 Well, welcome everybody to another of our hydroterror webinar series. We've had quite a lot of webinars now and continuing to grow in popularity. So thanks very much for attending today. Today, the topic is wastewater management, monitoring and reporting insights. And we're very fortunate to have Matt Shanahan, who's a principal with RMCG, who are a consultancy that do a huge amount of work in this area and who we've collaborated with extensively over the years on various projects in this area. Matt's involved quite a bit with the new regulations that are coming out and he's going to refer to that as well in his presentation as well as the impact of the new EPA Act. We're also going to talk a bit about some case studies. So there's a picture of Matt. Matt's background. He's based in Bendigo and he is a principal in this area. He's got over 20 years experience working predominantly in the area of recycled water, but also particularly around sort of agricultural applications of that and also dealing with organics such as biosolids. As I mentioned, we work extensively together, Hydrotera and ourselves, where we do the sort of field data collection and monitoring systems side of things and they do the consultancy. Just before we get started, we love having questions and certainly we've had a lot of questions being asked over the last few webinars, which is fantastic. If you want to raise a question, you use the Q&A button at the top of your screen and you type that in and at the end of this webinar, I will read out those questions and Matt and myself will endeavour to answer them. When we run out of time, we will send you emails responding to your question if we don't get time to get to it today. Why is Hydrotera doing these webinars? Well, we like to generate awareness and share knowledge, particularly in the areas of monitoring methodologies and technologies, but also really about how they can be applied to improve operational efficiency and environmental outcomes. We see an important role of a business like Hydrotera to train the broader market in technologies that are emerging and we think it's really important that we also gain an understanding of industry needs from these and that's where Q&A is so important. So today, you've got myself, Managing Director of Hydrotera, who's going to present towards the end of this presentation and introduce Matt. Matt's going to tell us a bit about what wastewater is, what methods there are by which wastewater can be used and key considerations for wastewater management. Finally, we're going to talk about monitoring and reporting obligations and then I'm going to talk to a case study where we've worked together. So I'm going to pass control over to Matt now and let him take us forward. Thanks very much, Matt. Great. Thanks, Richard. And good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining in on the webinar. I hope you're all well, particularly those of us that are in Victoria and New South Wales and have been dealing with the storm that's come through and other states as well. I hope you're all safe and surviving that okay. Thanks for the intro. It's great to be here talking about wastewater or recycled water. As Richard said, I've spent the best deal of 20 odd years in and around recycled water and looking for sustainable ways to make sure we can utilize it as best as we can. And I'll share with you today some of my thoughts and looking forward to any questions that you've got and we can pick through those towards the back end of the webinar. So I thought we might start off with just for some definitions to set the scene. For those that are close to the industry, you'll know that there can be a lot of discussion about whether it's wastewater or whether it's recycled water. At the end of the day, I don't think it really matters too much and you're free to call it whatever you like. From my point of view, I prefer recycled water as the term. And the reason for that is I think it gives a nice feel for the resource that it is and the value that we can get from it. That it is a really good water source out there that we need to make the most out of. And I like the idea that recycled water is something we're putting back into our systems and getting the most out of. That third dot point you can see on the screen there, it's actually a definition that I've taken from the new EPA recycled water guidelines that have been released. This is Victoria, an EPA that have been released in the last few months known as Publication 1910 or Publication 1910. And I think it sums up really quite neatly what I'm going to be talking about today and referring to, which is water that's been derived from sewage systems or industry processes and treated to a standard that is appropriate and fit for its intended use. There's a couple of really important terms in there. I think set the scene for our discussion this afternoon. So it picks up that we're talking about recycled water from sewage systems. So municipal treatment plants and even trade waste treatment plants where they feed in. But the industry is a really important part of our wastewater industry as well. So dairy processing wastewater and abattoirs, even some sailyards, a whole range of things. There's lots of industry out there that are producing a form of recycled water, which they then need to find a management option for. So it's not just our larger municipal treatment plants that are dealing with some big volumes in our towns and cities. There's lots of other forms of recycled water out there, which is just as important and that we're consistently looking for really great solutions for. The last dot point is an important one that we're not talking about on farm effluent today. So we're not talking about dairy effluent or pigary effluent. Whilst there are lots of similarities. So when we come to managing those sources of water, we're still worried about nutrients and salts and sodicity and pH and potential impacts on the environment and volumetric loadings, et cetera. But it is an important distinction that we're not dealing with farm effluent today. We are talking about industrial recycled water and then also sewage from the municipal treatment plants. Why is that important? There can be a lot of confusion at times between the on farm effluence and the other wastewater or recycled water