As part of our goal to be an eco-city, the City of Melbourne focuses on improving sustainability of the city’s building stock, reducing carbon emissions, protecting our world renowned parks and gardens and developing ways to capture, store and reuse stormwater within the city.
Stormwater harvesting
Stormwater harvesting is key to achieving our city's environmental goals, ensuring that we can meet the challenges of a changing climate. The process involves collecting the rainwater from roofs, roads, footpaths and hard surfaces that ends up in our drainage system. Once the water is collected in urban catchments, it requires treatment to remove pollutants as well as a large area to store it for reuse. Stormwater harvesting systems provide greater reductions in stormwater pollutants than other alternative water sources. Stormwater harvesting reduces total suspended solids in water, including soil, silt & clay, prevents litter from entering water bodies such as waterways, rivers and the bay and can reduce flooding in some areas.
Darling Street, East Melbourne
The next three years will see the City of Melbourne deliver a number of stormwater harvesting projects, with Darling Street, East Melbourne currently under construction. The installation of the tank and filtering infrastructure is expected to be complete by June and the streetscape renewed by July. All irrigation connections are expected to be complete by September 2011.
The system will divert stormwater from existing drains in adjoining streets running perpendicular either side of Darling Street. The water will be captured in underground storage tanks and treated before being stored for reuse and irrigating neighbouring reserves and median strips with trees, including Darling Square, Powlett Reserve and median strips in Grey, Simpson, Powlett and Albert streets. When finished, the system will have the capacity to capture an estimated 24 million litres of stormwater each year, which is equivalent to saving more than 18 Olympic swimming pools worth of water annually.
City of Melbourne will monitor the system for 12 months after completion of the construction process. This project received funding from the Victorian Governments Stormwater and Urban Recycling Fund and Melbourne Water as part of the Living Rivers Stormwater Program.
