Nature-Clear is a grey water system designed to treat domestic wastewater excluding toilet waste. Councils are increasingly reticent to allow new homeowners to dispose of grey water without treatment. The days of being allowed to spray wastewater untreated onto the garden are coming to an end. Each state and council have their own regulations and you will need to speak to your local council to establish what they will permit alongside a waterless toilet. By way of example the following explains our understanding of the situation in Queensland. Please note however that there are variations from council to council.

Primary treated wastewater must be disposed of in sub surface trenches. Septic tanks are the main example of systems that treat only to the primary level. Secondary treated water can be disposed of at ground level either via mulch beds, drip irrigation or in some cases by spraying. Aerated water treatment systems such as Biocycle treat to secondary level. Such systems include a disinfection unit, most commonly using chlorine. These systems typically cost around $5000 plus in-ground installation. There are then annual inspection and maintenance fees, plus wear and tear and electricity costs on the pumps and aerators, totaling some $300-400 per year.

In order to satisfy the new council requirements Nature Loo has developed a grey water system which cleans waste water via a natural grease trap and gravity fed sand filtration. We recently achieved approval for use of the system to treat water to the primary level. We will now seek secondary treatment approval. In the interim, please propose the system to your geotechnical consultant and/or council. If you would like us to do this for you we will be happy to do so.

Your council will probably ask you for a site plan. You will need to engage a geotechnical consultant or engineer to test your soil and produce a plan for distribution of the treated water. Make sure your engineer allows for the lower volume of water associated with a waterless toilet. This should result in trenches only 65% of the length of trenches for septic systems handling both black (toilet) water and grey water. We have found that some geotechnical consultants have only experience with the more expensive Aerated Water Treatment Systems, and do not want to design a system around a waterless toilet. You should check before engaging the engineer that they are happy to work with you in designing a system which is based on waterless toilets. We can help with finding what we consider to be unbiased engineers.

The Nature-Clear system is clearly explained in the literature. If your council or geotechnician will not allow the installation of Nature-Clear then you can still propose a waterless toilet, but will need treatment of grey water to be via a conventional grease trap and pump well into trenches. The alternative to this is a small septic tank just for grey water. We would very much appreciate the opportunity to speak to your council, if this is the case, and provide the latest test results on Nature-Clear.

Nature-Clear provides a simple and low cost effective means of treating grey water. Not only is the equipment low cost, but also, if your site is suitable, the only excavation work required to install the system will be the trenching. The ongoing costs will be less than those of a standard septic system.

The filtration tank, which is less than 1 cubic meter in size, consists of a natural grease trap on top of a sand filter. The grease trap is designed to catch scraps from the kitchen sink and lint from the washing machine. The sand filter traps any finer materials and cleans the water. The grease trap consists of a filter bag containing pine bark. The filtered material and bark will compost over time and should be removed once a year and replaced with fresh bark. If your distribution area is down hill from the filtration tank your engineer should be able to design a distribution system without the use of a pump. If this is not the case, you will need our pump well and pump.
If desired, and the pipes from the house are at a suitable height, the tank can sit on the ground. If this is not possible, it will require a pit around 700 mm deep.

The 225 litre pump well contains a submersible pump with float switch, capable of lifting water to a height of 5 metres. The tank, which measures 850mm in height and 820mm in diameter, can be located on the ground alongside the filtration tank, but performs better if put in a shallow pit so that its base is 400mm lower than the base of the filtration tank.

As Nature-Clear has recently been approved as a primary treatment system, we recommend that you distribute the treated water into a trench system, as specified by a geotechnical consultant. Make sure that his calculations of trench size do not include an allowance for toilet water, which would make them unnecessarily large and more expensive.
Your plumber can lay the treated water application area (distribution system) in accordance with the site plan.

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