The Scare Campaign Against Recycled Sewage Water Continues

The West Australian newspaper dominates the state's media. It can make or break an issue or a person, regardless of the accuracy or validity of the criticism or cause which it has chosen to champion. On occasion, the paper appears to chose its subjects with sales targets in mind, rather than reasonable justification for its particular slant.

In The West recently, Yasmine Phillips wrote an article warning that recycled water could contain chemicals that posed a risk to human health. It wasn't a big article but, located in a prominent position on page 3 (a right hand page), many people would have seen it. Its provocative headline - Experts warn on recycled water - would then have encouraged most people to read it. Sadly, as shown below, the experts that Ms Phillips was quoting appear to have made a fundamentally incorrect assumption about the way that recycled water would be treated in Western Australia prior to human consumption. My email to Yasmine - see below - received the following unhelpful response:

Hello Bernie,

I appreciate your comments regarding my article.Unfortunately due to space constraints, my article was cut during the editing process.Thank you very much for your explanation.

Kind regards,

Yasmine Phillips

Journalist

Is this a case of The West deliberately scaremongering, knowing that recycled sewage water is one of the highest priority potential sources of future drinking water supplies for Perth? I guess it's a case of "watch this space .... in The West"!

Dear Yasmine,

I read your article in Thursday's West expressing concerns about some of the contaminants in recycled water. Can I ask that you investigate their concerns further because I believe they and you have made an incorrect assumption about what is meant by recycled water.

In fact, there are two general types of recycled water. The first is water that leaves a sewerage treatment plant after what one would consider 'normal' treatment - as applies here in WA - and then is put back into the hydrological cycle, i.e. is discharged to a river or ocean. In this situation, the presence of undesirable and potentially harmful contaminants - in particular endocrine disruptors which your article describes as pharmaceutical products - can be significant and of genuine concern to human health.

However, the second type of recycled water is where water from a sewerage treatment plant is subjected to reserve osmosis (RO) filtration, the same process that is used in WA's seawater desalination plant. In this situation, the filtration plus several other treatments that are applied to the water before it is allowed to be drunk removes all of the contaminants that might be present in the non-RO treated water.

To understand why I am so confident of this statement, can I ask that you consider what happens to water when it is subjected to RO. Under high pressure, the water is squeezed through such a fine filter that the molecules of sodium and chlorine - the common salt that makes seawater salty - cannot pass through the pores. Only the much smaller water molecules can pass through. When you use RO on sewerage water, all the large molecules including the

endocrine disruptors (which are dozens to hundreds of times larger than a water molecule) are left behind with the salt; only water molecules are able to pass through the filter pores.

The Singapore government and the Orange County Water Board in southern California both use RO and between them they provide recycled water to several million people. All other recycled water in the USA and UK is not subjected to RO treatment.

My understanding is that the Water Corporation's proposal to use Perth's sewerage water for drinking purposes includes RO treatment. On this basis, the concerns by your quoted experts are almost totally overcome.

Regards

Bernie Masters

RENEWABLE ENERGY - the article that Crikey chose not to publish.

History repeats itself when we don't learn the lessons of the past. Yes, we have some renewable energy technologies that can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions right now but let's take a reality check.

First, there is nothing that the world can do today that will make any difference to the changes of climate that will occur over the next decade or two. We've been putting out too much CO2 and methane for too many years to be able to make an instant difference. So let's focus on the long term solutions and on what we can do to minimise the impacts of the climate change that will occur no matter what.

Second, some existing technologies are simply not economic to implement. Why waste billions of dollars on high cost or problematic solutions when promising lines of research of new technologies (new PV strips as seen recently on the ABC's Catalyst program) and carbon sequestration (not just clean coal) suggest better and more workable solutions are just a few years away?

Third, the most important and cheapest action that can be taken right now is not the use of renewable energy or clean coal but being more efficient with the energy that we're already producing. It's not an emotionally attractive solutions like some others but it's the one that can be implemented immediately and cheaply. Savings in energy usage of 30% or more are readily available in almost every energy-using situation around the globe at costs that provide a pay-back period of only a few years. Solar hot water systems are one of the best examples, with pay-back periods of 5 to 7 years and an 80% or more reduction in energy required to heat most domestic and commercial situations.

Yes, we have to install more renewable energy facilities into Australia as suggested by Crikey's correspondent Sophie Black (March 13, 2007). But she wants our taxpayer dollars to be provided in large amounts to do this - Mandatory Renewable Energy Targets or MRETs for example - yet she criticises the federal government for wanting to use public funds to make coal more environmentally friendly.

As for BP who claim to be greener than green these days and leading the charge to more renewable energy production, I'll believe their 'holier than thou' statements when they stop selling the product that is the primary cause of our global warming problems: liquid fossil fuels.

The bottom line is that ALL governments must consider ALL options carefully, assist in the funding of ALL technologies that offer promise - picking winners is poor public policy - and inform the public what ALL the options are. At present, no political party or lobby group has put forward a credible and comprehensive package which addresses all the issues, including the need to mitigate the next 20 or more years of climate changes which are unavoidable.