Cities are literally flushing resources down the drain due to a costly age-old water management system still used by many today, said experts at last week’s Singapore International Water Week.
Water management has remained unchanged since cities formed - fresh water is brought in, used, and disposed of as quickly as possible, said this year’s Lee Kuan Yew Water Prize laureate Professor Mark van Loosdrecht at the biannual Singapore International Water Week water lecture.
Although most cities have become better about treating the water before sending it away, they are still failing to recoup valuable resources, added the Dutch water technology expert.
While the used water is itself a recyclable resource, it also contains heat, nutrients, energy, minerals such as phosphorus, and organic material that can support algae. Even the cellulose from tissue paper in the water can be reused.
Professor van Loosdrecht said that 40 per cent of the solids in Amsterdam’s wastewater is cellulose, which industry can reuse for glucose. Some`organic solids can be used for bioplastics, he added.
Such innovations are progressing rapidly, and used water treatment systems will soon be able to power themselves or even generate extra electricity, he noted.
Yet, despite the valuable resources embedded in used water, many cities are struggling with insufficient funding to maintain ageing and inadequate systems.
“The technology is not the problem; it is widely available. Management is the problem,” said Professor van Loosdrecht, pointing out that people in most towns with water problems manage to have mobile phones and televisions, even though these amenities are more expensive than the per capita cost of an adequate water system.
Water utilities have thei2 hands tied when it comes to recouping the costs of maintenance and improvements, because communities are unaccustomed to paying the full costs of water supply and treatment, said experts.
Executive vice president of water for engineering firm Black & Veatch Ralph Eberts told Eco-Business on the sidelines of the event that the subsidised rates that most communities pay for water were unsustainable.
He noted that the provision of clean water and treatment of used water were costly and utilities have to value water accordingly.
“The numbers have to add up,” he said.
‘Band-aids’ not enough
While many utilities are now building communications teams to raise public awareness, they should also be working on creating resilient water systems that have diverse water sources and properly maintained and operated infrastructure, said Mr Eberts.
“You can’t just keep putting band-aids on leaky, ageing water systems,” he added.
In a recent Black & Veatch survey of water utilities, nearly 74 cent of utility managers said that cost was a big worry in the repair and replacement of ageing infrastructure. The survey report noted that delays in such repairs led to more leaks and loss of revenue.
In the United States alone, about 7 billion gallons of clean water are wasted every day because of leaking pipes, according to the American Sociaty of Civil Engineers.
Mr Eberts said that for cities to overcome the multiple challenges of maintenance and the need for new technologies, they will need to integrate the management of water supply and used water treatment.
To make every drop count, cities have to overcome public resistance to recycling used water - a task made more difficult by the use of ‘waste’ in the term ‘wastewater’, he noted.
“Most people think recycled water is a good idea, but they resist when it comes to using it themselves,” he said.
Water recycling has been gaining ground. For example, Australia has set targets for the use recycled water for non-drinking purposes and Singapore’s Newater recycling project is a key part of its national strategy for water security.
Both countries were motivated by critical water resource constraints: Singapore’s water security has historically been dependent on Malaysia for water. Its neighbour still supplies half of the island nation’s water. Australia has been recovering from a long drought that strained the perpetual negotiations for water allocations for farmers, cities, industry and river eco-systems.
The public is much more receptive to recycling water in times of crisis, such as when water sources become polluted or scarce, but the industry needs to keep up a steady pressure at all times, said Mr Eberts.
The region’s governments are already under considerable pressure to address water issues.
Professor Seetharam Kallidaikurichi, who is the director of the Institute of Water Policy at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, told Eco-Business in a separate interview that Asia’s governments face an increasing sense of urgency to fix water problems.
As the average disposable income rises, people demand better environmental services and are willing to pay for them, he noted, explaining that if their demand is not met by the government, they will choose other options.
He has identified a tipping point – a threshold of USD10,000 average disposable income – at which people will vote with their feet by moving to another city or country that they perceive as having a better quality of life.
Governments are under pressure to act before negative perceptions about a city’s liveability – which are defined by issues such as traffic congestion, education levels, water management, clean air and safety - cause this urban to urban migration, he said.
Professor Kallidaikurichi noted that award-winning cities such as New York and Vancouver have changed their mandates from merely providing services to maximising the overall quality of experience for residents and visitors.
And while public transport and housing may garner more attention than water infrastructure, the latter is a central part of any city’s success.
“You can’t separate water from the urban environment,” he added.
The need for integrated planning of urban systems such as water, energy, waste and transport was one reason water week was co-located this year with the World Cities Summit and the CleanEnviro Summit. The three events drew over 16,000 experts from industries, governments and NGOs to expositions, dialogues and conferences at the Marina Bay Sands conference centre.
Professor Kallidaikurichi said that many policymakers and industry leaders at the event had advocated a re-think of the conventional water management approach, which assumes that every solution must be a large-scale centralised solution.
Instead, they suggested that urban managers look at all services needed for an area and optimise them collectively - which may lead to decentralised solutions, where a district has its own water treatment for instance.
The professor cautioned that while decentralised water management could be good thing, it is likely to be slow to set up because it would require additional time-consuming community negotiations.
For now, city administrations have no excuse not to provide the basics, he said.
“There’s no city that cannot afford to provide the minimum 1 to 2 litres of clean drinking water that people need each day,” he added. In areas with no publicly provided drinking water, it is the poor who struggle to pay high prices for bottled water or suffer health risks from poor sanitation, he said.
He also urged urban managers not to rely on private solutions for decentralised used water treatment systems, which are still a long way off for most cities in developing countries.
Globally, the world can bring about sweeping changes through consistent investment of only 0.2 per cent of GDP annually in water and sanitation, he noted.
According the UNEP, the Asian countries of Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam lose an estimated US$9 billion a year, amounting to 2 per cent of their combined GDP, due to problems such as water-borne diseases caused by poor sanitation.
Black & Veatch’s Mr Eberts said that government and industry can address these and other problems through improving resource recovery, better managing their water supplies and improving the energy efficiency of their systems.
“We have to find ways to do morewith less,” he added.
