Evaluation of an environmental education and enforcement program for urban stormwater (Funded by City of Kingston) | Print |


  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.