustments will need to happen on a massive scale if Australia's largest cities - including Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, and Adelaide - hope to continue having drinking water in just two years' time, experts have predicted.
Leigh Martin of the Total Environment Centre in Sydney has stated, 'Too long we have been living like we might live in Europe and not in accordance with dry climate conditions. Most people who balk at reusing sewage water should be educated about recycling.'

4. Australia's water problem is likely to grow worse
Population growth and periodic droughts and the probable impact of global warming on certain areas within Australia, mean that this continent is likely to face increasingly more severe problems meeting its water needs. Sydney, for example, with its infrastructure already under stress due to its rate of growth, has to accommodate and support a probable 50,000 additional people every year. This point has been stressed by Tom Gosling in an article titled 'Water shortages: it's the population stupid' and published in On-line Opinion on February 15, 2006. Tom Gosling stated, 'Today our [Australia's] population is 20.4 million and still growing at another million every four years. That's where the water problem lies. Not with lack of water, but with the huge growth in the number of people who are demanding it.'
Supporters of the use of reclaimed water argue that one obvious and important means of increasing the availability of water as demand for it grows is to recycle the water that is being used.

5. Dams are not a long-term solution to Australia's water problems
The conventional solution to the problem of a shortage of water is to build more dams. One of the consequences of dam construction is the degradation of waterways. Those rivers downstream of dams are typically deprived of the natural flows with erosion and loss of ecological diversity the consequence. This problem has grown worse over time and is likely to continue to do so. Further, many of our rivers, wetlands and bays are degraded for reasons other than the extraction of too much of their natural flow. There is also the effect of polluted surface runoff and stormwater flushed into them.
As well as causing ecological harm, dams frequently dislocated the lives of people living in the area. An instance of this is the plan to dam part of the Mary River to supply additional water for Brisbane. This will involve 500 farmers and their families being turned off some of the richest farming land in the state. 60 Minutes presenter, Ray Martin, noted, 'The experts tell us that no matter what the cost of the dam, it's going to be too wide and too shallow and there will be too much seepage. On top of that, they are gong to kick about 500 families out of this valley just to build the dam.'
Supporters of the use of reclaimed water claim it offers us a way to address many of our growing water problems rather than see them become worse in response to increased pressure and the consequences of years of misuse.

6. People can be educated to accept recycled water for a range of purposes
Supporters of the use of recycled water argue that introducing this water into public water supplies does not have to equal political suicide. It has been claimed that the 'yuck factor' can be overcome and people can be educated to accept that recycled water is safe for human consumption.
This point has made by Toowoomba's mayor Dianne Thorley, whose town has recently rejected a proposal that would have seen 25 percent of the town's water supplied from recycled water. Counsellor Thorley has stated that the project could not have succeeded without millions of dollars being spent in education over several years.
'The only way to gain acceptance of recycling technology was to build a demonstration plant for people to see working over a long period of time,' she said.
Cr Thorley's plan had been to build an advanced treatment plant and run it for several years, conducting education programs and then to hold a referendum seeking community approval for adding the water to the drinking supply.

Arguments against recycled water being used for human consumption
1. Recycled water is not safe for human consumption
Those who oppose the use of recycled water claim that it is simply not safe for human consumption. It has been claimed that the extra filtering processes may remove minerals that are present in standard drinking water. More importantly, small amounts of pharmaceutical and other chemicals may pass through the filtering process, potentially causing danger to humans.
Scientific Director of the Queensland Fertility Group, Keith Harrison, has stated, 'People who supply our water are very good at removing infectious agents from it and making it pretty safe to drink, but it's far more difficult to remove chemicals. And there are a number of chemicals, such as detergents, wetting agents, and plasticisers, which act like the female hormone oestrogen in the body. Not to mention oestrogens that come from the human urine that's going into recycled water. And it's thought that the hormone itself and these chemicals that act like the hormone could have deleterious effect on developing males in utero.' It has been claimed that the use of recycled water could lead to male infertility.
It has been claimed that most treatment plants, while they filter and chlorinate sewage to remove disease-causing microbes and excess organic matter, do nothing to clean the water of pharmaceuticals, which slip right through traditional treatment processes. Thus, it is argued, when plants release treated sewage into streams, they pump drug-tainted water directly into the aquatic habitat. It has been claimed that this will harm animal life as well as the humans who consume the water.

2. Most people will not accept the use of recycled water for drinking and domestic purposes
There appears to be a strong popular distaste for the idea of using recycled water for drinking purposes. This distaste is commonly referred to as the 'yuck factor'. So great is the belief that the use of recycled water will not be tolerated by the average Australian that some political leaders have decided that it is unnecessary even to survey their electorates to discover public opinion on the subject.
The premier of New South Wales, Morris Iemma, has claimed that there is no need to hold a referendum on drinking recycled waste water in his state as he firmly believes people are against the idea.
'We've always assumed the public are not ready for drinking recycled water and obviously public support and confidence is an important factor as well as the advice of the health experts. So we've assumed that the people are not ready for drinking recycled water and we've gotten on in our water plan with other recycling projects,' Morris Iemma told reporters in Sydney.
Toowoomba is only the most recent of a number of Australian towns that have roundly rejected the proposition that recycled water form any part of their drinking water supply.
Australia's parliamentary secretary for water, Malcolm Turnbull, has stated, 'The majority of the Toowoomba community does not support the indirect potable reuse of recycled water.'

