The article by Melanie Gosling, environmental Affairs writer refers.

Water and Environmental Affairs (DWEA) Minister Buyelwa Sonjica has said that her department was forging ahead with plans to supply desalinated water to Cape Town, and furthermore extract water from the Table Mountain (TM) aquifer.

As mentioned in the article, all rivers in the Western Cape have been dammed, and the maximum amount of water is being extracted. There is no more water that can possibly be squeezed from our rivers. What was not said is that this water is used, polluted and largely wasted to rivers around the Western Cape with concomitant damage to riverine and marine life.

The focus has always been and remains to supply more and more water.

Now DWEA are looking at other ways, hence the aquifer extraction and sea water desalination. Has the Minister not been advised by scientists that by extracting fossil water from the TM aquifer, the relatively finite amount of water in the aquifer is being permanently reduced for all practical intents and purposes. This is a fossil aquifer, and has been there for millions of years. Not only would extraction permanently reduce the amount of water in the aquifer, but it would also jeopardise plant and animal life as well as rivers within the aquifer system. If you for instance pump water out near Cape Town, there will be a lessening of available water as far as Port Elizabeth!

Desalination plants are able to send distasteful but pure water to Cape Town, but how do desalination plants dispose of the high saline water once the pure water has been extracted? This high saline water is sent back to the sea. The plants and animals that are found within the sea current of this highly saline water are likely to be adversely affected. This is aside from the higher cost of the water to consumers.

One of the problems with supplying more water is that this means more water going into the sewers. Local sewage plants spill up to 35% of the volume of raw untreated effluent into estuaries, rivers canals, and directly into the sea. This is because they are not able to cope with the current amount of water passing through them, let alone any future augmented amount. The money charged for the treatment of sewerage is not currently being put back into maintenance and building of new sewage treatment works. This money is used elsewhere.

Not only does this mean that there are plans to use water which is not sustainable, but treatment of the effluent which is not currently sustainable, is going to be further degraded. I need to put this very simply for all South Africans to understand, and not just the Minister of Water Affairs: Desalination of sea water is not sustainable. This process of supply of water destroys the sea, land and air. Removal of ground water from the TM Aquifer is not sustainable. This cannot be difficult to comprehend.

Please rather put the money that you would have spent on your proposed but unsustainable augmentation systems into education, to teach people to use less water. After all the first democratic Minister of Water Affairs Prof. Kader Asmal, said: “Ways must be found to use less water”. Instead of augmenting the supply of water, the demand for water must be managed and reduced. There are many ways to do this, but at present none are being prioritised. The recent water week passed unmentioned (and probably unnoticed) by government or the press.

Eskom has made environmentally laughable their rebate system for solar geysers with their new loan to build a huge coal fired generating plant with a loan, the biggest ever given to anyone by the World Bank. I appeal to the Department of Water and Environmental Affairs not to make a similar environmental fool of themselves by giving lip service to the use of less water (which is all the effort they are currently putting into the management and reduction of the demand for water) while at the same time introducing new unsustainable and environmentally unsound water supplies. Never has it been truer, that energy and water are inseparably intertwined. Each kilowatt hour of electricity generated in South Africa costs 1.32 litres of water, making ESKOM the biggest single consumer of water in the country. This situation is made far worse by adding dirty power for manufacturing clean water to the list of environmental misdemeanours.

This announcement to desalinate sea water is just too close to the announcement last week of the approval of the building of this new power station. Has our Minister been asked please to spend some of this new electricity supply on energy hungry desalination plants? Any thoughts about environmental matters? Water and Environmental Affairs fall within the same Ministerial Department. It seems that Environmental Affairs is currently being sidelined to the detriment of the country.

Jeremy Westgarth-Taylor

A climatologist from the University of South Africa (Unisa) has helped develop a low cost, eco-friendly system to harvest moisture from abundant mountain fog in a water-scarce region of the Eastern Cape, and communities there are already benefiting from it.

The project was successfully launched in Cabazane Village, in the rural Mount Ayliff area in the north of the province, in mid-March 2010 during the annual National Water Week.

The area, which falls in the picturesque Alfred Nzo district municipality, is bordered to the north by the mountain kingdom of Lesotho and much of the terrain is steep and remote, with very cold winters and mild summers. Fog is a frequent visitor and a ready source of clean water.

Professor Jana Olivier of Unisa’s School of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences has spent the past 20 years specialising in the properties and hazards associated with fog, especially for vehicles.

