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.

Across the globe, more and more people are starting to focus their attention on water. This is due the the increasing scarcity of clean water, and price is the controlling mechanism.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a speech on World Water Day, that “more people die from unsafe water than from all forms of violence, including war. These deaths are an affront to our common humanity, and undermine the efforts of many countries to achieve their development potential.” He announced this year’s theme focuses of “Clean Water for a Healthy World.”

“Our growing population’s need for water for food, raw materials and energy is increasingly competing with nature’s own demands for water to sustain already imperiled ecosystems and the services on which we depend,” Ban said. “Day after day, we pour millions of tons of untreated sewage and industrial and agricultural waste into the world’s water systems. Clean water has become scarce and will become even scarcer with the onset of climate change.”

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) believes one way to get smart is to better price water. It says putting the right price on water will encourage people to waste less, pollute less and invest more in water infrastructure.

Tariffs for water and wastewater services vary, according to the OECD. For example, a bathtub of water in Denmark and Scotland can cost 10 times more than in Mexico, while Irish households pay no direct fees for water, the OECD says. Water bill increases over the last decade have been primarily driven by higher wastewater charges. In many OECD countries it now costs more to get rid of wastewater than to bring in drinking water.

Pollution, in other words, is adding up to a big and costly problem. Businesses are beginning to get wise to this. We should, too.

Just five beverage companies consume enough water over the course of a year to satisfy the daily water needs of every person on the planet. Of course, we may not be able to control how much water is put in a can of soda or a beer, or the amount it takes to make paper, but we can control our own use at the workplace and even influence those who manage supplies. It may not be our nickel that gets spent on the utility bill at work, but the gains are certainly ours when we reduce the corporate water footprint on the planet.

Water prices are poised to rise due to increased water stress, and corporate growth is expected to be impeded as resources dwindle. Make no mistake, all of this comes out of our paychecks in one way or another.

Many people are still unaware of how they are charged for wastewater disposal. If you are looking at reducing you wastewater charge on your municipal account there here are a few easy solution. Keep in mind that your waste water charge is calculated at 70% of your fresh water use by volume.

• Harvest rainwater from your roof and use this water inside you home or to irrigate your garden.
• Reuse your bath,shower water (grey water) for either toilet flushing of garden irrigation.
• Use your fresh water wisely and only where needed. Clean fresh water has become a scare commodity. By saving as much water as possible you will not only be doing the next generation a favour but also helping the environment.

ABC News
If water is the next battleground for a globe facing dwindling water resources, then this 1960s-style community center at the northern end of Los Angeles’ Koreatown is at the forefront of the fight. On this day, Laura Allen, cofounder of Greywater Action, a group that encourages conserving and reusing household water, is in her fourth of a five-day workshop teaching Californians how to reclaim and recycle what has been dubbed “gray water.”

Typically, gray water includes the discharge from washing machines, sinks, showers, and tubs, which is then used to provide moisture for outdoor plants, from backyard rosebushes to large orchards. While progress has been made — many institutions, corporations, and municipalities around the world use gray water — activists say there’s still a long way to go. And it’s groups such as Greywater Action that are helping to drive change.

“Grass-roots efforts — seeing an issue and trying to do something by acting individually and being responsible stewards — are very important,” says Kathy Robb, founder and director of the Water Policy Institute in New York.

As an example, she points to the fact that before regulations in California were changed last August to make it legal for homeowners to install or alter a simple gray-water system without a construction permit, there were already an estimated 2 million unpermitted systems in the Golden State.

This is evidence, Ms. Allen says, that, given the opportunity, state residents will embrace the technology for both economic and environmental reasons.
‘Laundry to Landscape’ Systems

‘This is the way the world is going. We all need to learn to save water,” says Trent Cawthon, a handyman from Redondo Beach, Calif., who aspires to be a contractor and feels that expertise with gray-¬water systems will make his services more valuable.

Mr. Cawthon is part of a four-person team that has designed a simple “laundry-to-landscape” system. They will practice their skills at the community center, running plastic pipes from the laundry room to the front of the building, where the rinse water will irrigate four fruit trees. Cawthorn’s teammate, Allan Haskell from Echo Park, Calif., runs a green consulting business that helps restaurants find compostable containers for takeout food. He hopes to expand his business to encompass gray-water planning.

Diana Lawrence, a former urban planner, is attending the workshop because she hopes to downsize her utility bills through gray-water usage.

Landscape architect Robin Grabs of San Pedro, Calif., has come because two clients requested gray-water systems. It’s fascinating, she says, but the amount of information is overwhelming.

Allen understands this reaction. “Fitting all the important things that gray water brings into a five-day class and a manageable package is a challenge,” she says. The course has to cover plant and soil information, plumbing, and landscaping and design skills. It’s aimed at a wide range of users – from those who must work within small budgets to those with larger ambitions, as well as people who simply want to water the plants in their yard inexpensively and those who might have a large commercial landscape.

Legalization Boosts Demand

In the months since California changed the gray-water permit requirements, demand has begun to build statewide, says John Leys of Sherwood Design Engineers in San Francisco, which has clients across the United States as well as abroad.

Mr. Leys recently consulted on new ¬water-planning regulations for Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, which has water needs similar to those in the American Southwest.

‘Ten years ago, we were not seeing any demand for gray-water systems,” he says, but now clients of all types are requesting projects that range from simple and inexpensive backyard irrigation retrofits to complex, multipurpose gray-water systems that are part of the design from the beginning.
Leys notes that as pressures over drought regulations and energy conservation have started to build, many businesses have begun to see that reclamation and reuse make sense from both a business and an environmental standpoint.

For instance, if a development of 10,000 new homes reduces its overall potable water use by as much as 25 percent, he says, that means a huge savings in construction and utility costs.

Most of the momentum toward greater use of gray-water systems is not being driven by economics — yet. “But that is inevitable,” Leys says, “if you consider that despite the vast oceans covering the planet, less than 1 percent of the world’s water is both fresh and accessible for human use.”

He believes that it’s important to plan for solutions in advance of a water crisis, and that when and how that’s done will become critical.

Today, even with conventional water-supply strategies and technologies, water shortages are common in communities around the globe. The World Health Organization reports that more than 2 billion people — roughly 1 out of every 3 people on the planet — live in a water-stressed area.

Commenting on the importance of reclaiming and reusing water, Leys says: “History demonstrates that properly managed water resources can be the deciding factor in determining the habitability of an individual site, the sustainability of a community, or the survival of an entire civilization.”