If Peter Beattie is returned to office he will CLAIM A MANDATE TO PUT SEWAGE WATER into SEQ water supplies.

There is no scientific evidence to support the safe use of recycled sewage water for drinking purposes. Scientists agree that tests are inadequate for tracing emerging pharmaceuticals and synthetic chemicals in minute quantities and are unsure how these chemicals may interact in sewage water.

More research is required on long-term health effects and the impact on the environment before this should ever be considered.

Our first option should be recycling sewage to free up drinking water in preference to directly replenishing current supplies. Good reasons for this approach include the unknown long-term outcomes from ingesting recycled sewage water, which will have a residue of unknown synthetic chemicals after treatment, and the expense involved in programs that monitor the quality of treatment to avoid the possibility of adverse effects including machinery malfunctions, accidents and terrorist acts.

The water from recycled sewage is most commonly used for non-drinking purposes, such as agriculture, landscape, public parks, and golf course irrigation. Other applications include cooling water for power plants and oil refineries, industrial process water for such facilities as paper mills and carpet dyers, toilet flushing, dust control, construction activities, concrete mixing, and artificial lakes.

Amber,
In making re-cycled water the sewage is filtered but there are stil microbes in the water so it then is subjected ti radiation to kill those microbes.
Therefore dead microbes are in the water when we drink it. They are too small to be filtered out.
Now those microbes, do they collect traces of radiation when they are killed.
No one has brought this point up that when tthe sewage undergoes radiation is the radiation safe.
Yes, must be the answer but radiation is collective and adds to the original dose.
Now health authorities recommend that we drink a litre of water a day.
So in 10 years each person will consume 3650 litres of water.
Will in 10 years time will there be an outbreak of stomach cancers because of the collective affect of the micobes that have undergone radiation to kill them?

GlenWriter, you may have a point there and thank you for bringing it to our attention.

With regards to radiation and stomach cancers, you might also like to think about the irradiated food, which is gradually making its way into our food chain. In Australia the following foods have been approved for irradiation. Herbs, spices, herbal infusions (teas) and nine tropical fruits, (mangoes, paw paws, lychees, longans, mangosteens, rambutana, carambolas, breadfruit and custard apples).

It won't be long and many other foods will be irradiated with Cobalt 60, which is produced in nuclear reactors, sometimes as a by-product of power generation.

But back to the subject of water:

GlenWriter, as far as I'm concerned drinking recycled sewage water is not safe whatever multi-barrier filtration method is used.

O dear Meg. You are still insisting that the Haughton River is north of Ayr. There are no rivers north of Ayr, only a bit of sugarcane and a whole lot of mangroves.

Getting your directions mixed up in the first place is a simple and understandable mistake. Lots of people in north and central Qld seem to do it, apparently largely because the coast between about Bundaberg and Townsville runs NNW to NW, ie a long way off north, which seems to throw some peoples’ bearings right out.

But insisting that you are right when you aren't is something else altogether! You obviously still haven’t simply looked at a map. But you suggest that it is I who should look at the map!! This is really strange stuff!! I’ll leave it to whoever wishes to actually look at a map to decide who is right.

Your complete refusal to just simply admit that you’ve got your directions haywire is too much for me.

And all you can off in relation to the essential issue of the stabilisation vs continuous growth in demand is “….killing off all babies over the one-child-policy….”. Wow! What a well though-out effort.

You have shown yourself to be fairly and squarely in the ‘too loopy’ category.

Amber, I appreciate your views on the safety of recycled water.

So if you think recycled water is so dodgy, what do you think of tank water?

It seems to me that there are potentially a lot of concerns with the quality of tank water, regarding pollution from dirty rooves, not least disease from bird and bat droppings. Could it be that we cannot have trees overhanging our rooves, or even anywhere near them? How good are the filters? Just how good is tank water?

Can you also give me your comparison between recycled water and treated dam water.

In a nutshell, what do you think is the best option, or combination, for Toowoomba and for all of SEQ?

Thanks

Meg, given that Westpac earnt about 2000 million, plus paid another
appr. 600 million in tax, why should 1 million be a problem?
If anyone thinks its a problem, they are free to raise it at the
Westpac AGM.

In general company donations are not that large:
http://www.crikey.com.au/articles/2005/02/03-0003.html

What Bazz showed is that apart from brushing his teeth and the bit
of water he drinks, most water in the house could in fact be recycled
water, without any large problems. A small rainwater tank would
solve it for most, for the bit used for drinking.

Lets face it, around the world, many cities draw their water from
rivers, yet upstream from those cities, other cities use the same rivers to dump their treated sewage water.

Glenwriter, I thought UV was used to kill microbes in water.

Meg, the China story shows what can happen if we don't address the
population issue early enough. China had to take drastic action
and now has 300 million people less, then would have otherwise been the
case. That means a much better chance of feeding and clothing 1.3 billion already there. Poverty and hunger have dropped dramatically
in China. Take the other extreme, the Horn of Africa. They have
some of the world's highest birthrates, the least use of contraception and family planning. They also have huge overpopulation, hunger and mass starvation on a regular basis.