Arris Blog

Arris Pty Ltd (www.arris.com.au) has been successful in obtaining a consultancy with the USA WateReuse Research Foundation to contribute to a world-wide study on the state of reuse of urban recycled water in agriculture.  The team leader is Dr Bahman Sheikh of San Francisco, whilst Ted Gardner and Jim Kelly of Arris will be delivering on the Australian and New Zealand end of things.

There are approximately seven tasks on which we are required to deliver, but two most immediate tasks are a Literature Review of existing agricultural reuse in Australia and New Zealand, followed by compilation of a geo data base of known agricultural reuse, and the location of high potential agricultural reuse areas, based in part on their distance from potential recycled water sources, ie sewage treatment plants.

We would be most appreciative if readers of this website would contact us (Lisa Smith +61 8 8313 6706 or lsmith@arris.com.au) with their ideas of the drivers and impediments for agricultural schemes reusing reclaimed water (from the sewage treatment plants) over the last 15 years or so, the importance of government subsidy programs in getting schemes off the ground, and good examples of successful schemes that illustrate the application of these drivers.  Of course, schemes that failed to launch because of impediments are also of interest to us.

On-line survey

You may be interested in participating in our online survey we are conducting.

We are aware there are are a lot of small rural towns in Australia (say less than 5000 people) that have sewage effluent reuse schemes that operate under the radar of the national water industry collegiate.  We would be most appreciative if you would send us examples of these small reuse schemes and better still, an overall list of these schemes for each State.

The WateReuse Foundation report (USA) will be released in June 2017 and will be in the public domain. Nonetheless ARRIS will make sure that  survey respondents are sent a copy of the final report. ARRIS also plans to publish the overall survey results in an OZWATER conference, as well as the AWA journal, eWater. These publications will include the geo referencing component of the project, but will not report details of specific schemes without the permission of the utility.

We thank you for your assistance.
Kind Regards… Ted Gardner and Jim Kelly