sources. And they've got different makeups, particularly from a microbiological point of view, which can really impact on what their end users look like. And whilst those similarities are there, they're better dealt with separately. Okay, for some reason, I can't seem to go into the next slide, Richard. Well, I'll try to come from here. Let's see how we go. Yeah. Okay, thank you. Okay, so let's talk about recyclable water management options and the ways that we have available to us to manage this resource. Increasingly, recycled water is being seen as a valuable resource with lots of potential uses. And it's clearly that we've seen over the last 20 years throughout the industry that our advancements in the number of recycled water schemes have been increasing year on year and becoming a lot more sophisticated. And that's a fantastic thing. We know that particularly in Australia, we're a pretty dry place. Water is a really precious resource and we've got to be making sure we're being as efficient with it as we possibly can. But that also means that we're using our alternative water sources to their fullest potential. And there's a great range of uses for recycled water. It's not currently invoked in Australia, but we do know other parts of the world that have got very clear direct and indirect potable reuse schemes, which is a really great thing. And I'd forget for that, of which I am. We've seen that a lot of places that have been struggling with dry conditions and drought conditions have set up these indirect and direct potable reuse schemes where we've got confidence in the technology and our treatment standards that we can treat our recycled water sources to the suitable standard and use them for drinking water. So that's something that's happening. There's a lot of energy for that all around the place. And who knows what the future of that will be for in Australia. Hopefully, as I said, from my opinion, we move in that direction. A large part of what we do with our recycled water sources is irrigation. We've got a range of irrigation schemes that operate all across different parts of Australia. So broad acre irrigation, so dairy and some forms of cropping and beef and sheep grazing. Lots of large schemes where irrigating either recycled water direct to pastures and crops or we're mixing it or shanding it with other sources of irrigation water and using it really productively to drive agriculture and get great outcomes. Similarly, in a range of horticultural settings, depending on the quality of the recycled water, there's lots of different things we can do. So when we talk about class A, so the highest standard of recycled water that we've got, we can use that on really fresh varieties of horticulture through to orchards and vineyards and a whole range of things. Lots of you would also be familiar with recycled water used for sporting grounds and golf courses. Golf courses have been adopting recycled water for irrigation for a number of years and doing it really well and getting really good outcomes and similarly, lots of our footy ovals, soccer ovals, et cetera. Soccer pitchers are being used using recycled water to make sure they've got the best turf conditions possible for that facility and drive really great sporting facilities. And then also end of our public open spaces, our parks and gardens and that type of thing, particularly with the millennium drought that took hold across lots of eastern Australia during the early 2000s. We saw lots of advancements in recycled water schemes being piped back into a lot of places and used to green areas of the community which when things are dry and there's not much drain around and the droughts at its worst, those green areas can offer a real salvation area for communities to get to and be outside in more comfortable conditions than just dry parklands. We also saw during the drought, that millennium drought and other times recycled water being used for lakes and wetlands which again really adds to the amenity of our towns and provides really great focal points and it's a good use for that water depending on what the active uses on the waterway are. We know that recycled water is being used back through industry so cooling towers, a whole range of things, some wash downs depending on what the quality of the water is like. It gets used for dust, suppression and road making. In certain areas there's an ocean outfall that occurs with recycled water but the one that I thought might be worth spending a little bit of time on which is getting into prominence a lot more is this river creek and stream discharge. We've seen over the years that some recycled water treatment plants have had what we call a licensed discharge where they've been able to discharge the treated recycled water into the stream or creek or river depending on the size of it but increasingly what we're seeing is that it's not really a discharge it's actually being used to benefit the flows in that waterway. A lot of our creeks and streams and rivers one of the single greatest things it's impacting them is lack of flow. Farm dams dotted across the catchment climate change more abstraction of water in our growing urban populations means that a lot of our waterways have reduced in flow and so there's a great opportunity where we can get recycled water into the right quality to be able to release it into these waterways and drive some really fantastic benefits by supporting the aquatic environment and drive a better ecosystem. So that's been happening for quite a while there was a scheme that we were involved with working with Galvin Valley water so in Central to Northern Victoria putting recycled water back into the Killmore creek so treated sewage from the Killmore wastewater treatment plant being treated to a really high standard and being put back into the creek at specific times throughout the year to drive environmental flows to improve what that waterway was like and to get much better outcomes. One of the interesting things with that project was that we worked with the local catchment management authority and the landholders to offset any of the nutrients that were going to be released to the waterway so there's a whole lot of work done with farmers in the region to increase riparian vegetation to fence stock out of the waterways and to improve some other practices that