2009/08/31
FROM the toilet to your tap, the thought of drinking recycled sewage may not be everybody’s cup of tea, but it could solve the country’s water woes.
As hard as the thought is to stomach, a R2.5 million experimental sewage-to-water treatment plant in Alexandria could just be the answer to water shortages on the Sunshine Coast and the rest of the country.
After three years of lobbying for State funding, a proposal by local water engineer Steven Fick to supplement the town’s water shortages using recycled sewage, was finally given the green light six month ago.
Although it’s a new concept in South Africa, Fick said the rest of the world has been producing drinking water from waste for more than 50 years. “It is difficult for most people to get their head around the thought that they are drinking water obtained from recycled domestic sewage, but the final product is much better than the quality of most bottled water bought in the shops.”
After years of trying to come up with alternative water supply sources for Alexandria, which relies on extracting the precious resource from already stretched nearby coastal sand dunes, Fick and his company, P&S Consulting, decided to look into recycled sewage to stop the town from running dry.
The fully computerised system was supplied by Cape Town-based GrahamTek Systems , which built a larger scale plant in Singapore that produces 85 megalitres a day.
The whole of Ndlambe presently uses less than 15 megalitres a day and the plant will boost the town’s supply by 300 cubic metres daily .
After operating “beautifully” for a month, Fick said the experimental plant was shut down to allow glitches to be sorted out. The plant will run for three months before embarking on a year-long contract to produce water for the town .
The waste is taken through several computerised processes including sand filtering, reverse osmosis and other filtration techniques, before it is chlorinated and UV sterilised.
Systems operator Jessi Jacobs said his friends and family were already hooked on the idea of drinking recycled sewage.
“They love the water … it tastes like mother’s milk.” - By DAVID MACGREGOR, Port Alfred Bureau
|