Proposals to explain a new water recycling facility at Budds Farm, Havant explained
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00:00Hi there, I'm Sam Underwood. I'm part of the team working for Southern Water
00:03delivering new sources of water for Kent, Sussex, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.
00:08We're here at Bud's Farm Wastewater Treatment Works today to learn a little
00:12bit more about water recycling. Bud's Farm releases on average one and a half
00:18thousand litres a second of highly treated wastewater 5.7 kilometres out to
00:23sea and that water has been treated for between 14 and 16 hours here at Bud's
00:28Farm to a really high standard so that it can be safely released to the sea.
00:32But ultimately it's wasted and there we are abstracting from chalk streams and
00:36aquifers inland when we have a source of water here that we can tap into to
00:40reduce our reliance on those rivers, particularly the River Tess and the
00:44River Itchen in Hampshire during drought periods. So what we want to do is to
00:48create a new source of water from this treated wastewater with a process called
00:53water recycling. It's widely used around the world, has been for more than 40
00:58years in Australia, in Singapore, in America and elsewhere and what water
01:02recycling does is take treated wastewater as a source and put it
01:06through extra treatment processes to produce this which is purified recycled
01:10water. The processes that are used include reverse osmosis which is the
01:15same treatment process used in desalination, so taking seawater and
01:19producing drinking water from it. The membranes within the desalination and
01:24water recycling reverse osmosis membranes, the membranes have perforations
01:29that are more than 50,000 times narrower than the width of a human hair. That's
01:3350,000 times narrower than the width of a human hair meaning that they strip out
01:37individual viruses and bacteria as well as the good stuff such as salts and
01:43minerals and metals. So we have to put some of that back in to remineralize the
01:48water and what we'll be doing is we've got plans to produce purified
01:54recycled water and a new water recycling plant here, so Bud's Farm is
01:57here on the map, we'll pump treated wastewater to the water recycling plant
02:01it will go through the full water recycling treatment process and we can
02:05be able to produce up to 60 million litres of water a day during the droughts
02:09and that's the key thing about this project is that it's a drought proof
02:13source of water when other sources of water are not available to us.
02:18Producing 60 million litres a day of purified recycled water will allow us to
02:23top up the Haddon Thicket reservoir to supplement the spring water that's going
02:26into the reservoir and enable us to take up to 90 million litres a day of water
02:31from the reservoir during a drought and pump that up to our Otterbourne water
02:35supply works where the water will go through the full drinking water
02:38treatment process before it's then supplied to customers. So this is a great
02:43new source of raw water essentially the same type of water that we're already
02:46taking from the environment but without having to take more from Hampshire's
02:50precious chalk streams. Something like 85% of the world's chalk streams are in
02:55this country the finest examples I would argue are here in Hampshire you've got
02:59the test in the Itchin, we've got the Mion, the Ems and in the Lavins as well
03:02and these are really sensitive and rare ecosystems that are reliant on their
03:08water flows but then we are too as a society so what water recycling does is
03:13speed up the natural treatment processes and make sure that we have an always on
03:17drought-proof source of water to maintain supplies for customers and keep
03:21taps and rivers flowing.