3. Very few places in the world use recycled water for human consumption
Opponents of the use of recycled water for human consumption note that very few places in the world actually use reclaimed water for drinking and bathing. The example of Singapore is seen as in no way comparable to what had been proposed for Toowoomba.
Had Toowoomba residents agreed to having reclaimed water added to their water supply it was proposed that this water would equal 25 percent of the available supply. In Singapore reclaimed water constitutes only one percent of the city-state's drinkable water. It is intended that this water will never constitute more than 2.5 percent of the city's water supply and that these levels will not be reached until 2011.
Further, all those cities in the United States which use recycled water do not use it as part of their water supply for human drinking. Reclaimed water is distributed with a dual piping network that keeps reclaimed water pipes completely separate from potable water pipes. In the United States, reclaimed water is always distributed in lavender (light purple) pipes to distinguish it from potable water. This is the mode of water delivery in those four American cities which use recycled water - Tucson, Arizona; Clark County, Nevada; Clearwater, Florida; St. Petersburg, Florida and San Diego, California.

4. There is more pressure on rural towns than on major cities to use recycled water
It has been claimed that the pressure to use recycled water has been directed disproportionately toward rural communities. According to this line of argument, rural towns such as Toowoomba have been urged to take up recycled water because their doing so is seen as a safer political option than placing the same demands on a major state capital.
Therefore the residents of Toowoomba appear to have been resentful that they were asked to trial the use of recycled drinking water when the same demand was not being made of those living in Brisbane. Indeed there are plans in place to build a new dam to meet Brisbane's water needs.
Snow Manners, who is campaigning for a 'no' vote, has argued, 'There is no community on this planet that deliberately sources [as much of] its drinking water from a sewage treatment plant. Therefore it's a new technology, it's an experiment, and Toowoomba is the guinea pig.'

5. Water can be conserved and so reduce the need for recycled water for human consumption
It been argued that a range of other options exist which can remove the need for Australian cities and communities to use recycled water.
In New South Wales, the Goulburn Mulwaree Council has seen the level in its main water source, the Pejar Dam, fall below 9 per cent of its capacity. The council's director of engineering services, Phil Hansen, has indicated that the council is embarking on its own community consultation.
Mr Hansen has stated, 'The job of this water management planning process is to identify all options. They could be a whole range of things, they could be surface water options, they could be ground water options, they could be ... conservation options with the water that we currently have.'
It has been claimed that the nature of Australia's supposed water shortage has been exaggerated and that with more efficient water usage practices in place, Australia could avoid the need to use recycled water.
Although Australia is the driest continent in terms of rainfall per square kilometre, Australia's small population and fertile coastline mean that the average resident has access to three times as much fresh water as the average Dutch citizen and 170 times as much as the average Jordanian. If the country had the same population as the US, which covers a roughly similar area of land, Australia would be in trouble. But, in fact, it has the same population as Texas and considerably more water.
According to this line of argument wasteful irrigation practices lie at the heart of Australia's supposed water shortage problem. Irrigation accounts for 70 percent of Australia's water use. Much of this water is distributed in wasteful open cannels, leaving it prone to loss through evaporation. More effective irrigation practices are seen as a major means of reducing the need for the use of recycled water.
Rice on its own uses 2,000 gigalitres of the Murray each year, and Australia's 800 cotton growers, who are also mainly based around the Murray, use 2,900 gigalitres of water each year. That last figure is equivalent to 18 times the amount of water used by the United Kingdom's entire irrigated agriculture industry.

6. Using recycled water for human consumption will have a negative effect on tourism
Many of those campaigning against the use of recycled water in Toowoomba for human consumption have been concerned that such a development would damage tourism in the city.
Rosemary Morley, the co-ordinator of the 'no vote' group, Citizens Against Drinking Sewage (CADS), said Toowoomba residents did not want to become 'lab rats for the rest of Australia'. She claimed that many of the town's residents feared its reputation would be damaged if the plan had been approved.
Ms Morley has stated, 'They call us "Poowoomba". I won't go into some of the other crudities but I think that people would not want to visit here.'

