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Recycling Water For Industry
Industrial recycling opportunities
Providing recycled water for use by industry is an excellent way of saving drinking water. Sydney Water is working to maximise the amount of recycled water that can be used for industrial purposes.
Of all the water used in Sydney, residential and commercial properties use around 82 per cent and other types of properties, (including primary producers and government), use 6 per cent. Of the total, just 12 per cent is used by industry.
BlueScope Steel
Sydney Water operates one of the biggest water recycling schemes in Australia, for industrial use by BlueScope Steel in Port Kembla.
About 20 million litres of high quality recycled water per day is being delivered to BlueScope Steel from a new recycled water plant at Sydney Water's Wollongong Sewage Treatment Plant.
This replaces 7.3 billion litres of drinking water per year previously drawn from the local Avon Dam, a 57 per cent reduction of drinking water consumption by Sydney Water's largest customer.
The water recycling plant at Wollongong uses micro-filtration and reverse osmosis membrane processes to produce high quality recycled water, suitable for a range of industrial purposes such as cooling systems.
This project alone reduced the use of drinking water across the total Illawarra region by 17 per cent. There is potential to expand to other local industries in the future.
BlueScope Steel’s use of recycled water is part of the Illawarra Wastewater Strategy.
Wollongong Stage 2 Recycled Water Scheme
The Wollongong Stage Two scheme will supply highly treated, disinfected recycled water via new pipelines to the Port Kembla Coal Terminal, Wollongong Golf Club and nearby Wollongong Council Parks.
Recycled water will be used for irrigation at Wollongong Council's JJ Kelly Park, Greenhouse Park and Vikings Rugby Field and to irrigate the Wollongong Golf Course. The coal terminal will mainly use recycled water for dust suppression.
The Wollongong Stage Two Recycled Water Scheme will replace approximately 1.4 million litres a day of drinking water.
The project is now in the final stages of construction, with recycled water scheduled to become available to the coal terminal, golf club and council by the end of 2008.
Sydney Water Onsite Reuse
Sydney Water's sewage treatment plants treat and use nearly 15 billion litres of recycled water per year for their treatment processes.
Sydney Water's Operating Licence requires that by 30 June 2009, Sydney Water must ensure that all sewage treatment plants, (other than Malabar, North Head and Bondi, and storm flow sewage treatment plants at Fairfield, Bellambi and Port Kembla), use at least 85 per cent recycled water for treatment processes.
All relevant plants are already meeting the target, with around 96 per cent recycled water used across all plants - an increase from 50 per cent from five years ago.
More than 41 million litres of recycled water are used in Sydney Water sewage treatment processes each day.
North Head Sewage Treatment Plant
A $3.5 million recycled water facility began operation at North Head Sewage Treatment Plant in 2005. It currently produces up to 1.5 million litres of recycled water a day, saving about 550 million litres of drinking water per year.
This is part of a $150 million program of works at North Head Sewage Treatment Plant, designed to improve the plant's performance and reliability.