Trade waste is different to regular household wastewater as it contains fats, oils and greases or toxic or harmful substances such as acids, petroleum products, heavy metals, solids, organic solvents or chlorinated organics. Customers who produce more harmful trade waste have pre-treatment devices installed to help reduce impacts in the wastewater network, where it is safely treated.
Unitywater Executive Manager Customer Experience Katherine Gee said the water utility was about halfway through installing Captis Series 2 digital loggers on meters for 30 trade waste customers – those who generally produce higher risk, more harmful wastewater.
“Existing meters measure the volume of waste discharged but these digital loggers will also enable us to monitor when our customers are discharging to our wastewater network,” she said.
“It’s an important action to protect our network and the wastewater treatment process, to ensure what we treat remains safe for public health and the environment.”
Ms Gee said the Captis Series 2 loggers were designed for larger meters such as the ones trade waste customers have.
“Our trade waste customers’ meters are larger to handle their discharge volumes and these loggers were a good fit and readily available. We also saw the potential for operational efficiencies and insights we could gather about trade waste discharges from the logger data,” she said.
Ms Gee said trade waste could have serious impacts on treatment operations if not managed carefully.
“Uncontrolled discharge of trade waste may cause serious problems including overflows, blockages, corrosion, hazardous work environments and failure of the wastewater treatment process,” she said.
“These digital loggers give us readings every hour to ensure our customers are complying with their trade waste agreement to help protect their infrastructure and ours. While our Trade Waste Officers will still perform site visits, the loggers will help make our billing process more efficient as they’ll no longer require a manual read by our team.”
Did you know?
Unitywater has more than 3,500 trade waste customers including food outlets and shopping centres, education facilities, hospitals and medical centres and industrial and chemical manufacturers.