were impacting on the creek so that was effectively neutralising and providing better creek outcomes and neutralising the nutrients that were being released into the waterway and therefore driving an overall much better environmental outcome. So I think with a dry climate we're going to look to see a lot more opportunities for that in the future as well as those traditional uses of recycled water around irrigation and amenity lakes and some of the industrial reuse that we're seeing. Next slide, thanks Richard. I thought it'd be worthwhile if we spend a bit of time looking at the different components of what goes into recycled water management and in the first case when you look at this slide it might be a bit overwhelming and daunting to see the number of different components that we need to think our way through but in a lot of cases it's relatively straightforward and it's common sense that we're dealing with and if we've got some good data to support us along the way then we can make some really good decisions and make it work but ultimately we're thinking about water quality how much water we are looking after so the volume what our receiving environment looks like and as part of that receiving environment the community where it exists and the potential impacts on health how we're going to set up a good scheme from a monitoring and reporting point of view to make sure we know what's going on but also from a continuous improvement point of view that we can drive really good outcomes and make sure that we're managing the recycled water the best way that we can our people we can never forget our people they're integral to us and they're integral to our really well-developed recycled water management schemes so have our people got the right skills what sort of training do we need to provide and from a professional point of view hopefully those people on the webinar and it's certainly true for Richard and I that we've been able to drive a really great career out of this industry and there's lots of opportunity for that into the future so providing a really strong pathway for people to get involved in the industry and have a really fulfilled work life and provide really great outcomes from an environmental management point of view and a resource management point of view the economic viability of our schemes is also critically important they can be costly at times sometimes for irrigation schemes we're piping the water some distance to get it to the farmland or to access the amount of farmland that we need to make the scheme work so it's really important that if we're going to spend a lot of money on capital and have some considerable operating costs that the end use that we're supplying the recycled water to is economically viable and they're going to be able to use the recycled water and thrive over the next 10, 20 beyond years and that's what that last box there is talking about the win-win outcomes ultimately we want to be using recycled water for its highest potential value and to make sure that everyone so that's the producer of the recycled water the end user of the recycled water and the community drive really great outcomes the water quality will really dictate what we can do and we generally talk about different classes of recycled water particularly in Victoria but other states are similar so class A being our highest standard which can be used for uncontrolled public access so if we're going into a park where the community access to that park all the time that's a class A standard also to some of those fresh varieties of fruit and vegetables there's some where it's still not appropriate but lots where it is the second class is class B where it can be used for sporting sites predominantly it also has some advantages for dairy farms particularly we've got lactating animals and then class C class of recycled water up until recently class D was the other source of recycled water we had available to us but it's now just classes A, B and C in Victoria with the release of the new guidelines publications 1910 and 1911 which had been with us for a couple of months so the class of the recycled water is really driven by the microbiological quality we use E. coli as the reference but also look at viruses and protozoas by the time we get into looking at class A recycled water so that class can dictate how the recycled water can be used but I can't stress the importance of also understanding the other parameters of your recycled water so what's the salinity going to be like what are the nutrients like are there any toxicants in terms of heavy metals emerging contaminants so having a really great understanding of what your recycled water quality looks like having some good monitoring data to support that and then identifying through the guidelines that are available where the recycled water can and can't be used is a really important first step but then thinking about your volume thinking about the receiving environment so what impact am I potentially going to have on soils how am I going to look after the beneficial uses of surface waters groundwater or the marine environment making sure I'm not impacting on flora and fauna or cultural heritage so we have indigenous heritage but also some parts of European heritage as well but certainly cultural heritage is an enormous part of the planning that goes into recycled water schemes these days and that's been a really great increase in focus over the last years so there's a range of things that need to be thought about but certainly understanding the data having good information that enables you to make good decisions can be really important we roll to the next slide Richard there's a few things that I've learnt over the last 20 years of recycled water management which I want to impress on you now we don't have long enough today to talk in enough detail about all the components but I think if you take these practices on board you're going to maximise the possibility of having a really fantastic recycled water scheme the first one is that successful schemes aren't set and forget and what I mean by that is that they take ongoing work and they take consistent resourcing to make them work a key part of that is communication really strong communication between whoever's producing the recycled water and your end user sometimes it's the same