Our Urban Rain Water Harvesting Project

The Social Studies and Science departments have completed a cross-curricular unit that involved students piloting a project to harvest rain water at Wellington East.  They did practical research at Massey University and had a project launch which was attended by local members of parliament. 

Year 10 students spent Term 2 2008 learning how and why to harvest rain water in what can only be called our inclement Wellington environment. We discovered that Wellington has plenty of rainfall, but limited storage capacity. Our city council has signalled water supply as an area of concern in our communities.

Our school also has responsibilities in the event of an emergency. We discovered that the Civil Defence recommends 5 litres per person for 5 days. This upward shift in requirements needs to be met somehow. How? By collecting a free resource and storing it for emergencies.

We have had excellent community support from Devan Plastics, Guttertank, Marley NZ, Environmental Diagnostics, and Massey University. We learnt about the process of Rain Water Harvesting at Massey University, and all the companies came on board by providing the equipment for Stage One of our 5 year project.

Thanks to our sponsors, we now have 5,600 litres of rain water storage capacity on site. In five years we aim to have 25,000 litres of stored rain water available for use in emergencies. Students will have water monitoring responsibilities from 2009, as part of the new learning opportunities this programme provides us with.

Our funding and resourcing planning is underway.

In the long run we aim to use this water in areas where treated water is not necessary; our gardens and to flush our toilet cisterns. We are proud of the community links we have made, and of the impact this project will have on our ability to sustain ourselves.