A new report has found more than 90 per cent of Tasmania’s waste treatment plants are failing to meet environmental and public health standards.
The 2013-14 report by the economic regulator assessed TasWater’s performance in its first year.
The report said elevated levels of nutrients and faecal bacteria in discharge into rivers and coastal waters continues to be a concern.
TasWater’s acting chief executive Dean Page said there was no danger to the public.
“We’re not getting the strength or the cleanliness of that final product up to the standard that is required by our licence,” he said.
“But, it doesn’t, of itself, create any public health issues, but certainly we need to be aware of sensitive receiving waters and ensure that our testing is thorough and recurring to be able to keep a monitoring of that situation.”
Mr Page said TasWater invested $38 million in sewerage infrastructure in the 12 months.
“In our next pricing period we do have a focus on sewerage infrastructure and ensuring that the transportation and the treatment of waste water is brought up to a contemporary standard and we will be devoting a fair amount of our capital program over those years to improving that infrastructure,” he said.
The performance of the sewerage system has been declining since 2009, but the report found there was an improvement in drinking water quality in the past few years.
Mr Page said improving Tasmania’s drinking water was a key focus of the organisation’s first 12 months.
“Investment in our water infrastructure to ensure that as much of the Tasmanian community as possible was receiving water to Australian drinking water standards,” he said.
“We do have plans in place over the next couple of years to bring potable water supplies to another 13 communities in Tasmania.”
TasWater was formed in 2013 through the amalgamation of the three Tasmanian water and sewerage corporations; Ben Lomond Water, Cradle Mountain Water, Southern Water and their service arm, Onstream.
Previously 29 local government areas around Tasmania had managed the state’s water and sewerage assets, but in 2009 the provision of service was handed to the three corporations.
Tenyear plan for improvements
Mr Page said it was always going to be a long-term proposition to get the state’s water and sewerage up to standard.
“When the water corporations were formed back in 2009 it was acknowledged at the time that this was a 10-year program and costing upwards of a billion dollars,” he said.
“We are now at year six in that program, we have spent to date in excess of $500 million on improving that infrastructure and we still have a way to go.
“We see, for the foreseeable future, that we will be continuing to deliver a capital program in excess of $100 million per annum in order to be able to progress the improvement in this infrastructure… on a mixture of water and sewerage infrastructure.
“It would be fair to say that there is not one solution that applies across all of our systems across the state.
“Each of them are unique sets of infrastructure and different operating perimeters and different technology standards, it would be a unique fix for each of those individual systems that we operate across the state.”