Chennai and Cape Town: A window into our future

India’s sixth largest city, Chennai, has run out of water. In South Africa, authorities ran a “Day Zero” campaign to highlight the exact day when taps would run dry in Cape Town.  A quarter of the world’s population is facing extreme water stress according to data released recently by the World Resources Institute.  

These are desperate situations. They’ve prompted desperate ideas. In Cape Town, there were serious discussions about towing an iceberg, at a cost of $200 million. In Chennai, a city of 10 million people, officials announced plans to run special water tanker trains from another district to areas of scarcity.

This situation hits close to home for me as a former resident of India with family still living there. It’s disheartening to see that residents in areas that receive more rainfall than any other in the country are paying for water to be delivered in tankers.

As the CEO of a company in the water industry, I know exactly how water shortages are creating a global crisis. I also know that the type of advanced infrastructure and solutions that can prevent water shortages have been available for decades with thousands of successful implementations across the world. We shouldn’t be thinking of these crazy and desperate ideas – the technologies and solutions exist, the financing is available, it’s been done many times before – we just need to get out of our own way and make it happen!

For example, treating wastewater so that it can be reused or recycled has the potential to close the gap on water scarcity, and opens opportunities for cities and industry to recover valuable byproducts. Even temporary solutions, like modularized mobile water treatment plants and retrofits of existing plants, are far less expensive than towing an iceberg and shipping water on trains. You only get to tow an iceberg once. The infrastructure that can be built now, like advanced water and waste water treatment plants, lasts for decades, and is far more sustainable than other solutions.

I’m proud to lead a company with a world-class technology portfolio that can help address these challenges. Our membrane bioreactor systems continue to be a primary building block for water reuse and treat billions of gallons of wastewater globally every day. We have ozone and ultraviolet technology for disinfection, electrodialysis reversal and reverse osmosis for total dissolved solids removal, analytical instruments for total organic carbon monitoring, and an entire suite of specialty chemical offerings, just to name a few of our technologies. We pull this extensive portfolio together to drive solutions in water purification, disinfection, desalination, recycle to zero liquid discharge applications to solve the world’s toughest water challenges.

To see how this infrastructure and technology can provide sustainable water supplies, we should turn our attention to global success stories like Israel, Kuwait, and Singapore - three nations with some of the most significant water challenges on earth.

We don’t need to waste water 

Water isn’t only used to support human life. We use it to wash our clothes and irrigate farms. Manufacturing facilities use tremendous amounts of water making the products we use every day.

But too often, water is used once and flushed away. It shouldn’t be this way. Recycled wastewater provides the most sustainable source of clean water to fulfill our needs, and offers the ability for us to reclaim other resources.

In Israel, approximately 90% of wastewater is treated and reused predominantly for agriculture, but also for increasing river flow. Israeli authorities encourage farmers to use recycled water by pricing it lower than freshwater, and by offering increased water allocations for those farmers using it. Even when water is not immediately reused, Israel maintains strict standards for effluent discharged into rivers, because discharged water may be relied on by another user downstream.

The island nation of Singapore relies on recycled water to provide 40% of its water needs. The recycled water, given the brand name NEWater, is used for industrial processes like semiconductor wafer manufacturing. It also provides a crucial buffer for the island’s drinking water supplies, while supporting a key sector of the island’s economy.

In collaboration with Singapore’s Public Utilities Board, SUEZ WTS has demonstrated capabilities that could reuse a majority of the country’s wastewater. Our involvement doesn’t stop there. We’re engaged in projects that lower the energy consumption of wastewater treatment plants and desalination plants, and provide market leading solutions for handling “tough-to-treat” water coming from the island’s industrial processes.

While water reuse in Israel and Singapore are remarkable, a project in Kuwait exemplifies the degree to which water recycling can support human life and economic development in even the harshest environment. For that project, SUEZ WTS helped Kuwait diversify its water supply after the government began looking for alternatives to desalination.

As one of the most water scarce countries in the world, Kuwait relies primarily on desalination to meet domestic and industrial freshwater needs. But authorities in Kuwait wanted to develop water resources that did not depend on desalination.

 Completed in 2005, the Sulaibiya Wastewater Treatment and Reclamation plant uses ultrafiltration (UF) and reverse osmosis (RO) to remove bacteria and pathogens to a level that exceeds World Health Organization potable water guidelines. With expansion underway, the plant already treats almost 60% of Kuwait‘s wastewater.

 Reclaimed water produced by the Sulaibiya facility supports the entirety of Kuwait’s dairy and vegetable growing operations, and at the completion of a second phase of expansion, excess secondary quality water from the RO plant will be reused for oil recovery in Kuwait’s oil fields.It is the first plant of its kind to be built in the Middle East and will be the largest UF and RO wastewater purification plant in the world once expansion is complete.

We have hundreds of success stories like this.

Spurring sustainable water infrastructure adoption

Yet, even with successes in Israel, Singapore, and Kuwait it is estimated that by 2025, half of the world’s population will live in water stressed regions. What has befallen Chennai and Cape Town are harbingers of the future.

It doesn’t have to be. Governments have a wide menu of policy options they can implement to promote sustainable water infrastructure development. They can accelerate implementation through proactive planning, supportive policy and involvement of private players and partnerships for creative solutions.

Financing strategies exist as well. In Kuwait, where revenue from oil production has sustained robust government spending, the Sulaibiya facility was built through a private consortium of which SUEZ WTS is a member. The consortium designed, built, owns, and operates the wastewater treatment and reclamation facility under a 30-year concession. 

The water industry is motivated by a desire to prevent the suffering of millions. We can help plan, build, operate, and finance advanced wastewater treatment systems and solutions that will support healthy lives and healthy economies.

Some cities and towns in India are being proactive about how they’re handling water, but it is time to accelerate the pace of change. We have the need. We have the technology. We need to collaborate and drive change and awareness to create a sustainable water future for India and the rest of the world.