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Evaluation of an environmental education and enforcement program for urban stormwater (Funded by City of Kingston) |
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Steve Marshall , Tony Barrett (City of Kingston), Dr Vincent Pettigrove (Melbourne Water).
Environmental education and enforcement
(E&E) programs have become a popular strategy to address the widespread
pollution of urban stormwater; however, it is often difficult to directly
evaluate the effectiveness of such programs in reducing pollutant loads in
stormwater. Traditional approaches to stormwater quality evaluation typically
rely on continuous flow rate monitoring and automated collection of water
samples for chemical analysis to derive an event mean concentration for each
pollutant of concern. In contrast, adsorptive media provide an integrated
measure of the mean pollutant concentrations. This approach is more
cost-effective than continuous monitoring; little specialised equipment is
required, and pollutant concentrations in solid media are more consistent
within sites. We applied this method to the problem of E&E program evaluation
for the City of Kingston council, located 25 km
south east of Melbourne.
Drains were monitored initially over eight sample collections, grouped into
pairs on the basis of similar pollutant profiles, and one catchment in each
pair randomly assigned to either control or treatment groups. Over the
following six months premises located in catchments designated “treatment” received
an E&E program delivered by City of Kingston
stormwater officers, while premises located in catchments designated “control”
will be ignored. At the conclusion of the E&E program, all drains were monitored
for an additional eight sample collections, and the effectiveness of the E&E
program in reducing the pollutant loads in stormwater from “treatment”
catchments will be evaluated.
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