It has been a hotly contested idea for almost a decade and now it’s about to become a reality.
With Australia being a drought-prone country there have been a lot of ideas tossed around on how we can maintain the water levels needed for Australians to survive. There have been desalination plants built, and now the first sewerage treatment plant is ready to pump 14 billion litres of treated wastewater into the Western Australian drinking water by the end of the year.
Western Australia is on the forefront of this technology after states like Queensland and New South Wales continually reject the idea. Things are different in Perth where 79 percent of the residents were in support of the concept. A concept that has no become a reality.
The Water Minister for WA, Mia Davies, announced that the 14 billion litres are just a start that they are already planning to double the volume to 28 billion litres next year. These plans are to stay on the government’s target of having 20-percent of WA’s drinking water come from what the government calls the “Groundwater Replenishment Scheme” by 2060.
Does this mean that the rest of Australia will follow suit? Not necessarily. Other states will be keeping an eye on what happens in Western Australia. However, there is one University of New South Wales expert that will have to take back their words they told Fairfax Media in 2013 “I can’t imagine a direct potable reuse scheme in Australia in anything less than a decade, perhaps 20 years, perhaps 30 years”.
Western Australian will have reached their goal by the time that expert thought there would be a working model. Here is a video of a very similar plant in California.