Blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) can bloom in marine and freshwater and cause additional problems for water utilities when they produce toxins and taste and odour compounds…
At least three different ways to use recycled water are applied around the world: groundwater and aquifer replenishment, surface water augmentation and direct potable reuse…
The Australian Guidelines for Water Recycling (AGWR) require water recycling treatment processes to be validated in ways that ensure that recycled water does not pose a risk to health, safety or the environment…
Water Research Australia led an innovative, and collaborative Australia-wide investigation that developed novel methods for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater…
One wastewater treatment (WWT) option is disinfection with ultra violet (UV) light to remove pathogens and some contaminants, but substances in treated wastewater, such as particles of solid matter, can absorb the UV radiation and reduce its disinfecting activity…
A human hair is about 0.1mm wide, or 100 000 nanometres (nm); far too wide to qualify as a nanomaterial, which consists of particles, tubes and structures ranging from 1 to 100nm in size…
Smaller and regional Wastewater Treatment Plants (WWTPs) have the capacity to recycle wastewater for agricultural use, but the cost of obtaining regulatory approval or ‘accreditation’ is prohibitive…
The ADWG has methods for predicting risks to water quality, but these were not developed for managing extreme climate-change driven weather events such as bushfires or floods…
Water treatment plant operators remove cyanobacteria and the toxins they produce from source waters but calculating the amount of treatment needed for effective removal is difficult, particularly in bloom conditions when cyanobacterial cell numbers and toxins change quickly…
‘Microbial source tracking’ (MST) is a technique that aims to identify the animal that excreted faeces and polluted water…