Eastern Treatment Plant Bundle

Melbourne Water’s ETP Bundle project was a critical infrastructure upgrade of Melbourne’s Eastern Treatment Plant. The project encompassed the replacement and augmentation of key preliminary and primary treatment systems, including the influent screenings facility, grit removal units, and primary sedimentation tanks (PSTs). 

These vital upgrades aimed to enhance the plant’s processing capacity, resilience, operability and safety, in order to ensure that it can reliably meet consumer water service demands through to 2052-53.

The project’s objectives include increased capacity and resilience of the screenings, grit and primary treatment systems, as well as improved safety and maintainability for the plant’s operations and maintenance teams. Additionally, it would future-proof critical infrastructure to meet long-term population and flow projections.

During the concept design phase, Touch Projects identified the need to address gaps in the original options assessment process. A number of steps were undertaken to counter this, including the facilitation of a Traffic Light Assessment workshop, introducing a Red-Amber-Green (RAG) approach to transparently evaluate options against key criteria. Next, decision-making was streamlined by refining a broad set of concepts into four well-defined, viable options. Finally, a robust Multi-Criteria Analysis (MCA) workshop was facilitated, combining qualitative and quantitative evaluations to identify the preferred solution.

Touch Projects proactively ensured stakeholder engagement throughout the project, resulting in strong alignment, confidence in the selected pathway, and momentum toward the business case phase. Ultimately, the project delivers an upgraded and integrated screenings, grit and primary treatment system that is safe, resilient and capable of meeting ETP’s operational and regulatory performance targets.