Some Meander Valley businesses are angry about TasWater imposts on trade waste and grease traps ramping up their costs.

Deloraine resident Malcolm Eastley believes TasWater’s bills for residents and businesses are too high. He presented some local businesses’ opinions to the recent Legislative Council inquiry into TasWater.

TasWater’s responses follow Malcolm Eastley’s claims.

SEWAGE COSTS

Malcolm says: Tasmanians are being charged twice as much for sewage as Melbourne people

TasWater claims Tasmanian water and sewage charges are in line with mainland prices.

The reality is that Tasmania has a natural advantage in water pricing due to ready availability. Melbourne has to buy a third of its water from a desalination plant. Our price for water is only half or even less than say, City West Melbourne, but we are being charged twice as much for sewage.

A typical pensioner couple pays the fixed charge of $650. In Melbourne it would be $341, made up of a $256 network charge plus $85 treatment. City West charges 86c/kl for residential sewage and TasWater charges $3.41/kl.

The cost of residential water/ sewage charges has risen by 400 per cent since TasWater started but in many cases small businesses are paying 10 times as much.

Under Tasmania’s Water and Sewage Corporation Act 2012, TasWater must use volume pricing for both water and sewage billing (section 16:3) but both TasWater and the economic regulator have interpreted that as being optional, despite the fact that water meters are now universal and readings are used in the water section of the bill.

The fixed sewage charge used by TasWater is based on 200 kl per year, but the rest of Australia uses a three-person residence/150 kl per year as the basis.

Prices are also boosted by ‘leakage’, unmetered or illegal connections. TasWater customers are paying for this.

TasWater knows how much water is treated and goes into storage, compared with how much is charged by the residential meters. The leakage is a deficit of 25–30 per cent.

Instead of averaging the meter readings to find the average usage, TasWater has divided the total treated water by the number of connections to get a figure of 191 kl and rounded that to 200 kl per year as the basis of calculations.

Commercial customers fare even worse as this inflated usage figure (200 kl instead of 150 kl) is then used as the basis of the Equivalent Tenement calculations. Note that if City West Water had chosen to use the fixed sewage charge method their ET charge would be $375 compared to TasWater’s $650.

TasWater response:

It is difficult to undertake direct comparison of prices between water utilities as the costs to supply services vary greatly based on a number of factors.

Tasmania is at a significant cost disadvantage compared to most other Australian water and sewerage businesses because of our dispersed population, geography and the resultant inability to create economies of scale. Despite this, Tasmanians pay in the lower range of water and sewage service charges nationally.

Melbourne for example, has two major sewage treatment plants (STPs) that service millions of customers. This provides them with significant economies of scale, while Tasmania has 110 STPs to service 550,000 people spread around the state.

Melbourne’s sewerage network comprises 3,000 km of pipes. TasWater manages 4,813 km of often-ageing sewer pipes.

Melbourne Water has 4.2 million customers. TasWater has approximately 220,000 customers.

TRADE WASTE

Malcolm says: Tasmanian businesses pay twice as much in trade waste as Melbourne businesses

TasWater multiplies the treatment cost of residential sewage by four to establish the treatment charges for cafés and restaurants.

In Melbourne, café trade waste is regarded as very low risk and billed at only twice the base price.

It is also billed as non-residential sewage and not as trade waste, the charges being 86c/kl residential and cafés $1.76/kl.

The actual cost to TasWater of treating waste with higher oil content is only the cost of adding enough water to the treatment tanks to dilute to an acceptable level, or extra time in the tanks, so even doubling the base cost is more than enough for cost recovery.

When calculating the number of ETs to be applied in commercial bills TasWater does not use the volume supplied but two different methods for sewage and trade waste, then adds them together .

Trade waste is assessed as 80 per cent of meter reading, with 20 per cent assumed as used in cooking or consumed. But this is only accurate for premises without toilets.

Sewage use is based on a calculation using floor area and a porcelain count to arrive at a theoretical maximum seating capacity and usage, and then applied as annual usage. This is often very inaccurate, and despite an example in a Regulator’s Report of a business assessed as 2.4 ETs, i.e. 480 kl per year when the meter reading was only 20 kl, nothing has been done.

TasWater response:

The prices for water, sewage and trade waste are verified and approved by the Tasmanian Economic Regulator and prices cannot increase above the approved regulatory allowance.

TasWater proposes its plans for what it will charge and how it will spend the money it collects in its price and service plan. The Tasmanian Economic Regulator reviews this plan in detail over a ten-month period before it is approved and implemented.

Trade waste customers pay additional charges to cover the cost of transporting and treating their business waste and managing its impact on TasWater’s sewerage network. These charges vary depending on the type of business.

In recognition that Tasmanians may have faced some form of financial difficulty as a result of COVID-19, TasWater froze all prices for 12 months from 1 July 2020. In addition, eligible small businesses received a 100 per cent rebate on their TasWater bill issued between 1 April and 30 June 2020.

GREASE TRAPS FOR CAFÉS

Malcolm says: Most cafés do not need a grease trap

TasWater makes grease traps compulsory for cafés regardless of volume or oil content produced, knowing that installation is costly or even impossible on some sites and adds $1,000 a year in pump-out costs.

TasWater offers four-year loans of up to $60,000 for installation but that means that anyone unlucky enough to have a difficult site faces four years of water bills of $19,000 a year.

In TasWater’s concern that coagulating fats pose the risk of blocked pipes they fail to understand that:

• modern cooking oils do not coagulate at room temperature

• the net effect on TasWater is zero if people choosing not to cook at home where they do not need a grease trap go to a pub or café

• substances from a café sink must first pass through a 2mm hole in a sink basket

• most cafés cook meat on griddle plates which are wiped and scraped clean.

TasWater response:

Trade waste refers to any liquid waste generated by business that does not include domestic sewage from toilets, hand basins and showers. It includes fats, food, oil, grease, solvents, paints, pesticides and other chemicals.

There are very real risks associated with trade waste entering the sewerage network. If not managed appropriately it causes damage, blockages and spills and can disrupt and significantly increase the cost of the sewage treatment process and harm the environment.

Before TasWater introduced a trade waste policy, every customer paid for the additional waste produced by businesses. This was unfair on residential customers and saw impacts on infrastructure, safety, and the environment.

TasWater has approximately 3,700 commercial trade waste customers and 78 per cent of these customers have already installed the required pre-treatment systems.

TasWater’s trade waste team work collaboratively with business owners to ensure they have the appropriate pre-treatment systems in place.