Health risk assessment and management approaches for recycled water irrigation in agriculture

This PhD portfolio presents five papers which identify innovative health risk assessment and management approaches for securing safe irrigation with recycled water in agriculture. They are based on a research project from 2002 to 2012 carried out primarily at the Hawkesbury Water Recycling Scheme (HWRS) in Sydney's northwest, which irrigates a wide range of food crops and pasture types using tertiary treated sewage effluent from the Richmond sewage treatment plant (STP). Most of this irrigation takes place on the Hawkesbury agricultural campus of the University of Western Sydney (UWS). Motivation for the project came from a number of local and international health incidents involving large-scale contamination of food or water with faecal matter, raising concerns which overspilled into the agricultural irrigation sector. Reliance by irrigation schemes on a single set of water quality data supplied by the STP was challenged, given the potential for change in water quality as the result of bacterial growth, or through contamination by farm or wild animals including birds during environmentally-open scheme storage. This and other issues required investigation and a research project was initiated by the author following a request from the HWRS