Cedar Grove Environmental Centre unveiled

Cedar Grove Environmental Centre unveiled

Cedar Grove Environmental Centre wetlands

Queensland’s first environmentally sustainable wastewater treatment plant will officially be called the Cedar Grove Environmental Centre.

The treatment facility, now under construction at Cedar Grove in Logan, will set a new benchmark in providing a state-of-the-art sewage treatment service while also enriching its surrounding natural environment.

Logan City Council and Economic Development Queensland agreed to the name for the centre in consultation with the Cedar Grove Community Reference Group in June in recognition of the facility’s emphasis on environmental and community benefits.

The centre will operate under the strictest environmental license ever granted by the Department of Environment and Science in Queensland.

Under this license, a “net environmental benefit” must be achieved for the facility’s surrounding catchment.

The new plant will achieve and exceed that with an industry-best rating of ‘ultra-low nutrient output’. The environmental benefit to the river and its catchment will be up to five times better than the impact of any typical wastewater treatment plant in Australia.

Meeting this standard has not been done before in Queensland.

Logan Water will achieve this by:

  • Producing ultra-low nutrient effluent using a biological treatment process (membrane bioreactor technology) and constructed wetlands to ‘polish’ the effluent. The wetlands design is world’s best practice, based on learnings from other similar developments. The combination of ultra-low nutrient effluent and wetlands will achieve a total nitrogen release of 1mg/litre and total phosphorous release of 0.5mg/litre.
  • A program to replant and rehabilitate sections of the Logan River banks upstream of the WWTP to prevent tonnes of nutrient-laden sediment from entering the waterway each year.
  • Planting native trees on 38ha of the site to offset approved vegetation removal by developers across Logan.
  • An on-site solar farm to contribute energy for WWTP operations.
  • Investigations into potential reuse of effluent produced by the WWTP for agricultural irrigation.

Logan City Council has also committed to working with the community surrounding the Cedar Grove Environmental Centre.

The Cedar Grove Community Reference Group, established in 2018, has been working with Council to prepare a site masterplan including walking trails along the Logan River, picnic shelters, a Landcare nursery and areas for community groups to hold events such as the Queensland Rocketry Society’s rocket launch days.

Construction work on the wastewater treatment facility is about 40 per cent complete.

The facility is expected to be operational by mid-2020.

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