Further implications
It would appear that some of the more extreme claims made about the deleterious effects of recycled water used for human consumption are at best ill-informed exaggerations and at worst part of a scare campaign.
Bacterial levels in such water are very low, generally far lower than water conventionally used for drinking purposes. What appears more problematic is the chemical contamination of the water, derived primarily from the various pharmaceutical products that the original users of the water will have consumed. Current filtration processes are unable to remove these chemicals and it appears too early to say what the long-term effects of ingesting them may be. Certainly, Singapore does not supply a useful test case as it has been augmenting its potable water with recycled water for only a very short time and in far lesser concentrations (one percent) than were proposed for Toowoomba (25 percent).
However, the question needs to be asked as to whether there are not better and more effective ways of managing Australia's water problems. Excessive consumption is frequently presented as though it were predominantly a suburban issue and restrictions are put is place to limit the water use of domestic consumers. What is not often acknowledged is that domestic use accounts for only nine percent of Australia's annual water consumption.
Some 70 percent of the water Australia consumes annually is used in irrigation. While much of this may be necessary and unavoidable there are those who have questioned the effectiveness of the manner in which this water is often distributed, for example, in open channels, where much is lost to evaporation.
Also at issue are some of the crops Australia choses to grow. Rice, cotton and sugar are all extremely water hungry crops that seem incompatible with desirable agricultural practice in a country where there are significant water issues.
Writing in The Guardian on November 8, 2004, David Fickling noted, 'dotted along the Murray River valley, the continent's only major river, there are dozens of farms that collectively use almost as much water growing rice as Australia's 20 million people use for all household purposes.'
Fickling went on 'rice on its own uses 2,000 gigalitres of the Murray each year, and Australia's 800 cotton growers, who are also mainly based around the Murray, use 2,900 gigalitres of water each year. That last figure is equivalent to 18 times the amount of water used by the UK's entire irrigated agriculture industry.'
Fickling concluded, 'Some farming is ... necessary to support the population, nutritionally and economically, but a dry continent, such as Australia, should be concentrating on cereal crops, fruit and vegetables and livestock rather than cotton, rice, and sugar, which together account for more than one-third of the country's agricultural water usage.'
There may obviously come a time when some regions of Australia have to place far greater reliance on recycled water. However, it would appear that part of the solution to the nation's water problems is a rigorous re-examination of the manner in which Australia currently uses water, especially for agricultural purposes.
From a political point of view, none of these 'solutions' is going to appear attractive. Clearly metropolitan voters are likely to punish governments that require them drink recycled water, while rural voters, in areas where agricultural industries are either cut-back or dismantled because they are too expensive of water, can be expected to deliver an electoral caning to the government (either state or federal) that they hold responsible.

Newspaper items used in the compilation of this issue outline (This is a preliminary list)
The Age
AGE, July 31, page 5, news item by Frew and Ker, `The effluent society voted down'.
AGE, August 7, page 11, comment (on Toowoomba) by Peter Mares, Brian Costar, `A plethora of plebiscites adds up to a democratic deficit'.
AGE, August 5, Insight section, page 8, editorial, `We're still a nation of wallies with water'.
AGE, August 5, page 9, news item by R Baker, `Millions of litres of drinking water lost to leaks' (with related item, `Stormwater or treated effluent: take your pick').

The Australian
AUST, July 25, page 2, news item by T Koch, `Gorbachev tick for recycled sewage'.
AUST, July 21, page 6, news item (ref to Toowoomba and sewage recycling) by S Mitchell, `Recycle or you're on your own: MP'.
AUST, August 2, page 5, news item by T Koch, `"Support" for water recycling'.
AUST, July 31, page 15, letters under general heading, `Beattie won't allow Toowoomba poll to be the final word'.
AUST, July 31, page 6, news item by Mitchell and Koch, `No camp gears up for next water war'.
AUST, July 31, page 6, comment (on Toowoomba supply) by A Wahlquist, `Fish make love in it: reuse the least worry'.
AUST, July 29, Australian Magazine insert, page 22, analysis (photos - ref in part to recycling) by R Eccleston, `Aqua blue'.
AUST, July 29, page 25, analysis (with boxed information on dams, cities, towns etc) by Asa Wahlquist, Bernard Salt, `Make every drop count / Dammed if we don't take care of our liquid assets'.
AUST, July 29, page 18, editorial, `Damming the nation'.
AUST, July 29, page 6, news item (photo of Toowoomba mayor Di Thorley) by A Fraser, `Contest sinks to gutter'.
AUST, July 29, page 6, news item by S Mitchell, `If one town won't take plunge, another might'.
AUST, July 29, page 6, news item by Crowell and McDonald, `Sewage vote a recycled "precedent"'.
AUST, July 28, page 4, news item (photo) by A Fraser, `Threat on sewage vote'.
AUST, August 7, page 8, analysis (photos, diagram of Goulburn recycling proposal) by Mitchell and Wahlquist, `Call for last drinks'.

The Herald-Sun
H/SUN, August 3, page 21, comment by Neil Mitchell, `Make mine water'.
H/SUN, July 31, page 18, editorial, `Sense gets full flush'.
H/SUN, July 31, page 9, news item, `Reused water's future murky'.
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