No business like snow business

The sewerage will be collected at the Mt Buller sewerage treatment plant, and after filtering and UV treatment , pumped 140m uphill to the Sun Valley dam topping up the snowmaking reservoir with an additional source of water that will allow for additional snowmaking capacity.

This also in principle closes the water cycle on top of the Mountain since the water collected up at Mt Buller stays on the slopes in the form of snow and when it melts most of the runoff goes back into the Boggy Creek catchment which is pumped back up to the snowmaking reservoir and so on. It potentially deprives the Howqua and Delatite Rivers of the run off. These two rivers feed the drying up Lake Eildon Reservoir.

If we set aside the increased potential for a reduction of runoff water from the ski slopes of Mt Buller into the parched dams at the bottom of the mountain, any public concerns about skiing on snow from recycled sewerage should be tempered by the knowledge that the snow already contains added substances of a biological origin such as Snowmax. This proprietary ice nucleation protein derived from Pseudomonas syringae strain 31a: a plant pathogen that causes frost damage on crop plants and was developed for its use in artificial snowmaking back in the late ’80s. It has received regulatory clearance for this use in Australia, New Zealand, North America and in Europe.

Up in the Victorian Alps there is truly “no business like snow business”. It literally forms the semi-solid foundation on which the whole thriving multimillion dollar tourism economy rests. But it is a slippery slope in years of snow drought. Any skiing in the future in ski resorts like Mt Buller is increasingly likely to be done on recycled sewerage containing artificially added bacteria or bacterial products.

Most skiers and visitors to the snow fields surely don’t mind. The snow looks real, feels real, and probably tastes real. However for the environmental sensitive skier there perhaps should be warnings on the slopes pointing out that the snow is artificial and an ingredient list of the "snow" enclosed on the lift ticket.

As Frank Zappa said in the well known song about the Eskimo boy Nannook: “Watch up where those huskies go - and don’t you eat that yellow snow.”