Sprinkla wants to celebrate the work that communities are already doing, and spread the word on good news stories. Share details here about your community or sustainability project. Email us at events@sprinkla.com

Be inspired by what can be done with stormwater

Ten years ago, when residential community Cairnlea was being created, the community and the developers established a stormwater harvesting scheme, a project which is now proving what a valuable asset stormwater can be.

The estate, in Melbourne’s north-west, is almost one third open space and includes 37 hectares of grassland reserves and parks. The harvesting, treatment and recycling scheme enables the irrigation of four major parks reducing the demand on potable mains water by up to 160 megalitres a year.

To maximise the recycling of stormwater from a 700 hectare catchment area north of the estate, developer VicUrban modified two waterways entering Cairnlea and constructed five wetlands, known as the Gladstone Street Wetlands, to retain, treat and reticulate stormwater to lakes, parklands and sportsfields.

An incredible 26 million litres of water can be stored in the Gladstone Street Wetlands, which is transferred via a gravity flow pipeline to Cairnlea Lake.

Cairnlea Lake itself stores six million litres of water that is distributed to lakes in three landscape parks. These local lakes have a combined capacity of eight million litres and also collect stormwater from the surrounding local catchment area.

Litter and silt traps remove rubbish, silt and nutrients from the water, which is then blended with that pumped from Cairnlea Lake.

Irrigation water, drawn from all the lakes, is filtered and treated with ultra-violet sterilisation prior to use on sportsfields and public open space. The reticulation system balances peak flow to reduce downstream flooding.

The water used by the scheme would otherwise run off into the sea and be wasted.

VicUrban is the Victorian State Government’s sustainable land developer. To read more about this and other exciting sustainable projects VicUrban is working on, go to www.vicurban.com

Parents Supporting A Sustainable Future

Hi. I have been very interested in doing a similar thing to your renewable energy drive and incentive. I was wanting to start a project targeted at parents. It would be called Parents Supporting a Sustainable Future. Using schools as a captive audience for rounding up support and like-minded concerned individuals who want to make a difference.

I would really like to target a few large projects aimed at creating a sustainable future. The first one being solar power and aiming to create a situation where solar power technology and installation is availble to individuals at a much more cost effective rate. I would like to lobby the government and try to get this as a government-driven project. If that is too difficult and takes too long then joining the community together to create a group to make this a possiblity could be another option. Support groups, fundraisers, surveys, volunteers and interested solar converters are part of what I hope to bring together by using schools and parents as a viable network and community group.

This idea I've been very interested in starting sounds very similar to your solar power drive. I would love to get involved or at least talk to others involved in this drive to see if our ideas and approaches can meet. I would love to know if there are any other parents or individuals in the community that would like to get involved and start the same project at their own schools.

Thanks for this opportunity to share my idea and hopefully link up with other like minded individuals.

Many regards, Sandra

To form a sustainable parents network with Sandra contact info@sprinkla.com

Australia’s first community-owned wind farm

It was when a large corporation tried to set up a wind farm in Daylesford Victoria that residents decided to take matters into their own hands. ‘People really didn’t like the idea of their countryside being taken over by big business, and there was huge opposition to the plan,’ says community member Jane Knight.

But one resident had seen how well the concept of community-owned wind farms was working in his native Denmark and he knew there was plenty of support for renewable energy. So Per Bernard arranged a meeting to talk about a small-scale wind farm, to be owned and controlled by locals, and ‘people just said yes,’ says Knight.

A cooperative has been formed and planning permission has been granted for two turbines, which will have a maximum capacity of four megawatts. ‘That’s enough to power 2500 households, which means that we will wipe out the entire footprint of the towns of Daylesford and Hepburn,’ says Knight.

Find out more about this project at www.hrea.org.au