organisation sometimes the end user could be a third party but having really great communication which talks about the quality of water that's consistently being developed how much water is available what it's being used for is it being used in accordance with the management plan it's an ongoing job and sometimes what we see is where schemes start to fall over is because the resourcing just simply isn't there to make it work and it's an old adage little things done consistently over a long period of time can make things work a whole lot better rather than putting something in place forgetting about it and coming back a lot later down the track I need to realise there's a whole lot of problems that have occurred the second one is there's no substitute for good data I can't express this highly enough either know your recycled water inside out we were touching on it on the previous slide understand your microbiological quality understand the salinity understand the nutrients understand the impact it might have on your receiving environment and how you're going to manage it and the mitigation practice you got available to you but you need to be undertaking monitoring of recycled water quality I would say monthly throughout the year particularly during the irrigation season if it's an irrigation system that you've got set up but looking for those changes over time is it consistent is it fluctuating understanding the reasons why it may be fluctuating and the impact it's going to have that's really critical planning for your scheme is really important but planning for the wet year I think is the most important thing that you can do in dry years particularly for operating irrigation schemes dry years can be annoying dry years can be annoying because we can run out of recycled water during the season and if you're supplying recycled water to a commercial farmer for example under contract and they run out of water partway through the irrigation season they're not going to be too impressed but from a compliance point of view if you've emptied your lagoon prior to the winter storage period then you're going to be in a much better situation but the wet years is where we really start to test the the friendship and where our struggles can come along so you need to have a really good plan that can clearly show how you're going to manage your recycled water when we've got bigger volumes that we're trying to manage recycled water is often described as a really sustainable stable source of water and whilst that's true it does fluctuate quite considerably with the environment and with the climate the same way a lot of our water sources do so during a drought we're going to have a lot less when we wish we had more and during the wet years we're going to have heaps of it to manage when we wish we didn't have it but it is those wet years that you need to have a plan for so often we do that through water balance modelling which will touch on in a bit more detail in a minute but we make sure that we've got enough infrastructure so enough storage and enough end use to manage how much water we're going to generate in a wet year that's a really critical part of putting together a good scheme and making sure you're planned for all sorts of conditions that could come towards you reconcile your data again we see a lot of systems where data is being collected and it's being recorded in a spreadsheet or put into a spreadsheet and not a great deal of thought is being given to what that information means so one I would go back and make sure that the data makes sense so are the results I'm getting do they pass the gut test or is there something in there that gives me an inkling that either the data might not be recorded well maybe there's a flow meter that's out maybe we've got a leak somewhere maybe we're recording from a different area where we thought we shouldn't have been or we should have been or maybe we've got some data that says to me our treatment process isn't working well or something news being introduced which has changed how much water we've got or what our quality looks like not just trusting data blindly and putting it into spreadsheets is really important having a critical eye and looking through that data and understanding why you're getting the numbers that you are and why maybe fluctuating is really important because it'll help you to keep track of how well your scheme's operating and whether you're maintaining your compliance or not it'll give you a much better understanding of your system so you'll be much more in tune with how things will ever flow and what you might expect to see when little changes are made it'll just keep you in good contact with everything that's going on so reconcile your data please if you take one thing out of this I hope that's it really make sure you understand what your data is saying and what it's all about and the last point there is all good schemes are underpinned by good water balance so Richard if we roll over to the next slide I really think this is critical for any recyclable water irrigation scheme that you understand what your inflows or what your volumes throughout the year are going to look like what their seasonal variation is and how you're going to make them work there's a few graphs on here and I'll just quickly talk our way through them the graph in the bottom left hand corner is what we call a sawtooth graph but that's modelling how a winter storage is expected to fill an empty over a 20 year period in this example our criteria is that we've provided enough infrastructure to manage the recycled water in a 90th percentile wet year so you can see from that graph there's 20 years of data the lagoon would spill in two of the 20 years so there's your 90th percentile containment what we're saying here is that the storage is consistently filling and emptying apart from those few wet years which is exactly what we want to see in our recycled water schemes that means we've got a good balance between winter storage and irrigation and that we're looking after our compliance quite well the graph in the top right hand corner is a curve that we often produce which looks at the different combinations of storage and irrigation area you can have to manage the volume of water so as that curve shows you can have a really large area a really large storage volume and