How to save garden water waste

Obviously the simple solution is to use less water in the garden, however this can leave you plants dehydrated and dying, which doesn’t look great! The other simple solution to the problem of water wastage in your garden is to install a greywater Irrigation system.

A greywater Irrigation system takes the used water from your shower, bath, basins and washing machine, sends it through a filter and then uses it to thoroughly water your garden. The water is completely safe, suitable for your garden and just as hydrating for your plants as water from the hose pipe.

With a greywater Irrigation system you will not only save water but also money. By recycling your used water from the shower, bath and washing machine, you will use less and keep you water bills down. Over a long period you find you will save quite a substantial amount of money on your water rates, thanks to a greywater Irrigation system.

What’s more, you can incorporate a greywater Irrigation system into your garden without ruining the garden design. Many landscape garden designers will even incorporate a greywater system into a new garden design and help you maximise its potential, in terms of foliage and irrigation.

The following article from IOL

South Africa’s real water crisis is that the stuff is just too damn complicated. What do you think about when you worry about water? Can you afford to pay your water bill?

Is the water in the tap safe to drink? Is there even water in the tap? Or perhaps what you really want to know is when you are going to get a tap?

If you run a business, is the quality and reliability of the water good enough for your needs? Do you even know where your water comes from?

Different South Africans face very different water challenges as a few cases will show.

For a taste of an immediate water crisis, start in the municipality of Nkomazi between Kanyamazane, Malelane and Komatipoort. Through the cane fields south of the N4, you are in rural South Africa, with half a million people living scattered across what used to be the homeland of KaNgwane.

There is normally some water in the big rivers, the Komati, Lomati and Crocodile, because downstream Mozambique vigorously defends its rights to a share of their water. That’s just as well because if you ask anyone what their water problems are, you will be told that, too often, the pipes are dry.

Even when the water flows, it may not be safe to drink. Here the problem is not the water resource, the water in the rivers, but rather the water services, the water in the pipes. Even where there is infrastructure, its management is an impossible task in an area with too many users and not enough supply.

If the problem for the rural poor is pipes with no water, the issue the rich people who live around Hartbeespoort Dam contend with is what comes out of the pipes. Once their pristine playground, the dam is now an environmental disaster. It was turning green and smelling bad even before sewage started flowing directly in, when the town pumps failed. But its state now is often unbearable.

Yet for the farmers downstream and the people who live and work among the platinum mines of North West, the dam is part of an infrastructure lifeline that collects Gauteng’s wastewater for reuse. More than half the water in the Crocodile River basin, of which the dam forms part, comes from the Vaal. People might prefer it to be cleaner, but without it, there would be disaster. That is cold comfort for those waterfront homeowners who can’t sit outside for their sundowners because of the stench.

Down at the coast, the water problems of the Nelson Mandela Bay metro are different again. The region certainly has water problems. That’s because the local rivers are simply too small to meet the area’s growing needs, aggravated by the current drought. The city has priority access to a huge supply through massive tunnels from the Orange River.

But because of the cost of bringing it to town, Port Elizabeth’s city fathers always tried to survive using their own resources. Now they’ve pushed their luck too far and are pleading for national subsidies for expensive desalination plants that can be built quickly. The rule is that drought hits places with too little capacity.

Ethekwini is the exception to that rule. Water demand has substantially outstripped supply but a series of good rains has kept the dams full and enabled them to live without restrictions – so far. The city’s water managers got away with it during the World Cup and, if the Spring Grove Dam gets from drawing board to ground in time, they will be safe again.

These examples illustrate the complexities of water and its management. We rely on unpredictable nature for the raw material and on our own ingenuity to manage it. As Hartbeespoort shows, water can be gainfully reused, but do it badly and the solution becomes the problem.

So successful water management is about sound knowledge, long-term strategy, sustained application and commitment. The real water crisis will occur not just if we lose our ability to understand and plan but if, as a country, we turn “Eskom ears” to the technicians and don’t listen to their advice. However, asking questions is the first step. Worrying about what the water crisis is and what can be done will help keep us on the right track. – Business Report

Mike Muller is a former director-general of water affairs and forestry, a registered engineer and a visiting adjunct professor at the Wits Graduate School of Public and Development Management.

Source:Times Live

Water Affairs Minister Edna Molewa says the water affairs department has less than a third of the officials it needs to enforce compliance with water quality and pollution laws.

