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systems that provide the raw water and the pumping systems that would be needed to drive them would make new developments far less viable and that developer shareholders should not be required to carry such costs etc. etc. etc.
We also have the circumstance that Water Companies have at their disposal huge amounts of water that could be recycled but that is not, that which exits the sewage treatment plants. Again, as with property developers the reasons for not recycling is probably cost and the effect this cost would have on potential profits. To take the effluent which, due to the previously mentioned high standards of cleanliness required by law, could be recycled and piped and pumped back to the top end of the water process. It may be relatively expensive to set up yes, but it is possible and the ongoing cost to run it may be offset by the need to look at opening up new water sources in the future or building new reservoirs to collect naturally produced water supplies. The argument again is that Water Companies have a primary duty to shareholders to maximise profit and therefore should not be put in a position where they should have to fund such a recycling system on their own, if at all. There services are in effect to supply drinking water on the one hand and remove wastewater once used – that is all.
Such a system would also require a major strategic plan and with, as in the UK, Water Companies working on a five year revenue/profit cycle, the investment needed to construct and run such a recycling system would not stand a chance in the water industry planning process or in any profit projections scenario. The short term profit driver negates any practical solution being put into place over any useful timeframe as investors (who probably take the provision of water as guaranteed much of the time) want to see their returns this year, not next or further down the line.
The counter argument has to be that if as a population we do not do something now or at least in the very near future we do face the prospect of increased and prolonged water poverty even in developed countries, despite most people taking water availability for granted. Either the sources of raw water will simply dry up through over extraction to feed too big a population or global warming will ensure that replenishment of those raw water sources is nowhere near as guaranteed as it has been previously. We are seeing this already as drought periods increase in developed countries, even in these relatively early stages of climate change. More often today drought conditions are being declared after just a few weeks of minimal rainfall instead of the several months without rainfall that it would have been historically.
So, what could be the answers to these difficult questions? First, whilst we all know that developers are there not to build houses for the population to live in but to make the most profit they can for their investors, there is a need to get houses built but also to ensure that they are equipped with the systems that will help minimise the potential for water poverty at local, national and ultimately global levels now and into the future. Similarly Water Companies (at least the privatised ones) are there to maximise profit for their shareholders, whether many or few. So they too will look at minimising costs as previously mentioned. For Government owned and run water authorities this should not be such a barrier but with increasingly limited budgets available from tax receipts and consumer revenues as governments try to minimise costs to their populations there is also pressure not to spend.
What really needs to be appreciated here is that the requirement to instigate water recycling on the larger scale will be necessary at some point in the not too distant future if water supplies are to be maintained and grown to meet increasing population demands across all forms of consumption. What also needs to be appreciated is that it will never be as cheap to do these things as it is now, everything rises in price over time from the products needed to create the pipe networks to the contractor costs for installing them and the costs of running them once installed. So, it will only get ever-more expensive therefore to achieve the necessary changes unless they are started now.
16 drain TRADER | April 2018 |
www.draintraderltd.com
Also, it should be obvious that it is always cheaper to design such recycling into a system at the start of a programme than it is to retro-fit any such system after development has taken place. This applies not only to the construction of new housing or industrial/commercial sites in developed countries but also to areas of the world where new water supply system are now being installed on a large scale or where the various charities are bringing in new water sources. There is always the potential for wastewater to recycle back into any new wells thereby contaminating the new water supply if the waste product is not handled correctly so negating ultimately the availability of the new clean water source and wasting the hard earned and raised monies that provided them.
Ultimately whilst yes this would not be cheap to set up in the longer term the cost savings of good planning and staged implementation using monies that can be accounted for over time would far outweigh the costs that would be incurred should it become necessary to instigate such a system on some sort of emergency basis, given that emergency responses tend to be more what can do now to quickly alleviate the problem as opposed to what is best to do overall.
In answering the question posed at the top of this article ‘Is Wastewater Recycling The Answer To Water Poverty?’ the answer has to be ‘Yes’, at least in some significant part. But, and this is a very big ‘But’, it will take a serious amount of investment, a serious amount of public knowledge and education to ensure that the populous knows why it is being done. Furthermore, and probably as important a factor as the money involved, it will need a serious amount of political will to make it happen. But, it has to start soon, if not now, and perhaps the biggest question that needs to be answered first has to be ‘Is there a politician/political party in any country that has the strength of will or the understanding needed to achieve this change as well as the ability to raise the backing of the public to get such a huge undertaking off the ground’? Not sure I will see this in my lifetime and that leaves me for one worried about the future of our children and grandchildren who may yet end up fighting in more than the political arena over something as simple as water.
This to many, most of whom take water very much for granted (perhaps we all do), will seem somewhat melodramatic and very much a doomsday scenario. Maybe it is - at present. But, it is a possibility and if the human race does not do something now to avert such a scenario then a possibility can very quickly turn into a probability. But it seems that plastic is currently ‘flavour of the month’ so providing sustainable water supplies to the ever-growing population for many centuries to come may just have to wait a while!
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