a really small irrigation area or a really large irrigation area and a really small volume and still achieve 90th percentile containment which is what this curve is looking at doing or 50th percentile containment or 75th percentile containment whatever your measure may be but the best combination is where that curve breaks and it's flattened out so in that example it's going to be somewhere around about 20 to 25 hectares and about 80 to 100 megalitres that's where you're going to drive the best results from your scheme but it makes sure that you've got enough infrastructure in place to cater for that wet year which I was touching on previously the graph in the bottom right hand corner those first two graphs that I spoke about that's what we would call strategic water balance modelling we've got enough infrastructure set up to cater for the volume of recycled water that I'm going to be producing the graph in the bottom right hand corner is what we'd call an operational water balance where it's looking at how much recycled water we've got in storage throughout the season and then what might happen under various climatic conditions so the blue line which is giving the highest values that's what would happen in a wet year greater than a 90th percent or wet year the second line is an average year through to a dry year etc etc that's a great way of predicting what shape you're in is my storage going to overflow am I going to have to try and increase how much reuse I've got and what I can do with my water again a really good thing to have throughout the year next one thanks Richard sorry guys Richard probably dropped off we are going to share the screen again sorry Matt and you can continue no worries thank you I've got it here if you'd like me to share but I'll let you yeah great thank you so apologies everyone who are online watching the webinar but that's the wonders of what happens when you're doing these things monitoring and reporting again it's really critical that we have good systems set up from a monitoring and reporting point of view that helps us keep check as to how our schemes are performing are we meeting our compliance which is a really important part so typically we'll have a management management program set up or an environmental management plan in place which is going to detail the monitoring we're going to do to make sure that we're looking after having a really positive impact and not having a detrimental or a negative impact on the environment or human health or animal health what your monitoring looks like will be driven by the individual scheme needs and should be underpinned by a really good risk assessment which will help show where you've got risks the mitigation practices you might need to put in place and then the monitoring you're going to undertake to show that you're either successfully or whether you need to make a change in your scheme monitoring yeah that's typically around volume and quality and soil chemistry nutrient balances groundwater etc etc but you need to make sure your monitoring is set up is efficient it's repeatable it's accurate and underpinned by good science and really skilled technicians we find a way to go if you're undertaking the monitoring in-house please make sure that you've got people who have got a good understanding of the monitoring they're undertaking the science that sits behind it and what they need to do to drive really good results because the monitoring data that we collect is critically important to our schemes it's the one thing that we've got that the schemes get judged by and it's the single piece of information or the single pieces of information to improve the schemes and what they're like next slide please we're just going to change gears a little bit now and talk about the new Victorian Environmental Protection Act which is about to come into on the 1st of July this year parts of it are already in place and I thought I might just touch on some of the changes just to give people an introduction if you haven't already caught up with it the three terms that you see on your screen or there's four terms really the preventative approach the general environmental duties the state of knowledge and reasonably practicable we're going to become very familiar with those if we're not already so the general environmental duty that's the overarching concept that sits behind the new Victorian EP Act I'll leave you to read the definition the state of knowledge is a really interesting one so what should be known or reasonably known about the risks of harm to human health and the environment and the means of eliminating these or otherwise reducing those risks so our state of knowledge is going to be really important it's what we're going to be assessed against and it's going to be up to everyone who's managing recycled water to make sure their state of knowledge is up to date and they know what they should be doing to managing their schemes and to the extent recently practicable means putting in controls that are proportionate to the risk and assessments in place understanding what our risks are and how we're going to mitigate them is going to be an important part of the new EP Act next slide please this is just an overview of how the new EP Act is going to come together but we might roll to the next slide in the interest of time there's going to be a new set of what's called permissions so they'll be licences a lot of the things that we do with recycled water particularly from an irrigation point of view will be covered by permits and that term we spoke about before being the state of knowledge the new guidelines that have been released in Victoria so publication 1910 that replaces the old publication that some of you may be familiar with which was publication 464.2 that's the overarching document in Victoria for recycled water management that will be two technical publications which can be used to help drive really good schemes so publication 1911 and publication 168 168 is specific to wastewater or recycled water irrigation so publication 1910 and 1911 they were released in the last couple of months we being RMCG are fortunate enough that we're currently working on a rewrite of publication 168 with EPA and we hope that that's going to be released towards the latter end of this year but they will provide a range of information