WISA
President ’s COMMENT
Rethinking wastewater management Valerie Naidoo, president of the Water Institute of Southern Africa (WISA), discusses how new and emerging trends and drivers could bring about a renaissance in wastewater management – if adequate funding is made available.
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and its shift from purely a final-effluentquality intervention for protection of health and environment to one that, while attaining the necessary waterquality mandates, also recovers water, energy, and other refined products. Based on a scan of the academic and wastewater management landscape, wastewater management can be divided into discreet classes: current and established technologies, new and emerging technologies and approaches, resource recovery systems. Technology choice The choice that one makes for implementing current technologies depends on several factors such as size, land availability, cost, capacity, and general limits. In addition, the choice should also be dependent on factors such as effluent quality vs water treated to a fit-for-use quality, energy efficiency vs energy recovery, intensification of processes (small footprint), and incremental vs disruptive technological development. The latter set of factors is more clearly aligned to leadership and its vision to achieve sustainability, liveable cities, technological excellence, and a highly capable human capital base that is able to provide high service levels to citizens. The current and established technologies that are in use in South Africa range from simple septic tanks and ponds
he 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) build on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and are positioned as a global call to action to end poverty, protect the environment, and bring peace and prosperity. These include new goals such as climate change, economic equality, and innovation, and build on SDG 6, which calls for clean water and sanitation. The latter expands on sanitation and wastewater management to be more inclusive of solutions aimed at safe reuse and recycling. Furthermore, the SDGs acknowledge that the goals are interconnected. For example, in South Africa, clean water and Currently, safe sanitation cannot be entities and provided without strong initiatives do exist but institutions that deliver tend to have committed high-quality services to the people. Payment for budgets and, to some extent, these services cannot be lead to fragmented and disconnected from the unaligned systems with most need for economic detechnologies dying a slow velopment, nor can it be separated from affordable death in the “innovation and clean energy, as well as a valley of death” technically competent industry, a robust innovation pipeline and well-managed infrastructure. Resource recovery It is important, therefore, to examine the philosophy of wastewater management
to biological nutrient removal – an advanced version of activated sludge. These tend to be a combination of physical, chemical, and biological processes. Breaking this technology lock in the sector has been difficult for the new and emerging technologies that are on offer like granular systems, membrane-based systems or the low-energy systems like anammox and hybrid ecologically based systems. This is owing to several reasons such as the inability of institutions to shift to a new capability base, cost, and lack of demonstrations that allow institutions to develop a level of confidence. To some extent, it also been because of poor financing of wastewater technologies, particularly for operations and maintenance, technology lock-in of consultants, and the ability for a sharedcost model for emerging technologies between industry (technology providers) and water sector institutions. Killing innovation? Technology start-ups from individual innovators and academia should have the support of a public sector “Water Innovation Fund”, which combines the budgets of the Department of Science and Technology, Department of Trade and Industry, and industry partners
Dr Valerie Naidoo, president, WISA
Adequate funding needs to be made available to inspire entrepeneurship, otherwise South Africa will miss its chance to be a leader in the development of new wastewater treatment technology may/june MAY/JUNE 2017 2017
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