Salisbury leads in water reuse

One of Adelaide's northern suburbs is benefitting from very progressive water planning. Over much of the city, the lack of rain has dried out much of the vegetation but is not impacting on the Salisbury council area, where more than 25 years of planning and development have paid off.

Mayor Tony Zappia said stormwater collected through wetlands systems has been stored in underground aquifers, ready for use across the council area.

"We have substantial amounts of water in reserve underground and we have been using that water to irrigate many of our reserves and sports grounds," Mr Zappia said.

"Even with the water restrictions, we'll be able to continue to irrigate these reserves and maintain them, whereas had we been reliant on mains water, we would not be able to."

The council has the capacity to collect, clean and store seven billion litres a year through wetlands at Greenfields, Pooraka, Para Hills and Burton.

Annual water use has never exceeded what has been collected and it is hoped there is enough to see out the drought period.

In the next four years there are plans to extend the network throughout Salisbury.

We investigated doing this on a small scale at the kids school. While it was technically possible, the benefits were not there, given the large capital expense and the limited run off from the school. We did however reestablish a small wetland area to be fed from stormwater runoff. We got a grant to put in a tank and are just waiting for some rain. However the project on Salisbury's scale is a great model for other Australian Communities. Some of the wetlands have fantastic native vegetation and wildlife.

Salisbury is one of a number of Adelaide's northern suburbs that are part of the Australian Solar City Project, where individual houses will be encouraged to install renewables and energy conservation gizmos.

These sorts of projects can make a big difference, especially in the middle of the big dry that we have in Australia at the moment.

Update: These must have been the kinds of projects the Margaret Beckett was talking about and that Flute was not aware of when he elegantly savaged the current incompetent reactie fools running the country at the moment.

Beckett said politely.

And of course Australia has more cause than many other countries in the world to understand the force of these arguments, because you already are a country that can teach the rest of us a great deal in terms of management of water resources, for example, and because actually you need to do so.

To which Flute responded

"That’s why the Murray Darling is buggered, recycled water is synonymous with wee wee, and no one has done a thing about the relentless, predictable and preventable decline in dam levels over the last five years.

We could teach the UK as much about water management as they could teach us about dentistry."

Well apparently we are not all bad when it comes to water management programmes. More of this kind of forward thinking needed.