NWC - households consume 11% of the nation's water ...
... while agriculture consumes 65%.
Much is made of the need for households to cut back on water consumption and to consider drinking recycled water. Households are indeed responding to the challenge to cut consumption.
However, it is worth considering who consumes the most water in Australia and whether households are being asked, perhaps unfairly, to shoulder a disproportionate burden in this water crisis.
The approximate contributions to water consumption in Australia from different sectors in 2004-5 were:
- Agriculture 65%
- Household 11%
- Water supply (including sewerage and drainage) 11%
- Manufacturing industry 3%
- Mining 2%
- Electricity and Gas Supply Industry 1% (excl in-stream use by hydroelectricity).
Source - National Water Commission press release - ABS Water Account Australia 2004-5.
Why is it that the consumers of 11% of the nation's water (or at least those in SEQ) are being asked to drink recycled water when the 'consumers' of 65% are not the focus of any campaign to force them to adopt greater use of recycled water in their activities?
Just a thought ...
posted by Concerned Ratepayer at 7:08 AM
2 Comments:
Hello,
Since you have asked this (perfectly reasonable) question, I would like to provide a constructive answer.
It is certainly true that most water use in Australia is consumed by agriculture. However, it is important to consider the finer detail of these statistics. One of the major problems that we (as a society) are trying to address is the unsustainable burden on the drinking-water supplies of our major cities. The fact is that very little of this water from our cities dams (Wivenhoe, Warragamba, etc.) is used by agriculture. The vast majority is used by households with a smaller portion used by industry and even smaller again by agriculture.
This week, Malcolm Turnbull released a report prepared by the consultants Marsden Jacobs:
Securing Australia’s Urban Water Supplies
Figure 5 on page 6 (page 22 of the PDF document) illustrates this point reasonably well. It clearly shows that the majority of water consumption in the state capitals is used by households (perhaps with the exception of Darwin). Much of the agriculture that you refer to is on the western side of the great dividing range and not easily accessible to where most of our treated effluents are produced (on the coast, east of the great dividing range).
I would agree that large industrial users of water should be among the first places that we look to replace the use of our drinking water supplies with recycled water. And I think most of our cities are making serious efforts to do so (witness Brisbane airport, Luggage Point, Bluescope Steel (Wollongong), Kwinana (WA), etc.). Some of these are quite considerable industrial reuse projects. However, providing recycled water to all of our (smaller) industrial users by dedicated reticulation systems is really not feasible. Supplying huge numbers of individual agricultural users across the width of Australia is clearly (I would think) totally unrealistic and would require enormous amounts of energy.
The only way to further significantly relieve water shortages from our major cities dams is to target household use...either by demand management or source supplementation. Unless there are some large cotton farms in Brisbane or Sydney, sending recycled water to agriculture will not help these cities save any significant volume.
I hope you will consider this to be a serious attempt to provide a constructive answer to your question. I’d be happy to discuss it further if you think I have overlooked something.
11:35 PM, November 29, 2006
Points taken. Provided some discussion which is always good.
Far too much of the debate in SEQ has focused on household consumption of recycled water without a similar focus on agriculture (with the exception of the 'Vision 2000" people) and looking at other sources for household use. Putting recycled water into dams seems to be the government's 'quick and lazy approach' to water infrastructure.
Look at Toowoomba - to the near west and south is agriculture in abundance. We pour near drinking quality water on crops just outside Toowoomba yet Toowoomba residents were asked to drink recycled water. There was no discussion at the time of the Toowoomba debate (round 1) of the benefits of making agriculture 'drink' it instead or as well. There may not be large cotton farms in Brisbane, but there are significant farms just outside Toowoomba. There are also significant farming areas between Toowoomba and Brisbane (some to finally have recycled water pumped to them - after much procrastinating by the Beattie government). You can understand how wary some people in Toowoomba were of Mayor Thorley's grand scheme when you saw some of the agriculture-related people pushing for Toowoomba residents to drink recycled water.
MP Turnbull also talks about water trading between cities and rural communities. One of the Toowoomba options was and still is exactly that - a water swap with irrigators for recycled water (or a straight out purchase of the water). But Toowoomba City Council continues to ignore this as an option. Such is their blinkered approach to water source options. On the issue of costings, it remains a fact that the Water Futures recycled water project was never independently costed throughout the Toowoomba water debate (round 1). The costings prepared on the alternatives by Beattie's advisers were somewhat suspect.
A couple of other points.
Toowoomba City Council, like many councils, banned water tanks. In hindsight, that seems like a very silly decision. How much garden and other outside use of water by households could be sourced from tank water, relieving some of the burden on water supplies?
Why is it too hard for Toowoomba and (most of) Brisbane to require new subdivisions to use dual pipe water but it's possible in Warwick, Jondaryan shire and parts of South East Melbourne (and others)? And why does the State government and Brisbane City Council still ignore requests by large industrial users of water in Brisbane for recycled water? Is it because it's easier just to pump it into dams - problem solved?
And the comment in the recent WSAA position paper is a classic. Paraphrasing - people may need to drink recycled water but food industries may resist using it because they have to export their products and overseas people don't follow the same practices. If only that report had surfaced around September last year.
9:56 AM, November 30, 2006
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