Sewage Treatment - Melbourne's History
Modern and efficient sewage treatment is something that most Melburnians take for granted, but this wasn’t the case for our ancestors.
By the 1880s, Melbourne was a sizeable city with a big pollution problem. Sanitation services were very basic, with all manner of waste being dumped into open street channels, which ran into the Yarra River and Hobsons Bay. This method of waste disposal was damaging to the marine environment, unhygienic and unsightly. Epidemics of fatal typhoid (person to person transmission, not water borne) were becoming frequent.
The findings of a Royal Commission in 1888 prompted the proposal of a new and effective land treatment system: a sewage farm. A tract of land at Werribee was chosen because of its low rainfall and the suitability of the soil for land purification treatment.
Development of the Werribee farm began in 1892. A pumping station was built at Spotswood (now the site of the Scienceworks Museum) to send the city's waste to Werribee. In 1897, the first Melbourne homes were connected to the sewerage system.
Melbourne’s second major sewage treatment plant, the Eastern Treatment Plant, opened in 1975 and at the time was a world leader in the secondary treatment of sewage. The 1100-hectare plant was built to address the rapid expansion of Melbourne in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in the south-eastern and eastern suburbs, and relieve pressure on the Western Treatment Plant.