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We've had a collaboration with SA Water for the last five years
and during that time we've been able to see what the major problems are
for the state in terms of water management and obviously
SA Water's responsibilities are to try and manage
those needs and meet those needs
and we've been able to give that a scientific underpinning
by supporting it with real research and growth in knowledge.
The fact that SA Water has
decided to go forward with another
five year agreement which actually takes it to a
ten year, very strong support agreement
of three and a half million dollars as I understand it
is something that we are tremendously pleased about.
It's been a terrific experience
to work with the Univerity of SA
in first of all creating this centre together
but as Peter said, signing up
for another period of time
for what I do expect to be a very long association
and a fruitful association.
One of my colleagues, Linda Zou, is doing some really
interesting work in low energy desalination research
and I think the future of desalination will very much lie there.
Desalination is a very important technology for
securing water supplies for most of the coastal capital cities
but it comes at a cost of very high energy requirements
so there's obviously new research that's required
to bring those energy requirements down and that's
very much the focus of Linda Zou's research.
We've done a lot of work in water sensitive urban design and we've
tried to illustrate that during the facilities tour today.
So, we're working in permeable pavements with underlying storage
bio-retention systems, syphonic roof drainage systems
and so we're enabling people to build water harvesting
and reuse into their new developments and into their existing developments
What I'm standing on here is a driveway
okay, it's a driveway with stone underneath
but on top is permeable paving
what's holding all the water that comes through the permeable paving
and it's not just the surface water off the property which is very difficult to harvest in most instances
it's all four of you downpipes. All four of your downpipes can go anywhere
into the base of this system directly.
So you've got instantly, when you put one of these in
you've harvested 100% of your roof water
but then you're also harvesting a big proportion of your
surface run off of your property, which nobody harvests in Adelaide at the moment
Where does it sit? Does it sit in some expensive rainwater tank underneath your driveway?
No, it just sits in the matrix of rock.
This whole installation including the pavers, everything
cost $2100 delivered to site
That's without labour.
$2100 for a 4000 litre rainwater tank
that you can park your car on.
That, in my view, is an incredibly affordable and appropriate technology.
We've got four major research themes
the first one is around Linda's area of desalination,
membrane science and nanotechnology
we also have a research theme in securing water supplies
very important for the state of South Australia
we have a theme on treatment for fit for purpose reuse
and our final, our fourth research theme is
water reuse systems design
so we can give people technologies, very adaptable
very affordable technologies to allow
people to simply reuse more water.
Thank you all for coming and we look forward to the next five years.