FENNER CONFERENCE ON THE ENVIRONMENT
Implementing technical innovation in water management: A business perspective
Mr John Grimes
John Grimes is the founder of Perpetual Water Australia. Having identified the need for innovative on-site domestic grey water recycling, John has spent the last three years bringing a new technology into a relatively new market.
Prior to pursuing his commercial interests, John served for ten years with the Royal Australian Air Force and Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Key career milestones and activities include extensive business and media experience; project and resource management; ensuring product development in line with strict guidelines; Graduate of Flinders University (BA, Asian Studies); Australian National University (MA, Strategic Studies).
This story all began in 2003 when, following the Canberra bushfires, the catchment zone of Canberra was burnt out. Almost overnight we found ourselves on Stage 3 water restrictions, and that hit Canberra hard. It hit my family particularly hard, because my wife decided that we would not stand idly by and watch the garden die. No, indeed, she decided that we would take the water from the kids' nightly bath and we would bucket it onto the garden to keep the garden alive. In fact, it would be my job to perform this task. By the second load of buckets up the hallway, I thought, 'You know, there's got to be a better way.'
I knew that pouring untreated grey water onto your garden was not good practice not environmentally, and not from a health perspective. So I thought, 'This is probably something that you can sustain for a week or a couple of weeks, but if we go into a cycle of a couple of years of drought, what's the environmental impact going to be?'
So I went searching on the internet. And I was astounded to find, in 2003 in Australia, that there was no product available to allow a person like me, living in suburban Chifley, Canberra, to take my grey water, purify it and put it back onto my garden to keep it alive. Astounding. I could find biocycles, those big systems that took grey and black water and treated it to Class C standard, but it needed to be dispersed subsurface. The result was a smelly part of your paddock that produced grass that even the kangaroos wouldn't eat. And you needed to be on at least an acre to have one of these things installed. Well, I don't live on an acre.
So, thinking, 'This is a problem that I have,' and looking over my neighbour's fence thinking, 'That's a problem that they've got, it's a problem that's really widespread and not just in Australia but around the world,' I set about inventing such a product. And this, I think, was our greatest strength. I don't come from the water treatment industry. If I had, I would have listened to my colleagues, who would have told me, 'It's too hard, it's too expensive, and if you were to do it, then you would take a single approach to use a biological method to treat the water because that's the way it's always been done.' Instead, I was completely naïve.
I surrounded myself with some smart engineers, but also people outside of the water treatment industry, largely, and we set about inventing such a product. The result, to fast forward 3½ years, is really quite an extraordinary product. It is the first of its kind anywhere in the world and something that I am pleased to tell you is having immediate market pull, not just here but internationally. And that's the story that I want to share with you today.
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The 'promise' of on-site systems for treating domestic grey water water from your shower, your bath, your clothes washing machine, your hand basins has always been about sustainable demand reduction. You can put water restrictions in place; that's great for a period of time, but when they are lifted water use returns to its historical levels, everyone goes back to business as usual. A classic example can be seen here in Canberra, where things have been dire. Then the month of February was quite extraordinary. The rain clouds came in every afternoon at about 3 o'clock and we got a torrential downpour. So if you look at the grass out there at the moment, you see it is emerald green. And the result on the dam locally? An increase of 0.8 per cent in dam levels. It went from 35 to 35.8 per cent, or something like that. In the public's mind, the pressure's off. But from a water planner's perspective, the pressure ain't off yet. So it's about sustainable demand reduction.
An on-site system allows development. If you take a country town like Yass, where they would not approve any new development, what does that do to a country town? It destroys it. And that is what the water crisis is doing to rural Australia.
You reduce the load on sewage treatment works and, importantly, you reduce energy consumption, because water and energy are linked.
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On the flip side, if you are in local government, these are the questions you are asking yourself.
Is anyone going to get sick? Will the neighbours complain? Will it affect the soil? How about run-off into the environment? How committed does a user have to be, particularly in a change of ownership? It might well be that when I buy the system, that's great and I'm very happy to change my habits and get special detergents and make sure that I do the right thing, but then I sell the house and the next family move in and they don't care. Well, that is not going to work. So how will it be maintained?
These are precisely the questions that we addressed in designing the system. I took a user's perspective but I also took a stakeholder's perspective in the design of the product that we came up with.
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Firstly, why would you treat grey water? Grey water is full of some pretty nasty things really, three types of contaminants, organic, inorganic and biological. To summarise it, if you pour untreated grey water on your garden you will kill the soil. It has high pH, is high in salt. It will degrade soils in a lot of environments, particularly in the clay soils of Queensland, for example. You have phosphorus run-off so it promotes algal blooms in the environment odour and a serious health risk. That's why you treat grey water.
However, in places like Victoria we encourage people to throw untreated grey water about with gay abandon 'Go for it' but we highly regulate on-site grey water treatment systems. There is a paradox there.
