Water waste

Public awareness of water reuse is a job for both the government and private sector.

The technology to treat water for reuse is not new, so why hasn’t it been widely adopted in a region where expensive and power-hungry desalination is the only alternative?

Every month in the back of this magazine, we run details of the latest utility infrastructure projects in the region. It’s not unusual for new desalination plants to make up more than 20 per cent of these projects, and you can understand why.

Thanks to a huge boom in population and industry in the last 40 years, the Middle East now has massive water scarcity issues. Many regions have destroyed their aquifers leaving few options open, and desalination – that is, turning seawater into potable drinking water – has been the solution of choice for decades.

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But it’s an expensive process. The plants cost big money to both build and run, and there’s a hidden cost, too. The gas or fuel oil powering these behemoths comes from the region’s natural reserves; the reserves it relies on to keep the petrodollars rolling in. Profitable commodity is literally going up in smoke to keep the desert adequately watered, and things look set to stay that way.

But they don’t have to. Wastewater reuse is not something that’s ever properly caught on in the Middle East – not in the way Europe and the USA have embraced it.

“It is apparent that hurdles to incorporate water reuse into integrated water management portfolios exist,” says Dan McCarthy, President and CEO of Black & Veatch’s Global Water Business. “It is also equally apparent that many communities will have to understand and clear those hurdles to meet future water demands.”

Black & Veatch recently conducted a series of roundtable discussions on the subject, with participants from Middle East, Asia, Australasia, Europe and the Americas, representing governments, utilities, non-profit agencies, trade associations and academia.

“Four principle recommendations emerged from the discussions, including the need for leaders to work together to overcome existing public misconceptions through clear, consistent and continuous communication about water reuse and its place within an integrated water portfolio,” says McCarthy.

“The importance of proactive public outreach was a common theme. Participants agreed that public trust is of paramount importance in implementing a water reuse programme so transparent, open and evidence-based communications are essential.”

One panelist, who didn’t want to be named, said: “We made a decision very early on that we weren’t going to sugar-coat this; we were going to tell it like it is. We were up front with people because we felt that if we didn’t get their buy-in early, we weren’t going to be able to make the investment we needed to make reuse work.”

For a Middle Eastern perspective, we spoke to Bassem Halabi, the Group Business Development Director at water treatment giant Metito. The company was the first to introduce membrane bioreactor technology to the region, and has consistently pushed the water treatment industry forward.

“We’re probably recycling quite a lot of water in the Gulf,” he says, “but in 2009 we were only using one per cent of that. Now it’s maybe up to two per cent, but that’s way below any standard anywhere else in the world.”

“You could easily go up to 25 per cent reuse, and in an arid zone like the Gulf it could be even more. Think of the possibilities for agriculture, instead of using well water or desalinated water; you could use this water to make the desert green.”