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DAM-L Water shortages in SA-excellent article/LS (fwd)
source for this article:
by Melanie Gosling, in the Cape Times, Mar. 22, 2001.
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Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2001 11:15:33 -0800
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From: Lori Pottinger <lori@irn.org>
Subject: Water shortages in SA-excellent article/LS
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A really excellent piece on where our water shortages come from....
MELANIE GOSLING
Environment Writer
"In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments - there are only
consequences."
Robert Ingersoll: Some Reasons Why.
WHEN babies born today turn 21, chances are there won't be many of them
celebrating their birthdays on green lawns around sparkling swimming pools.
By then these water-guzzling suburban features may have become luxuries
that only multi-millionaires could afford - or they might have been banned
altogether.
Sounds extreme, but it's quite a possible scenario. Scientists say, and
have been saying for decades, that somewhere between 2020 and 2030 South
Africa will have "run out" of water.
Will there be South African wine at their 21st birthday parties, or will
the Western Cape's viticulture industry have turned up its toes because of
lack of water? And will soaking in a deep bath before their parties be
something that the 21-year-olds have heard their parents talk about with
nostalgia, something they used to do back in the Waste Age?
Today is National Water Day, and all over the country schools, local
councils and politicians will be doing something to mark it. There will be
speeches, poster competitions, announcements on water strategies, more
speeches. Then we'll all go home and carry on as more or less as before,
using water as if we lived in a water-rich country with vast lakes, rivers
and frequent soaking rains.
An overseas Green Party politician said back in the 1980s: "Green politics
is not about being far left or far right, but about being far-sighted."
Granted, South Africa has come a long way in changing its attitude to
water, and former Water Affairs minister Kader Asmal's new water laws were
held up internationally as the way to go. But in a water-stressed country
like South Africa, have the authorities gone far enough? Back in 1997, the
Department of Water Affairs made public their National Water Supply
Regulations. They were tough and revolutionary, so much so that when the
Cape Times published them on April 1 1997, readers phoned in to find out if
the article was an April Fools' joke.
Now, four years down the line, these proposals have been workshopped all
over the country, stakeholders have been consulted , and the result? Many
of the water saving proposals have been chucked out.
Helgard Muller, the man in Water Affairs
overseeing the new regulations, which will be published next month, says
his department realised that the cost of complying with some of the
proposals would have had a "severe financial impact" on local authorities.
Water Affairs cannot micro-manage water usage, he says, only macro-manage
it. Besides, he says there's no point in introducing regulations which the
authorities can't enforce.
Why can't they be enforced? In water-stressed Israel, government
regulations control the type of appliances uses in the home to ensure they
not water wasteful.
Australia manages to enforce a law whereby all houses must have lavatories
with dual flushing systems, and has embarked on a process whereby all
existing houses are being fitted with the devices.
It seems a small thing, but dual-flush systems save millions of litres. UCT
water scientist Bryan Davies says if all the houses in metropolitan Cape
Town were fitted with dual flushing systems, we would save 17 million cubic
metres a year. This he calculated would amount to over half (55%) of the
yield of the first phase of the Palmiet River inter-basin transfer scheme.
And if flushing mechanism in every loo in Cape Town were replaced with a
dual flush system, it would cost a mere 19% of the cost of the Palmiet
scheme.
The proposed ban on hosing down pavements, roads, forecourts and other
hardened surfaces has also been scrapped, and so has the proposed ban on
watering gardens, sportsfields, etc. in the heat of the day and the proposed
ban on installing shower heads with a flow of rate greater 10 litres a
minute.
Another proposal was a ban on urinals that are not activated by the user.
That has also been chucked out in the new regulations. Automatic flushing
urinals are usually time activated to flush every four minutes or so.
Davies has calculated in his book Vanishing Waters that 3.6 cubic metres of
water is consumed every day by each auto-flush urinal - the equivalent of
the amount of water consumed daily by an entire high-income household.
"More ironically," writes Davies, "it is equivalent to the amount of water
(10 litres a person) used by 360 people living in a rural village and
carrying water to their homes every day. In other words, a rural
'village-worth' of water is wasted by a single, high-tech automatic-flush
cistern. And there are hundreds of them in every city throughout the
country."
Another irony is that South African taxpayers fork out huge amounts of
money to have their water cleaned and purified to drinking water standards,
pay further huge amounts of money to have it piped over long distances from
beyond the mountains into our homes and offices - and then we pee into it.
Pee into it and use 10 litres of this purified, increasingly scarse
commodity to wash it away.
As Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, remarked on the UK situation: "The biggest
waste of water in the country is when you spend half a pint and flush two
gallons."
The City of Cape Town's breakdown for domestic use on shows that only 3% is
used for drinking and cooking. The bulk of it (35%) is used to water
gardens, 22% for bathing and showering, 21% in kitchens and washing
machines and 19% for flushing lavatories.
Jeremy Taylor, a Cape Town inventor, has worked out simple but effective
ways of using water twice, for instance using "grey water" from baths and
showers to flush loos and water gardens.
The cost of fitting a suburban household with a full range of water saving
equipment would be between R5000 and R6000.
"If this seems a lot, these devices will make a suburban householder's
water bill drop from around R400 a month to about R70. Because water is
charged for on an escalating tariff, the more you use the most you pay per
unit. The water saving devices mean we wipe out the expensive water by
bringing consumption down to the levels where charges per unit are lower,"
Taylor said.
Catherine Wilson of the City of Cape Town's water demand management says
the trend is that consumers are using increasingly more water than previous
generations. In the time it took for the population to double, our water
consumption has trebled.
It is government policy to provide everyone with clean water in their
homes, which means consumption will continue to increase in South Africa.
"The future's not looking good. Do we just keep on building more dams? Even
if the building of Skuifraam on the Berg River started today, it would only
become operational in 2007 and would only contribute another 12% to our
water supply. It won't be enough.
"And if we start talking of desalination of sea water, we will see water
costing about R8 to R10 a kilolitre. We've got into the habit of wasting
water, and what this means is we're stealing it from our children," Wilson
said.
When the writing is so clearly on the wall, why do the authorities not
follow the example of strict water demand management like other
water-stressed countries, like Israel that reuses 65% of its domestic
wastewater for crop production?
Said Davies: "It's the old mindset with old fashioned attitudes to water.
To solve our water problem, a major paradigm-shift needs to take place."
ends
--
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Lori Pottinger, Director, Southern Africa Program,
and Editor, World Rivers Review
International Rivers Network <'})))>><
1847 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, California 94703, USA
Tel. (510) 848 1155 Fax (510) 848 1008
http://www.irn.org
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