Shortland WWTW
The Shortland Wastewater Treatment Works serves the communities of:
- Sandgate
- Shortland
- Birmingham Gardens
- Maryland.
It also:
- Receives sewage diverted from the decommissioned Stockton WWTW and Minmi WWTW, from the University of Newcastle and Saint Joseph's Nursing Home at Sandgate.
- Collects industrial sewage from Kooragang Island, the Steel River Project and intakes high strength waste from Steggles Potatoes
It currently treats:
The Shortland plant can handle wastewater from a population equivalent to:
How it works
The plant provides secondary treatment of the wastewater by the following process:
- Inlet works, including fine screening and grit removal;
- Secondary treatment through 2 Intermittently Decanted Aeration Lagoon (IDAL) units;
- Treated effluent is chlorinated for pathogen removal and then dechlorinated before discharge to the environment. (Note: this effluent will in future be used to supply the Kooragang Island Recycling Scheme.)
Sludge lagoons are used at the Shortland plant, as there is space available and the lagoons are an affective and cheap way to digest sludge created by processing.
The lagoons have a simple balance:
- sludge moves in
- supernatants move off
- the sludge layer at the base of the lagoon is pumped out and dewatered by contracted trucking units.
After storing the dredged and dewatered biosolids in onsite mounds for about a year the biosolids are reused in land rehabilitation and agricultural pasture improvement projects.
The plant provides secondary treatment of the wastewater by the following process: