There are many activities, documentaries and social campaigns set out on educating the masses on environmental related issues. Most of them are effective but they do not directly address the topic on wastewater because for most part the population tend to be unaware of most problems nationally and globally. These campaigns do make viewers rethink their practices and how it damages the environment, so this is a good start to making progress. However, we are very much lacking the educational programs pertaining to wastewater treatments. Even when we flick through the TV channels, how often do we come across the topic of wastewater treatments? As far as I can recall not even once! Nonetheless there are wastewater expo events running throughout Australia which are free to attend, and few educational programs set out there to educate especially the younger viewers.
Waste Expo Australia presents Wastewater Summit a free-to-attend seminar program. This educational component is led by the industry’s experts, giving industry professionals the opportunity to share knowledge on a range of topics including innovation, technology, regulation and new industry developments. The purpose of this seminar is to confront the challenges and opportunities in wastewater treatment through technology, strategy and compliance. Wastewater Summit hosts three distinct focus areas with the first being technology: seizing opportunities in wastewater technology and innovation, with the second being strategy:creating new revenue streams through wastewater to energy and developing cost effective strategies. Last but not the least it deals with compliance: navigating the regulatory framework to understand impacts to your organisation
A notable example is the ‘’World Toilet Day’’ campaign on 19th November 2016 which is an opportunity to teach young and old Australians. World Toilet Day is an official United Nations international observance day on 19 November to inspire action to tackle the global sanitation crisis. Four and a half billion people worldwide live without proper sanitation. World Toilet Day was established by the World Toilet Organization in 2001. The programs teaches the different type of waste that goes in the kitchen sink, rubbish bins and down the toilet drain. It also teaches students that waste does not magically disappear and the effect it can have on our beautiful beaches, rivers (swan river for example) and our environmental as well.
Social media, marketing and innovation has a direct positive effect on wastewater education whether directly or indirectly. These strategies of spreading the message makes an average consumer much more aware of how their actions affect the world we live in. Not only do the two mentioned organisation help raise awareness, they are also involved in the building, funding and supplying resources in order to achieve their goals. For example the organisation World Toilet Day, they have a set target of goals for every upcoming year. There should be no one single strategy to follow to inspire change in people rather we should utilize every method in the book to spread the message. There are many initiatives that promote this but they are not so well know given that they are not given enough media coverage and the fact is that most of us simply do not care about such issues.
As helpful as it is having such programs, we need a more effective method of preaching wastewater practices and my first recommendation is through popular TV channels and many electronic posters around especially in cities where population is quite dense. Electronic posters keep people more interested and updated with ease and this has zero consequence on resource to spread awareness. This is also where the government comes into the picture since they control the media to quite a large extent as well as influence on large companies and organisations. The government needs to make changes in law towards sustainable practices. We need the key big players to make an effort to sustainable practices because that’s where we can see the greatest changes. Sure, individually we can help but there’s only so much we can do.
I’m willing to bet that majority of people today don’t even know that toilet can be recycled into drinking water and imagine their surprise when they find out about this. In such a modern world that we live in today, people are still quite behind on general knowledge. So who is at fault for their lack of education? I do not like to point fingers as we are all partially guilty but the main blame goes back to the government. They control the news media but yet decide to show us news that a lot of the times are of no benefit to the society and at times counter productive. This is the perfect opportunity to use the popular channels to run shows on wastewater treatment, recycling and transportation to give the average consumer a basic understanding of the dire situation we live in. The whole world lives on social media and TV so we should exploit this tactic to educate.
Wastewater Engineering 
Wow very eye catching headline. “either your with us or against us”.
your very clear and your information is very helpful and i have learnt alot from you.
so thank you and good luck.
LikeLike
I would first like to say ‘i am with you’. There is a great lack of education when it come to wastewater treatment and though i agree that we need to start educating children throughout school but how can we achieve this. Maybe some ideas on what kind of curricula we can enforce in our schools to promote wastewater education. We all know (to a certain extent) that there is something wrong with our water supply, such as the lack of water, but how do we push the government to enforce waste water education?
LikeLike