Hydrologists such as professors Peter Cullen, Richard Kingsford and Derek Eamus, speaking at public forums in NSW earlier this year, warned that Australians are extracting water from stressed rivers and artesian systems faster than it is being replenished.
They also report that NSW does not capture statistics about water usage in an acceptably scientific way. While some groundwater reserves have taken millions of years to accumulate, NSW does not even know in which direction Sydney's groundwater system flows.
Australia's metropolitan sewerage systems waste vast reserves of potable mountain water by flushing it out to sea. While our current approach is unsustainable, proposals to move agriculture further north, without analysing why our small population wastes such enormous quantities of pure water, lack credibility.
Discussions about sewerage treatment proposals in Australia have generally been emotional rather than scientific, with different experts submitting contradictory evidence to various enquiries. Even recently, an Environmental Impact Study (EIS) was not required for the new Liverpool-to-Ashfield sewerage pipe, which is scheduled for completion by the end of this year.
Chemicals that are added to effluent make the total process ever more expensive in terms of water, energy and environmental pollution as fuel and food prices soar. The potentially enormous environmental damage that poorly designed sewerage systems cause, both to the land from where the water is sourced and to the sea where toxic effluent is eventually deposited, means that an EIS should be mandatory for all new sewerage projects.
W. Hodding Carter, in his 2007 book Flushed, reports that new technology allows some sewerage systems in India to operate efficiently while consuming virtually no water. The importance of minimising the amount of potable water used for sewerage is obvious when the historic effects of regional and continental drying are considered.
Even in the US, stressed cities such as Los Angeles are redefining water efficiency standards for buildings and are considering using night soil (human excrement used as fertiliser) for some agricultural purposes. The latter approach is especially important when experts consider the humanitarian impact of current world food shortages and the increasing scarcity of traditional fertilisers.
Janice Gray, a lecturer at the University of New South Wales, was quoted by AAP on May 29 as saying that sewerage may be the new gold. She said that "Instead of giving it away to public utilities, as we do at the moment, perhaps we will start putting it in our own home-based or neighbourhood-based recycling centres".
In its natural, untreated state, effluent contains reusable water and an abundance of nutrients that can be used in multiple ways. One challenge facing Australia in 2008 is to find innovative ways to turn this expensive liability into a valuable asset.
Recycled effluent could be used in forestry or in helping to regenerate land that has suffered extensive environmental damage. The transportation costs are minimal compared to the enormous cost of importing increasingly scarce products from overseas.
Australians may be induced to overcome an acquired aversion to eating nutritious food that has been grown with a cocktail of fertilisers that includes some night soil. Imported food that has been grown using night soil is currently consumed in large quantities and tourists heap praise on the food and fish they eat when they travel abroad.
Peter Andrews' 2006 book Back from the Brink says that many chemical fertilisers energise crops to grow more quickly without replacing the essential nutrients that they extract from the soil. To restore the fertility of agriculture's best farming lands, these nutrients need to be replenished. Finding innovative and affordable ways to restore essential nutrients to the soil can surely be found once diligent scientific research is undertaken. The main focus of Andrews' book is to describe the sustainable water management system Australia had when Aboriginals managed the land.
The more essential challenge is to drastically reduce the amount of pure mountain water that Australians unsustainably flush down the toilet. The earlier this challenge is met, the less damage continental drying and soil emaciation will do to Australia's environment and economy.
Despite the fact that the states in Australia have ultimate responsibility for water management and sewerage disposal, all levels of government share some of this responsibility. Since governments find sewerage a topic they can easily gloss over, it is essential that scientists and informed citizens stimulate intelligent and scientific debate on the best way to harvest the valuable products that human waste contains.
Local councils could inform their rate-payers about advances that are being made in cities such as Los Angeles and promote new technology as it becomes available. State and federal governments urgently need to start planning a complete redesign of an aging sewerage system that consumes far too many resources.
Australia's sewerage system wastes pure water and nutrients and pollutes important aquatic areas where fish traditionally breed. Penrith Council is so concerned about the inability of Sydney's current system to meet projected population increases that it made two sewerage-oriented submissions to the Australia 2020 Summit. Many councils are also very concerned about their lack of progress in ensuring sewerage sustainability and some refuse to even discuss this topic with local rate payers.
The Australian government's recent Water Efficiency Labelling and Standards Scheme defines a sequence of steps that will gradually reduce the amount of water that each Australian toilet-flush will use by the year 2050. The rate at which the amount of water-per-flush is being reduced is much too slow to be sustainable and other countries are doing far better.
The projected cost of redesigning Australia's entire sewerage system could run into billions of dollars. Despite this, the environmental and agricultural benefits are potentially far greater. Additionally it is quite likely that proposals for new and expensive desalination plants could be dropped.
Wasting potable water is an important human rights issue. Culpably wasting such massive amounts of pure water that the poor of the world depend on for their survival may represent one of the more significant violations of human rights caused by over-consumption on the planet.
A complete redesign of Australia's water and sewerage management systems may represent the greatest technical and human rights challenge that the nation faces as activists and scientists struggle to engineer a sustainable and just future that succeeding generations will enjoy.
[David Allen can be contacted at <davenn49@hotmail.com>.]