She later started delving into the technique of fog harvesting. “We got funding from the Water Research Commission, and we designed the fog water system,” she said.

Olivier teamed up with Professors Johan van Heerden, Hannes Rautenbach and Tinus Truter – all of Pretoria University – in the development of the system.

Unisa is involved in ongoing research into water harvesting from fog, especially for isolated rural communities, where water is scarce and villagers often have to walk vast distances to fetch a few litres at a time.

However, the system is only practical where fog occurs for at least 40 days a year, and for a period of several hours at a time.

The project has also been rolled out in other dry areas of South Africa, including Venda, Limpopo, and the West Coast, but Mount Ayliff’s persistent fog yields the best results, producing hundreds of litres of water a day.

“The West Coast and the mountainous areas – stretching from the Soutpansberg in the north, along the Drakensberg in the east to the Cape Mountains in the south – have the highest fog harvesting potential,” said Olivier.

Mount Ayliff is located in the Umzimvubu local municipality, one of two municipalities within Alfred Nzo – the other is Umzimkhulu. Umzimvubu’s population is just 198 550, of which only 4% live in towns – the rest live in rural areas.

Safe drinking water is a continual problem as the area lacks essential infrastructure, including water on tap. Villagers are often forced to dip into natural springs, running the risk of picking up water-borne disease.

“We have a challenge … because about 40% of our community here does not have basic water,” said Alfred Nzo mayor Gcinikhaya Mpumza.

However, the villagers’ lives have changed with the installation of the water-harvesting system and its inexhaustible supply. No electricity is needed to power the scheme, which makes it eco-friendly and low-cost, and suitable for areas with no power infrastructure.

Because the technology is simple, the equipment does not need special maintenance. The system consists of a double layer of 30% shade cloth nets stretched between steel cables supported by posts, with a gutter beneath each screen to catch the run-off. All components are readily available in the area.

The Cabazane set-up involves around 700 square metres of netting, said Olivier, with each square metre of shade cloth yielding up to five litres of water a day – depending on the weather.

Water droplets in the fog are trapped on the nets. They get bigger and heavier as the fog rolls along, and eventually run down into the gutter and from there through a filter into storage tanks. The system works best when the wind is blowing, because the fog moves over the nets more rapidly.

The system is installed up on the mountain slope, where nothing more than gravity is needed to get the drops flowing into the tanks. Reports say that about 30 homes in Cabazane Village have already benefited from the project.

The quality of water is described as “very high”, falling within the World Health Organisation’s standards for potable water. “The water is incredibly pure because it comes from the clouds,” said Olivier.

Innovative schemes like the simple and cost-effective fog harvester are well-suited to South Africa, as it’s one of the driest countries in the world, with annual rainfall well below the global average.

Source: MediaClubSouthAfrica.com

CAPE TOWN (Reuters) – South Africa will increasingly use desalinated seawater to meet growing demand for drinking water in coastal towns facing the worst drought in 150 years, the country’s water minister said on Thursday.

South Africa is a water-scarce country with an average rainfall of 450 millimetres — compared to a world average of 860 mm — and conditions are expected to worsen as a result of global climate warming.

“South Africa has a boundary consisting of approximately 3,000 kilometres of sea water, and this water is presently unusable because of its high salt content,” Water Affairs Minister Buyelwa Sonjica said in her budget vote speech on Thursday.

“We therefore made a decision to press ahead with unconventional water treatment, in this case desalination, largely because of the unavailability of river water due to drought,” she said.

Popular tourist coastal towns Plettenberg Bay, Knysna, George and Mossel Bay are facing severe water shortages due to prolonged drought in the southern Cape region.

These towns have turned to purifying seawater, as well as treating so-called grey water — waste water generated from domestic activities like laundry and bathing — to help meet their drinking needs.

Cape Town is also eyeing the option of desalinating water.

“Desalination has become the preferred purification option in terms of both the cost benefit and the flexibility of application,” Sonjica said.

However, she said the government needed to exercise caution in extending its desalination programme because of possible negative effects to the environment.

“There is ample scientific evidence that the impact of the effluents from the desalination plants on the seawater environment increase the seawater temperature, salinity, water current and turbidity,” said Sonjica.

Desalination is big business in the desert conditions of some Middle East countries, where it is a major supplier of clean drinking water to economic hubs such as Dubai.