Sydney Will Recycle More Water Than it Uses

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Sydney Will Recycle More Water Than it Uses

The developers have built an onsite treatment plant in an effort to conserve, recycle and export water. 

The concept of being truly net positive water is contentious, but Veolia’s regional energy manager and project manager, Matthew Lee, explains it as “exporting more treated water from a site than the amount of potable water taken in”.

Barangaroo South’s basement cooling plant operationsLee is working to make Lendlease’s Barangaroo South development in Sydney (consisting of three main commercial towers, three 10-storey residential buildings, and several multi-use buildings) net positive water.

This is part of the property group’s ambitions to make the project the country’s first large-scale carbon-neutral community. The project is also committed to the C40 Cities-Clinton Climate Initiative’s Climate Positive Development Program.

In the case of Barangaroo, all water used and produced on the site will be recycled; the usual greywater and blackwater will be captured from toilets, showers, laundries, waste rooms and restaurants, while additional water will be pulled from rainwater harvesting, cooling tower backwash, and – during times of low load (i.e. night time) – from water mined from Sydney Water’s sewer main.

Lendlease expects that up to 500,000 litres of potable water a day will be used at Barangaroo South once it is completed, with the recycling plant producing up to 1m litres of recycled water a day. 

The water treatment plant is expected to be operational in October 2016.

However, although the plant will begin recycling and producing recycled water for use on site immediately, it cannot become net positive water until customers commit to taking on the treated water too.

If no one signs up to use the recycled water, the development will not be net positive water but “net positive water ready” – as is the case with several other developments in Australia, such as Flow System’s water recycling plant in Sydney’s Central Park. The precinct will continue to use the recycled water on site.

But Lee believes this is unlikely. He says this type of net positive water project is “very transferable and scalable”, but concedes there are several barriers that may deter less sustainably-minded businesses from taking on such a scheme.

Source: The Guardian

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