Topic
Water and the Circular Economy
Project Round
2007
Project Number
42R - 2036
Research Organisation
ERA Nurseries

The Collection Treatment and Reuse of Nursery Runoff Water

Project Overview

ERA Nurseries operate a large scale seedling production nursery in Hamilton and is one of the largest uses of water in the region. The company focussed on the issues of water collection and recycling during the design and construction phases. The project incorporated an elaborate system of sub-surface drains to collect irrigation run-off and rainfall. The system includes a series of treatment and storage structures and incorporates a biological reed-bed slow filtration nutrient removal phase together with post-storage Iodine treatment prior to reuse. The innovations mainly lie in the various components of the overall system and the manner in which they interact to provide very high-quality recycled water resource.

Overall this project aims to further reduce the dependence on mains water by:

  1. Significantly off-set the use of main water supplies. The degree of augmentation will largely depend on prevailing weather conditions in particular rainfall.
  2. Greatly improve the quality of recycled irrigation water and rainfall run-off water using biological reed-bed filtration and nutrient removal systems and automated iodine water sanitation.
  3. Collect water samples at regular intervals and measure critical chemical and physical water quality parameters to determine the efficacy of the process over time
  4. Prepare information packages including collated data sets and associated descriptive information and make this available to interested parties through a variety of means including a dedicated section of the ERA website.

Supporting documents