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We developed a system that is not a biological treatment system. Why? Because biological treatment systems are very easily disrupted. They use bugs to eat the nasties in the water. The problem is that the products that we use in our houses soaps, detergents, Napisan, Exit Mould, pre-soakers, ammonia for the floors are all designed to kill bugs. So when they go down the drain they kill the bugs that eat the bugs, and destroy your system. There is a fundamental flaw there. So at the outset we couldn't have a biological treatment system.
Secondly, we couldn't choose a membrane processing plant. There were two reasons. The membrane process fails too quickly for domestic grey water, and there are high energy input costs. So we came up with a different process.
We use a process very, very well known and understood in the water treatment space. We take the grey water and we separate it off to a small in-ground sump. So we tap off the grey water to a single point. We pick up the grey water, we then put it through a purification unit. In that unit we flocculate the water with alum. That's really useful, because in that process we drop the pH from about 8 or 9 to about 4. The bugs hate that; it kills them dead.
We then put the clear supernatant through a multimedia adsorption filter, and that adsorbs out the remaining contaminants, soaps and detergents, that are left in that grey water. It is a very low cost, energy efficient, highly effective way of treating grey water.
We then put the water through multiple disinfection barriers UV treatment and the addition of a small amount of sodium hyperchloride, or pool chlorine so that the water can be safely stored, long term, in a reuse tank for reuse. That water is then used from a reuse tank where we provide a pressure pump, and put back into the toilets for toilet flushing, directly displacing potable water use. We use pristine drinking water to flush our toilets. What planet are we on?
Of all the water that comes into our houses, only a couple of per cent that comes through that pipe is for human consumption and cooking. Why don't we displace some of that water use with water that is treated to an appropriate standard? So we are not saying that this is drinking water, although let me show you the water that we produce. [Shows sample.] Ten years ago, in Australia, this would have met Australian drinking water standards. I have a few vials of the water up here. If people are interested, please take a sample bottle with you. This water has been in this bottle for over 10 months. I would even ask you to take the top off and have a smell.
So it can be used for toilet flushing, garden irrigation, washing the car, hosing down the pavers, washing the windows that is what the water is used for.
Importantly, when that reuse tank is full, the process stops working. The incoming grey water flows off to the sewer as it always did. So it is not like a biological system that just keeps feeding, and feeding out, and therefore even if it's raining you get drenched soil. It doesn't work that way. When it's full and not being used, it turns itself off. So there are all these rules and regulations around grey water that just don't apply to our technology.
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This is what a unit looks like, at Forresters Beach, on the central coast of New South Wales. They come in a range of colours and in this case the reuse tank is in Heritage Red and we used a purple hose and tap to distinguish that this is not drinking water but recycled water.
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We had to go through extensive testing and accreditation before we could get the product out to market. So we have been through NATA accredited testing, SIO Global, 'five tick' quality assurance accreditation.
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I have here some of the key statistics: raw grey water at the top, for BODs (biological oxygen demands), suspended solids and thermo-tolerant coliform; the health standard, in the middle, you can't exceed 10 mg; and what we achieved during our test regime, at the bottom.
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We have health accreditation in New South Wales, Queensland, the Australian Capital Territory and Victoria, and we are actively taking the product to market.
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We use a highly automated and controlled system. I needed a product that I didn't have to touch, didn't have to think about, and didn't smell, and that's exactly what we have got. When I am loading the kids in the car to go down to the coast for the Christmas holidays, the last thing I want to be thinking about is decommissioning the sewage treatment plant at my house, and so our customers don't touch this product, ever. That's a really important feature. The servicing is done by a licensed servicing contractor.
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We had to make up these signs that said, 'Perpetual Water flows here. Recycled water in use,' because people suddenly had water abundance. The shower water that goes down past your feet to the drain is currently a lost resource. We captured it and made it available for reuse. People hate the idea of that reuse tank ever being full, because if it is full then that water just goes to the sewer, so suddenly they start using the water, and suddenly they find they have all this water they were ignorant of.
A typical family has about 660 litres a day. They've got to try and get rid of it somehow, because otherwise it just goes to the sewer. So suddenly they have water freedom in abundance. They have a lifestyle back again a bit of green grass for the kids to kick a soccer ball around on and it's going back into the toilet or the washing machine, so they are directly displacing potable water use in that process. That's the private benefit, but there is a public benefit as well. So that is really the bringing together of the two, and it is about sustainable demand reduction.
So we had to make these signs, because there had been public pressure from neighbours who were saying, 'Oh, you're a water rat.' The response could be, 'Actually, I'm doing the right thing and helping to save the environment.' That's where you are going to get traction in terms of sustainable demand reduction, not from imposing punitive measures 'If you don't stop using water, if you won't allow your 30-year-old camellia tree to die, we are going to come and clamp your water down to 4 litres per minute.' No. These are the sorts of solutions that the community is going to embrace. This is the sort of approach that we need to be taking.
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We have outsourced our manufacturing to regional Australia, a company in Albury. They are gearing up to produce 150 units a month. They currently make around 60 units a month for us; they can do around 500 units a month.