that will help inform people's state of knowledge and what they need to be aware of when they're managing recycled water next slide this last slide really just shows again how they all come together but there is a very formal link to the Australian guidelines for water recycling so those new publications 1910, 1911 and the revised version of 168 that we're working on they all fall under the broader banner of the Australian guidelines for water recycling which have been a great set of guidelines they've been out for quite a while now but we're seeing some really good coordination between the states where they're all referring to an overarching set of documents the output of all this work is producing a management plan that can be in place to manage your recycled water in the past they've been called environment improvement plans but they're going to be called health and environmental management plans now so we're going from EIPs to hemp in Victoria and they'll essentially be the output of where people are articulating what their systems are going to look like the risk assessments that they've worked through the mitigation practices they're going to have in place and how they're going to drive really good, sustainable the next slide if Richard's on the line I'm going to hand over to you Richard to pick up this case study okay, can you hear me? yes we can that's good news, sorry my zoom cut out earlier everybody so look I just thought we'd share one case study in particular a bit of an emphasis I wanted to put on this was raising awareness on what can be done automatically certainly in the context of what Matt was saying about state of knowledge there's quite a lot of technology that's emerging or established that can be used to better manage wastewater or certainly optimize it so what was this project about you'll see on the right hand side there there's the large lagoon that lagoon was coming from a milk powder factory when you create milk powder you take a lot of fluid out of it obviously out of the milk and that comes in and forms an effluent which is monitored it's monitored as part of the process and at the discharge points to these ponds it's also monitored in real time in those ponds now typically that sort of monitoring happens as part of the production facility so the data often is in the format of a SCADA system which is linked to various control devices and that sort of thing so often that data is not readily available to people managing the environment certainly either from a compliance point of view or for managing it in terms of optimizing it so often one of the first challenges is just to get all the information and data that you need into one place so you can start doing those comparisons of data and look at how you can use that data to optimize application obviously if you're going to use that for something like optimizing irrigation you need that data in a really timely way and so typically you need to set it up on a telemetry type arrangement so that water that I pointed out in that Lagoon needs to find a home and these factories keep running all year round regardless of what the environment's really doing so you need to be getting rid of that water in a timely way to meet those requirements that Matt referred to in terms of not having too much water in a pond so there's a number of inputs you need and a number of things you need to know about that and quite a bit of infrastructure you need to actually get rid of that so the picture on the left shows how this particular facility managed those aspects so that sketch of the looks like slices of a pie is actually a pivot irrigator's sort of settings for how it it irrigates and it rotates around and it's applying water out onto in this case pasture which was used for grazing that pasture and the amount that you get off was monitored so they actually know the yield that's coming off there and they're trying to balance optimising that pasture growth with their environmental compliance obligations so what are those environmental compliance obligations well in this instance there's quite a few so there's a relatively shallow water table so part of their EIP or seem to be changed name plan is about protecting groundwater quality so you need to be thinking about not only the quality of putting on but the amount and trying to get a balance there between the transpiration rate of the grass or the pastures this is the infiltration capacity of your soil and the application rate of your irrigation system secondly there were surface water considerations so there are streams that run adjacent to those irrigation paddocks and one risk is you put too much water on you create overland flow and those impacted waters can potentially discharge offsite now obviously that varies completely with anti-seed and moisture conditions so if the paddocks already pretty wet then you need to throttle back your application rate maybe in some circumstances turn it off altogether because otherwise you're creating a surface runoff and potentially exceeding your compliance requirements so these sorts of projects they really do need a collaborative approach between the farmer who's looking after the pasture your consultant who's looking after environmental compliance and the site operator of the facility who's producing the effluent and managing and controlling that so in this particular project how to balance all these things well we had to set up a set of systems to ingest data in a timely way and as Matt mentioned often the data is in spreadsheets so it does involve changing processes for data collection it involved customising how to do that data so we had data inputs coming from the irrigation set up we had data inputs coming from the environmental compliance monitoring so things like depth to ground water and any water quality monitoring results from there and we needed the time series data coming from the SCADA system that was being used in the operating facility so all that data needed to come together but most importantly how to automate a water balance right for the importance of water balance well in particular how to automate the unsaturated zone of your pasture paddocks because that's really what's driving compliance here if you can balance your application rates with your soil moisture content offsite either discharged to ground water