South East Queensland
9.10 Direct discharge by user

The volumetric value for the line item at the end of the 2012–13 year was 5,274 ML.

This line item includes industrial and commercial businesses that discharge trade waste directly to surface water, rather than discharging their trade waste to the urban wastewater collection system. These businesses are licensed and report to the Department of Environment and Heritage Protection (EHP) via the WaTERS database.

Department of Science, Information Technology, Innovation and the Arts (DSITIA): discharge data from the Water Tracking and Electronic Reporting System (WaTERS).

DSITIA on behalf of WaTERS.

WaTERS contains both wastewater treatment plant discharges, and industrial and commercial  discharges.  WaTERS was queried for commercial and industrial discharge volumes in the 2012–13 year.

Data reported by South East Queensland (SEQ) discharge licence holders was filtered to differentiate between 'reuse' and 'discharge'. Discharges were then filtered to differentiate land, surface water and marine discharge. The discharges to surface water were selected and reported for this line item.

The data in the WaTERS have been collected, measured and reported by third parties (licence holders). The QA/QC of this data is not within DSITIA control, and it has been assumed that these data are accurate and complete.

Data for three industrial discharges could not be quantified for the 2012–13 year.

The uncertainty estimate was not quantified.