Media Release

20 Aug 2008

Rosehill-Camellia recycled water agreements signed

The NSW Government’s plans to provide billions of litres of recycled water for industry in Western Sydney have reached another milestone with the signing of four major agreements.

Contracts have now been signed for the Rosehill–Camellia Recycled Water Scheme.

Sydney Water has signed the project agreement for building and operating the $100 million plant and distribution network with AquaNet Sydney Pty Ltd and Veolia Water and construction will start early next year.

In addition, major industrial customers, Visy Paper and Marubeni Australia Power Services along with Sydney Turf Club – Rosehill Gardens, have signed agreements to receive recycled water from the scheme.

Agreements are expected to be signed shortly with Basell Australia, Boral, James Hardie and Shell.

The new recycled water plant, next to the Fairfield sewage treatment plant, will initially deliver 4.3 billion litres of recycled water a year via the distribution network. The scheme has been designed to be expanded to treat a further 3 billion litres a year.

The Rosehill-Camellia scheme is an important project which will reduce the demand placed on drinking water supplies by industrial and irrigation users. Initially just less than 1 per cent of Sydney’s drinking water will be saved and this saving will increase as the scheme expands.

Recycled water is expected to be available in three years.

This is the way of the future: recycled water replacing drinking water demand from major industrial and irrigation users.

The recycled water plant and pipeline system will be built owned and operated by AquaNet Sydney and Veolia Water Australia.

AquaNet and Veolia Water will extract secondary treated effluent from the Liverpool to Ashfield Pipeline and treat it by reverse osmosis and ultrafiltration at their new recycled water plant to a high quality suitable for irrigation, use in cooling towers and as boiler feed.

Sydney Water will initially purchase 4.3 billion litres of the recycled water a year from AquaNet and on-sell the recycled water to the racetrack and industrial users.

We expect AquaNet and Veolia Water will be among the first private companies to apply for a licence under the new Water Industry Competition Act (WICA) to operate the recycled water system and provide Sydney Water with recycled water.

The WICA establishes a clear access regime for the water industry in much the same way as the telecommunications, energy and transport industries over recent years.

This framework will provide even more opportunities for the private sector to become involved in the NSW water industry.

Sydney currently recycles around 25 billion litres of water each year; by 2015 Sydney will recycle 70 billion litres a year.

Learn more about recycling and reuse.

 

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