“Use what you have, before you exploit others”
The Government has produced a model that is available to water utilities and councils to predict the water available from rainwater tanks. For a small to average sized house in Newcastle, a single 5,000 litre tank (2m high by 1.8 m diameter) can generate reliably 95,000 litres per year, or approximately half the typical water consumption! And government at all levels is promoting the use of rainwater tanks. So why is it that the installation of tanks in urban areas of the Hunter is so low? – The Hunter does very little recycling (4%) and only 0.1% percent of households have rainwater tanks (on average, Australia recycles 9% of its water, and yet Adelaide has rainwater tanks in 28% of households).
Could it simply be that Hunter Water (and by default the NSW Government), as a monopoly supplier of a necessary resource may stand to lose windfall profits if rainwater tanks were widely used.
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