In 2010 the SIA embarked on an ambitious leadership project to develop a process to allow the assessment of the performance of water quality treatment devices. Perhaps naively we settled on a segment of the industry as a ‘first cab off the rank’ to explore the development of a testing protocol.

At the time there were discussions within the National committee about how such an initiative may be accepted by the industry and we established a working group (comprised of a range of reps from all States to work with CSIRO to complete a literature review of the verification techniques and approaches that had been tried before both locally and internationally. We sought (and got) co-operation from many industry players and also sought to get feedback from asset managers to understand how performance met with expectations.