or surface water runoff that's the definition of success and to do that you need real-time data on your soil moisture and in this particular site we used capacitance probes that measured soil moisture at 10 centimetre increments down below the soil and they had a an automated controller which changed the irrigation rates that came from the pivot irrigators so a fair bit of automation there so that's an example of a project the what else is coming in the way of technology that's relevant to this there's a system that was developed in western Australia by a company that we have a relationship with called swan systems and they can automate your weather forecasting data as well as your soil moisture data coming from capacitance probes and they can do a real-time projection of the application rates that you can put on taking in account weather forecast data obviously that's really valuable if you're trying to manage the amount of effluent sitting in that pond if you know seven days out that there's going to be a lot of rain then you want to optimise putting that before the rain comes rather than having a pond that's going to be overflowing during those storms so swan systems is certainly something I'd suggest you have a look at we have a link on our website to that but it's a really fantastic piece of technology the last bit of technology news is Matt's mentioned the importance of microbial monitoring and there's some really cool technology emerging around both hand-held devices to measure things like E. coli in the field using nanotechnology which is something that we're looking to bring to Australia so it's a little portable device like a photometer and that will give you a reading of E. coli readings and other bacterial readings the bit of nanotechnology allows it to be sort of specific for certain bacteria types very clever at the other end of the spectrum there are real-time continuous monitors now available for measuring things like E. coli they're quite expensive systems and quite large they need mains power supply and that sort of thing but they do exist and there's a company out of the Netherlands called Microland that set up these continuous monitoring systems to determine your relationship with so be aware you can measure things like E. coli in the field using portable devices and you can measure them continuously I think that will cover everything I wanted to talk about I think should leave a few minutes for questions next slide please alright so I'm not sure if I can view the Q&A I might be able to today alright so there's no open questions at the moment I'd encourage you to put some questions in in the interim I will ask a couple of questions of Matt so Matt firstly I suppose we are in a pandemic and we have issues with viruses and that sort of thing in our wastewater streams you hear about them monitoring that but how effective are our treatment systems at trading those sorts of viruses before for example we put them out on horticultural crops you've got a position on that absolutely I think there's been a lot of work done Richard to make sure that we specify the treatment processes that are needed for the different types of end uses so if we're going to a fresh crop which is going to not undergo any processing or cooking or anything like that then we need to make sure the quality of water is suitable for that type of end use and there's been loads of work done over the last 20, 30, 40 years to make sure that our treatment standards are really top notch and they can produce the quality of water we need for the different types of end use and that gets tested really rigorously there's really good controls in place critical control points and quality assurance management plans etc which are really quite stringent to make sure that whoever's producing that water they're doing it to the standard that's required and then it's suitable for the end use and those end uses are really well documented throughout all the guidance that we've got available the Australian guidelines or the individual state guidelines so I think we can take a lot of confidence that our water quality experts and our scientists who are working on that side of things have been thinking about it hard for a long time and we've got really well established practices in place. That gives me some comfort Matt we're not pumping viruses straight out on our salad Nigel Nigel McGuckin has a question Is there a need for a water quality standard between A and B particularly for use as environmental flows? Yeah so G'day Nigel for environmental flows I think it's all about what the beneficial use of that waterway is and it's environmental condition so if we know that that waterway is going to be used for primary contact recreation for example for swimming we're going to have a higher treatment standard that's needed versus if it's not used for swimming or drinking water or whatever it may be we don't always need Class A recycled water for environmental flows so I think my approach would be that we use the science and our risk assessments to help drive what the answers should be that we articulate that catchment what the beneficial uses are how it's being used and how we're going to go about making sure that we're looking after those beneficial uses and mitigating any of the risks that we identify so is there something specific between Class A and Class B that probably won't be I'm not sure it needs to be but I think we can get about it through that risk assessment process I might add to that question Matt so things like this emerging technology around continuous microbial monitoring do you think that's actually valuable in the context of working out whether you can discharge that water for environmental flows and that sort of thing or would that be I think if it helps provide confidence to whoever's involved be that the people running the scheme or the community then that's a really good thing Richard so if we've got systems in place that are operating the way they should be and we can see from the data that's being recorded that they're consistently meeting the targets that we need to mitigate any risks then yeah I'm all for it I think there's an opportunity to do it you've got to balance the cost of it I suppose that's the one thing that you've got to think about but you're probably a bit closer to me so I'm interested