Romsey recycled water plant upgrade

About the upgrade

Romsey Recycled Water Plant (RWP) has been a vital community asset since the 1970s.

It produces recycled water that achieves Class B standards under the Victorian guideline for water recycling (EPA Victoria) and is suitable for a range of uses, including livestock (drinking) water, in line with technical information for the Victorian guideline for water recycling (EPA Victoria).

Population growth has meant that Romsey RWP is close to reaching its capacity for managing wastewater inflows and we are finding it increasingly difficult to manage the volumes of recycled water produced through local reuse solutions.

Existing recycled water customers include the Romsey Recreation Reserve, Romsey Golf Club and local farms, and we’re continuing to explore options for supplying recycled water to additional customers in the local area.

We're also planning and designing a significant upgrade project at Romsey RWP to increase its capacity to serve the growing Romsey and Lancefield communities.

What the upgrade will do

Key benefits of the upgrade include:

• increasing the treatment capacity
• more storage to better manage recycled water levels across the year.

How it will be delivered

Stage one

This stage includes:

• new inlet pipe and inlet work
• new treatment lagoons
• re-purposing the existing treatment lagoons as storage for recycled water
• upgraded pump station.

Stage two

This stage will deliver:

• key infrastructure at the plant to allow more recycled water to be supplied to the irrigation site south of the plant
• two new centre pivot irrigators
• runoff protection around the irrigation site to ensure no excess recycled water runs off the property.

Environmental offsets

As part of stage two, we’ll need to remove a small number of native trees. We’ve obtained the relevant permit for this and in accordance with the conditions of our approval, we are required to mitigate native vegetation losses with ‘offsets’.

Offsets are areas of native vegetation which we ensure will not be developed through long-term protection. This ensures that there is no overall loss of native vegetation.

We’ll be working with the Macedon Ranges Shire Council to establish a local offset site in Romsey. This has been assessed as the best environmental outcome for the local area. It will involve allocating around 3.5 hectares of vegetation offsets which we’ll fence and maintain for the future.

We’re also developing a Vegetation Offset Management Plan and have commenced consulting with Deep Creek Landcare Group about the offsets.

Voluntary cultural heritage management plan

In recognition of the importance of preserving any existing cultural values of the site, we’ve committed to completing a voluntary cultural heritage management plan.

We’ll work with a cultural heritage adviser and traditional owners, the Wurundjeri, to prepare the plan. The plan will identify measures to be taken before, during and after the construction activities in order to manage and protect Aboriginal cultural heritage in the project area.