Queensland’s first environmentally sustainable wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) has been officially named the Cedar Grove Environmental Centre, as construction works continue at the facility.
The treatment plant, under construction at Cedar Grove in Logan, will set a new benchmark in providing a state-of-the-art sewage treatment service, while also enriching its surrounding natural environment.
Logan City Council and Economic Development Queensland agreed to the name for the centre in consultation with the Cedar Grove Community Reference Group in June in recognition of the facility’s emphasis on environmental and community benefits.
The centre will operate under the strictest environmental license ever granted by the Department of Environment and Science in Queensland.
Under this license, a “net environmental benefit” must be achieved for the facility’s surrounding catchment.
The new plant aims to achieve and exceed that with an industry-best rating of ‘ultra-low nutrient output’. The environmental benefit to the river and its catchment is estimated to be up to five times better than the impact of any typical wastewater treatment plant in Australia. Meeting this standard has not been done before in Queensland.
Logan Water aims to achieve this by:
- Producing ultra-low nutrient effluent using a biological treatment process and constructed wetlands to ‘polish’ the effluent. The combination of ultra-low nutrient effluent and wetlands will achieve a total nitrogen release of 1mg per litre and total phosphorous release of 0.5mg per litre
- Developing a program to replant and rehabilitate sections of the Logan River banks upstream of the WWTP to prevent tonnes of nutrient-laden sediment from entering the waterway
- Planting native trees on 38 hectares of the site to offset approved vegetation removal by developers across Logan
- An on-site solar farm to contribute energy for WWTP operations
- Investigations into potential reuse of effluent produced by the WWTP for agricultural irrigation
Construction work on the wastewater treatment facility is about 40 per cent complete and the facility is expected to be operational by mid-2020.