After Monday 31 January, the Village contact for new telephone and TV aerial connections and faults will be:

Byron Glover at 2 Hakea Walk - Phone 0451 659 306 or 8557 6920

The volunteers running the WasteWater Treatment Plant (WWTP) have been having some issues with stability and maintenance of the system that require everyone’s cooperation to help sort out.

1. PLEASE do not allow any bacteriocidal or germicidal products to go down the toilet or drains. Our WWTP is like a big septic tank. Its bacteria have to be kept alive and in good condition for it to work. All cleaning products should be of a type suitable for septic tanks. If the label says “Kills Germs”, don’t use it! At present, it appears that bacterial digestion is proceeding more slowly than it should so sludge build-up is too fast. This costs us dearly ($000s) when the large sludge tank has to be pumped and the sludge trucked off-site more frequently than it should be.
2. PLEASE do not put any fibrous material - like hair, tampons, fabric, string, sticking plaster dressings, plastic, etc - down the toilet (or other household drains). The only things that should go into the toilet are human sewage waste and toilet paper. Fibrous materials clog the pumps, which then have to be untangled and cleared manually. PLEASE consider our volunteers. It is very unpleasant untangling tampon strings and long hair from the sewage pumps by hand!

If you have problems with your phone, such as a noisy line, etc, try the following procedure, which may save you a $105 call-out fee:

1. Disconnect all equipment, such as portable phones, faxes, and splitters used for your ADSL connection
2. Plug a phone handset into the phone socket. When you hear a dial tone, dial 1. If the line is still noisy, try the same with another phone handset. If your line is then still noisy, call Telstra.
3. If, when you dial 1, the fault, i.e., noise, is gone, start to plug in your other appliances one at a time. If the fault returns when an appliance is plugged in, you have found the source of your problem (and saved a call-out fee!).

John Heij - for Works Maintenance Group

Tess Sapia from the Onkaparinga Council spoke with our group, answered our many questions, facilitated a garbage game, and gave out some stickers and hand outs.
It was an excellent evening, and for those who were unable to attend, I wanted to pass on this information:

Recycling Facts that you might not know -

These can be recycled in our yellow bins -
All hard plastic is now recyclable regardless of the number on the base. Anything that you cannot crush in your hands is accepted including ice cream containers, and yoghurt tubs.

These get reused or go into the red rubbish bin -
Small snap off type yoghurt containers that usually come in packs of 4.
Strawberry & cherry tomato containers, and the inserts of biscuit and cake packets.
Polystyrene trays that often contain meat products.
Did you know that all lids must be removed? This allows the containers to be compressed into a cube for transport; workers at Solo otherwise have to manually remove the lids! These lids need to go in the waste bin, unfortunately they cannot be recycled, the small ring that is left on the neck of the bottle is OK.

These Cannot be put in yellow bins but can be recycled -
Mobile phones, compact fluoro globes, and all batteries can go to the Willunga Environment centre.
All plastic bags cannot go in the yellow bin, but Coles and Woolies will take them.
Aluminium that can be easily crushed such as foil, pie tins, yoghurt lids, takeaway containers and chocolate wrappers cannot be recycled by Solo, so please leave out of the yellow bin. However, Chas M will take them, so collect them and place them in the bin provided in Sue E’s carport or leave with Jacqui G.

It is important to get it right because if the driver notices contamination as s/he tips the load into the truck, a decision is made to take the truck straight to landfill. So we can have an impact on the entire truck load going to the right place! Some of the contamination received includes the following:  food, clothing, basket balls, bags, electrical cords, & hoses, the last two are very hazardous to the recycling plant as they can become caught up in the machinery!
Onkaparinga's contamination rate is 15-24% at present.

Food Waste
Onkaparinga Council sells worm farms and compost bins "at cost" passing on the savings to the consumer, (cheaper than Bunnings) to encourage backyard composting and recycling. The council is very keen to reduce food waste going to landfill; apparently 50% of household waste (in the red bins) is food. (Yes they do bin audits!) If you must throw out food, because it is not suitable for your compost/chooks/wormfarm, it is much better to put it in your green waste bin, as this goes straight to Peats Soils in Willunga to be composted.

Bridget - for WMG

Last Friday, one of the pumps at the Wastewater Treatment Plant failed - at four o’clock in the morning! - resulting in unwelcome nighttime emergency calls to several registered volunteers.

The pump was found to be jammed up with tampon strings - the unravelling of which was a dirty, smelly and tedious job that no volunteer should have had to tackle.

So - to all our Village women - please do not flush sanitary products down the toilet (including the toilet in the Sharing Shed), and please make sure you also pass this instruction on to any female guests in the Village.

John H - for WMG

A few numbers about water and sludge:

It was July 2003 when the first house in the Village was completed and the owner moved in.
On 30 June 2009, we had 56 houses completed and occupied. This means that approximately a third of the homes are now built.

In 2003, we were told that it would take approximately 10 years before we needed to get the 60kL sludge tank in the Waste Water Treatment Plant emptied. We have, however, managed to fill this tank in 6 years, and emptying it this week has cost us nearly $5,000.00

As the number of completed houses is increasing rapidly, including the 24 Cottages due for completion in Aug/Sept, it is likely to be a lot sooner than another 6 years before the sludge tank next needs emptying - probably around 2 – 2.5 years. Once all the houses are built, we could maybe be looking at sludge removal once yearly.

With the associated costs of this process in mind, should we be looking at encouraging something like composting toilets, which would take pressure off the WWTP and keep the waste on site for possible use. We will still need the WWTP but it would be cheaper to run with less sludge in the system.

Should we be asking the BDC to strongly encourage composting toilets in all newly submitted plans?

Would anyone like to put their thinking cap on and do some outside-the-square thinking about dealing with sludge and its costs?

And to finish with - a big statistic: In the six-year period July 2003 to 30 June 2009, we have collectively pushed 10,300,000 (ten million three hundred thousand) liters of water through the WWTP (10,300 kL).

John Heij - for the WWTP Team