A new team member with a bike-load of enthusiasm

Essential Environmental welcomes a new team member, Rebecca Mackintosh. Rebecca comes with a lot of passion toward the environment having volunteered with friends groups in urban stream restoration for nearly 15 years. Rebecca has recently completed her civil engineering degree and with her final year project/thesis on water sensitive urban design, she caught the eye of Essential Environmental.

Using Liege St Wetland in the City of Canning as a case study, Rebecca’s project entailed looking at the cost and benefit of the construction of rain gardens as an upstream nutrient intervention in comparison to remedial works done to improve the wetlands treatment efficiency.

Her research concluded the rain gardens were a cost efficient and beneficial alternative to the remedial works with an 8% decrease in spending. The research also indicated that closer attention must be made to the big contributors of stormwater runoff (i.e. shopping centre carparks) within the catchment to the efficiency of an urban treatment wetland.

Apart from compiling data, Rebecca is an avid backyard gardener, propagating new seedling from established herbs every year, trying her hand at being a novice seamstress and riding her old-but-beloved postie bike.

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