The Challenge
At the time of applying for the Smart Water Fund grant, Coliban Water’s water storages were at an all time low with the Coliban system at 13 per cent and Lake Eppalock at 5 per cent of capacity. Coliban Water was proposing to spend $77 million to construct a pipeline from the Goulburn system to Lake Eppalock to augment supply to Bendigo.
Bendigo Bank is a tier two Australian bank with its head office located in Bendigo, regional Victoria, employing up to 1,000 staff in the new Head Office building. The purpose of this project was to incorporate water saving measures into the building design to reduce demand on potable supplies in highly stressed catchments.
The Project
The following systems put in place include water savings, water recycling and biosolids recycling:
- The Recycled Water Treatment Plant “RWTP” is designed to treat wastewater from office building showers, sinks, basins, dishwashers, toilet pans and urinals. The nominal capacity of the plant is 17,000 litres of treated class ‘A’ water for daily use. The number of building occupants is based on net lettable area of approximately 13,000m².
- All wastewater from amenities areas, such as showers and change rooms, etc. as well as from tea preparation areas is collected via a combined piped system and discharge into RWTP on the ground floor.
- The treated class ‘A’ water from the RWTP is pumped to level 5 flusher tank and gravity fed to toilet pans and urinals for the office building.
- The Blackwater/Greywater treatment involves several processes through the treatment plant which falls into three major categories including Primary treatment, Secondary Treatment and Disinfection.
The Outcome
The project will conserve an estimated 4,500,000 litres of potable water and a considerable quantity of landscape irrigation water each year. The latter quantity is dependent on the frequency and intervals of rain.
The Bank has also put in place communication routes to ensure that the lessons from the project are widely disseminated to increase public awareness and also confidence amongst large commercial building owners and developers of the practicality and benefits of water conservation measures.