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We have done a lot of press, both nationally and internationally.
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We have won a stack of business awards the public get this including the HIA GreenSmart product of year award, where we were the national finalist. Dulux, Wattyl, Dux and Perpetual Water were the finalists.
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Clients that we have supplied units to include the National Water Commission headquarters building, here in Canberra, the Defence Housing Authority, major developers and architects. Developers ask us three questions when we speak to them: 'Is it a biological system? Is it an aerated treatment process? Is it fully automated?' It is only when we answer, 'No, no, yes,' that they say, 'Ahh, keep talking.' They have got to get their BASIX points, they have got to meet building legislation requirements. They have to do something. Well, we have a solution for them.
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We are putting units into 14 surf lifesaving clubs in New South Wales, under the Community Water Grants. Surf lifesaving clubs have turned off the water; they can't hose down their equipment any more. The equipment is cracking up because the salt water is degrading their equipment. They go to get their equipment and think, 'Oh, hang on, is that going to fall apart in the surf?' That's the problem. Well, now we are putting units in place to recycle the shower water so they can hose down their equipment practical solutions for real problems. That's what it is about.
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We produce Class A water. The system is silent, and safe for soil. It's not biological, and it shuts itself down if it's not maintained.
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We have been funded by AusIndustry to scale our process up. So it is not just at the home level we are developing a unit to process 10,000 litres a day. It will take up less than a single car space, for multi-residential and apartment blocks. Our second prototype is being deployed in the next week or two to the Australian National University campus, the halls of residence. We have councils in Sydney saying, 'We have got 14 development applications for approval that we can't approve because they can't meet their water efficiency/saving targets. Until you can get this product on the market, we can't move.' Enormous pressure. So there is huge market pull for what we are doing.
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Some key statistics: our forecast revenue for next year is set conservatively at $23 million. How many people are in this room? 100? Every day around 430 people visit our website. They spend, on average, 4½ minutes there. For a website visit that is quite extraordinary, and that is every single day. This is a community revolution.
People in the community aren't waiting for policy makers, they're not waiting for big-picture solutions. They are like me: they've got a garden that's dying, they've got buckets in hand. In fact, they're fed up. They're looking for leadership from politicians and others, and if they don't get it, they'll find solutions. That's really what this is all about. This is a bottom-up revolution. They are not looking for water utilities to help solve the problem; it is companies like Perpetual Water that will solve this problem. That's really what's happening out there on the streets.
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However, I really want to pick up on a point that Dr Tom Hatton was talking about in his presentation. We need to be collaborative, and we need to build confidence. An important part of that is an initiative that we have just undertaken. We have formed the Australian Grey Water Institute. That is, grey water purification organisations our competitors and ourselves have set up the institute. Murdoch University is participating, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the surf lifesaving clubs association, Gosford City Council has indicated that it would like to participate, there are vendors and industry suppliers. The objective is to sponsor the responsible use of grey water, because this crazy situation where untreated grey water is thrown around with gay abandon but treated grey water is maligned just cannot go on.
In Queensland it is illegal to flush your toilet with this water. But they are talking about treating sewerage water and putting it into the drinking water supply. We haven't made a political issue of that yet, but we have just put out a press release today and it is about to become a political issue. The people of south-east Queensland are going to go ballistic when they hear about that. And I can give you 15 other examples.
One of the key objectives is to help councils. State governments set the policies and then it is up to the poor councils, who have no training, no background and no resources, to have to try and implement often confusing policy. No wonder they are confused. The institute is designed to help facilitate, with good science, sensible policy facilitation.
Discussion
Question: I am wondering how much the unit costs all up, and then, based on the amount of water that is used by a household in, say, a year, what is the kilolitre cost of that water, based on the cost of the unit?
John Grimes: We can get a unit installed in a new home if you are doing a large development, say 100 homes in a new development, for example all up for $10,000. If you are retrofitting it into an existing home, it is more typically going to cost you around $15,000. What is the difference? The difference is that for an existing home you have got to access the house, tap off the pipework, cut up concrete, excavate, run power on a separate circuit a lot of these are requirements levied by government that increase the price of installation and put concrete pads down, there are lots of things that need to happen. So that's the price of the unit.
The ongoing running costs: the unit uses less than 1 KWh of energy per day, so it is very energy efficient. There is not a huge energy cost in running the unit. The maintenance costs of the unit are around $350 a year, so there is an ongoing running cost.
What you will find is that if you amortise those costs over 25 years it is not going to be as cheap as getting water out of the tap. The reason why our customers buy it, though, is that water goes from being worthless to priceless overnight. What do I mean?
Well, one day you've got it on tap and the next day the water police say, 'You can't use that water and you've got to let your camellia tree die.' Priceless. People buy this because they want water freedom and access to water. In Melbourne, there are services that go around and sell Class C water for 55c a litre, to come round and put water onto your trees to keep them alive during the drought. That's how valuable water is. That's why people buy this product.
So that's the return on investment that a customer gets from this, and that's why they buy the product.
