1962

The Bondi Wastewater Sewage Treatment Plant at North Bondi was the nation’s largest when it was opened in 1962. It is buried deep underground, below Bondi Golf Club in excavated sandstone, and many residents don’t know it’s there.

It was the first treatment plant to be located underground in tunnels and buried chambers and was the first to be attached to a deep ocean outfall sewer.

Today, it takes wastewater from more than 500,000 inhabitants and discharges up to 680 million litres a day of treated effluent through the deep-water ocean outfall 2-3km offshore.

The wastewater is filtered through fine screens to remove items such as paper, cotton tips, plastic, sand and solids that have settled at the bottom of sedimentation tanks. It also filters and removes oil and grease that floats to the top.

Until the late 1800s, Sydney’s untreated sewage was largely discharged straight into the sea via the original Bondi Ocean Outfall System.

In 1936, the first wastewater treatment plant was built and ungraded in 1962, but sewage still poured into the sea just 500 metres from Bondi Beach and created a grey-brown plume off Ben Buckler headland. Prevailing winds would blow ‘Bondi Cigars’ and ‘Brown Mullet’ - nicknames for raw sewage - onto the beach.

Surfer Andrew Heard, a Sydney Water hydrographer, recalled: ‘Whenever there was any wet weather, it would be terrible. You could see the sewage, smell the filth.’ For much of the 20th century, Bondi was often smelly, thanks to the methane gas emitted from the plant’s venting tower.

Throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, Bondi surf events were regularly cancelled and residents began protesting about pollution. In 1989, more than 100,000 people attended the Turn Back the Tide concert on Bondi Beach to ‘protest the poo’.

Work began on the deep-water offshore ocean outfall and, once operational, its filtration system quickly improved water quality, with purified sewage pumped 3km out to sea. In 2016, work began on solving odour problems.

The 2020–2021 NSW State of the Beaches report rated Bondi’s water quality as ‘good’.

Courtesy Waverley Library Local Studies Collection and AusImage product - Sinclair Knight Merz.