in your thoughts as well but it would seem like there's good potential for it well I think there's probably real benefits in those spot measurement devices because I'll be pretty low cost producer reading in sort of less than half an hour so you can do spot checks in terms of real-time monitoring I'm really not sure so certainly if it's real-time monitoring you can know what the trends are in your microbial levels and that sort of thing and it would probably be a good way of retrospectively checking if you had an exceedance or set an alarm on that so perhaps if it's linked with an automatic shutoff and you've got a criteria for a particular concentration or a coli reading that could be a real benefit so yeah it's probably benefits but it would be interesting to map it out versus what you do I think the caution too is we know that they're going to jump around a bit the treatment plants which is often why we're interested in median results from a water quality point of view knowing what the 75th or the 90th max might look like as well so we would need to make sure we take a balanced approach to it rather than just getting scared by a limit which may jump at any one time but then may flatten out over the rest of the day or something like that yeah no that makes sense I've got another question here from Adam Buzza Buzza with respect to the case study what's the approximate cost of that package for automated weather stations or moisture telemetry irrigation decision support look there's a few elements to that it's not easy to provide you with a cost estimate straight off the bat but I would say that the first step is we do a monitoring system design typically the cost for us to do something like that sort of design sits between about five and ten thousand dollars and that produces a monitoring design and a specification which includes recommendations on equipment and that sort of thing in the particular case study there was a lot of pre-existing infrastructure for example water quality sowns in those lagoons they had a weather station on site so the infrastructure that we were adding there was really the real-time soil moisture sensors we did end up putting another weather station in because the weather station on site was a bit weary and then to integrate it back into data strand is pretty low cost if you want to add something like swan systems to it there's another costing structure around that and that's typically about six thousand dollars per year to have that swan systems facility on top of it the amount they charge depends a bit on the number of pivot irrigators that you have on site for example so there's another question but it's sitting in the chats I will go to the chat session in regards to technologies available this is from Sebastian Quintana in regards to technologies available would there be an interest in laser flow meter instruments to qualify flows on shallow water beds or where surface conditions are a bit harsh given the ability of these devices to measure true velocity true velocity under the surface of the water I'm new to the industry so just a silly question no such thing as a silly question Sebastian so Matt what's your view on that one well it sounds like a Hydrochera answer to me Richard well it's a bit of a combination right so there's several ways to measure velocity one of the challenges of measuring flow velocity comes down to when you're dealing with conditions where you have no flow at all for example and then you have substantial flow so other technologies that are used for for example open channel flow or things like Doppler sensors that sort of thing a lot of the time you have flow meters coming into your irrigators right so in the case of the case study that flow data was critical but that was in pipe flow they normally use something like a mag flow on those or an impeller and if you've got a low budget and that provides you with real time flow data in terms of compliance on I mean Matt I'm not actually sure if you have a sort of flood irrigate with wastewater yeah no definitely there's there's really good examples on the right soil types and this is what you always need to think about when you're picking your way through different irrigation systems but on the right soil type surface irrigation can be quite efficient so there's plenty of examples where every cycle of water is being used from a flood point of view So I think in answer to the question there would be some opportunities if that technology was the most cost effective way to measure flow coming down the bay for example the second part of that is managing to make sure you're not putting too much on so you're exceeding those infiltration sort of things related to managing flood irrigation as well Next question can you give an example of closed loop cycle for industrial wastewater yeah it's a good question often the volume yeah often the volumes that are produced will exceed any of the internal reuse opportunities so it won't be completely closed loop and the other thing we often see baruna as well is from a risk point of view sometimes the industry will prefer to use potable water which has been provided by the water authority for all their processes as opposed to recycled water that they've produced themselves even though it could be of the same standard just from a risk side of things so a completely closed loop would be hard to achieve but certainly there is industrial water that goes back into for cooling purposes and that type of thing but it would be unusual that would account for the whole volume although there are some sites that look to account for quite a bit themselves and make sure that they're reducing what their potable water or intake may be maximising the value of their recycled water all right we're just about out of time in fact we are out of time but which is pretty good because we've just run out of questions as well so Matt I'd just like to really thank you for sharing your knowledge today I thought that was excellent and particularly good to keep people up to speed with those new regulations and the regulations you're working on so many thanks for your contribution today and if you have any queries feel free to give us an email and we will pass those questions on to Matt so many thanks everybody and thanks for coming along today Thanks Richard, thanks everyone