From Muck into Yuk - Part 2

From the ABC

Toowoomba vote a blow for recycling

The Mayor of Toowoomba, Di Thorley, says the case for water recycling in Australia has been dealt a severe blow as a result of yesterday's poll in the south-east Queensland city.

Around 60 per cent of residents have voted 'no' to a plan to draw 25 per cent of the city's water from recycled effluent.

Pete's Points
Readers will recall my commentary on a proposal from South Australia recently to feed fish the recycled wasted from piggeries and then of course to sell the farmed fish for human consumption.

This article I suspect is in a similar vein. Only in this case instead of the waste being treated, fed to another organism which then is sold for us to eat, the Toowoomba Council obviously wanted to cut out the middle man (so to speak)

No wonder that some people have been renaming this town (temporarily I am sure), to "Poowoomba".

I have no problem with treating effluent and then pumping the results back onto our gardens or playing fields, or back into the toilet systems so that there is real recycling, but I am afraid that I do have problems with the need to recycle our own waste products into our drinking water.

I know that there are those who call this planet 'spaceship Earth' and I am sure that the technology that enables Astronauts to make do with their own bodily fluids is simply wonderful. However I am not greatly taken by suggestions that we do here what the Astronauts are forced to do by circumstances.

When we live in a non closed environment some other solutions may be more, er. . dare I say 'palatable'.

We are an island for goodness sake, we are surrounded by water, oceans of water!

I know, Samuel Taylor Coleridge has often been quoted from the Ancient Mariner with his "Water water everywhere and not a drop to drink!"

Yes the oceans are full of salt, but then again so is our groundwater, a fact that has become painfully obvious as and when the amount of irrigation that we use a little further south creates some issues that are being faced elsewhere.

We are blessed with massive amounts of currently unused sunshine over vast tracks of land in our interior for most of the year and thus we have a natural power source in our deserts and semi desert areas.

Why not make an investment in the future and combine these ingredients to our current and future advantage?

Mr Howard certainly had it right when he called Australia a 'super power' in energy terms. It is NOT however our possession of at least 1/3 rd of the known reserves of uranium that he ought to focus on, but the sun and the water that we do have in abundance.

Desalination plants have been known about and used for some time everywhere they are needed.

Yes they are resource intensive, and hence costly, but not necessarily if we use solar energy as one of the mainstays of our future power source.