A day in the life of your poo

Canberra has a massive network of pipes that feed water to your home and lets your waste slide away. If you laid our pipes end-to-end they’d reach from Canberra to Vietnam. While your poo may start in the toilet it doesn’t always go to the same place. We have two facilities that treat Canberra’s poo. The first is our Fyshwick Sewage Treatment Plant. This site usually holds waste temporarily before sending it to our primary facility. The second is the Lower Molonglo Water Quality Control Centre (LMWQCC). This is our major treatment plant which handles almost all of Canberra’s wastewater, twenty-four hours a day.

When the toilet flushes your poo begins its journey to the wastewater treatment plant. It makes its way through your internal plumbing before slipping into our sewerage network. Gravity carries your poo most of the way, but sometimes it needs a little push. When your poo needs to get over a hill, it goes through a pump station. Then, when it needs to get back down, we might send it through a vortex – which works just like water leaving your bathtub. Once your poo has made its way to our Lower Molonglo treatment plant, we collect it all together and send it on a journey through Pooland.