In a written reply to a parliamentary question, she said the department had only 31 full-time staff for enforcement, monitoring and compliance across the whole country.

“There are 16 officials at national level… and 15 officials at provincial level.”

There were nine vacant posts at national level and 56 at regional level, she said.

On the posts not filled, the reply lists, among others, technicians, pollution control officers, resource protection staff and drinking water quality officials.

On plans to create a so-called regulation branch within the department, the minister said this had not yet happened.muni

“My department intends to create a fully-fledged branch for regulation. The process of organisational design for this new structure has not been finalised as yet, but there are plans in place to increase the number of officials dedicated to compliance, monitoring and enforcement,” she said.

The Green Drop Report — a national assessment of wastewater treatment plants, released by the department in April this year — found only about seven percent of municipal sewage works were operating to acceptable standards.

With many of the 852 treatment works around the country discharging raw or only partially treated sewage into rivers and streams, experts have warned of a looming pollution crisis and growing threat to South Africa’s water security.

TRADE unions warn that SA needs to take urgent action to address water pollution, and have applied to the National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac) to discuss the issue.

After an application by Federation of Unions of SA (Fedusa) and its affiliate United Association of SA (Uasa), Nedlac will today consider their proposal to discuss a “water crisis”.

This comes amid growing concern over the state of SA’s water quality, as major river systems are badly polluted.

Uasa CEO Koos Bezuidenhout said the union was particularly concerned about dysfunctional sewage treatment plants and acid mine drainage.

Fedusa wants nonfunctioning drinking water and wastewater plants to be placed under the control of a national project manager. This manager — possibly the Development Bank of Southern Africa — would draw up a national programme of work and a budget to restore SA’s entire water infrastructure.

The government needed to approve this budget as a matter of urgency, he said. Restored plants should be handed over to municipalities on condition that qualified staff have been appointed and trained .

Source: Businessday

Effective clean up efforts could run into the hundreds of millions shrinking the financial benefits of ever having mined for these minerals. Unfortunately many of the profits incurred form previous mining operations have already been payed out to the stakeholders, leaving insufficient fund for effective clean-up operations. With out sufficient clean-up action a toxic water supply could crippling much of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, Benoni, Boksburg, Springs, and Germiston) area.

This report form Times Live.

Grootvlei mine shaft

Water and Environmental Affairs Minister Buyelwa Sonjica has told Parliament that her department will take legal action against Aurora’s Grootvlei mine for failing to treat its waste water “before pumping it out into the adjacent wetlands”.

Responding to questions by Lance Greyling, of the Independent Democrats, Sonjica said the decision to institute legal proceedings was triggered by an investigation by her department that revealed that the Grootvlei mine had not complied with conditions stipulated in its licence agreement.

“My department has conducted several site visits to the Grootvlei mine in order to investigate the lack of treatment of the underground mine water.

“The site visits revealed that chemical treatment was either not taking place or not effective to ensure compliance with the licence conditions.”

She said the quality of the final discharge water was “found not to be compliant with the conditions of the licence issued to Grootvlei”.

“The investigation indicated that chemical treatment during the last three months [was] irregular due to the mine’s financial constraints.”

Sonjica said a pre-directive was issued on April 14, and a directive on April 28, “to the Grootvlei mine to put measures in place that would enable them to comply with the licence conditions within a specific time frame”.

The minister said the deadline for compliance with licence conditions had lapsed and the mine has not complied.

Yesterday, Frasy Namanyana, the National Union of Mineworkers’ representative at the mine, said some of the miners draw water from the nearby Blesbokspruit, which runs through one of the wetlands where the underground mine water is dumped.

What more can be said? You don’t need to be smart to predict this with the current state of the countries water. Will the next world war be fought over this precious resource?

The following extract from Times Live

Water pollution

South Africa faces a water crisis that could cripple economic growth and cause a plague of health problems – but critics say the government has yet to act with urgency.

The most immediate concern is the acid mine drainage (AMD) polluting a vast swathe from the Witwaters-rand to Mpumalanga. Other threats include pesticide run-off, broken infrastructure and failed sewage plants.

As the population grows and economic recovery puts more pressure on limited inland water resources, experts predict a shift of industrial activity to coastal areas where desalination plants will have to meet a growing share of demand.

Environmentalists warn that if the government and industry fail to act, within two years mine water as corrosive as battery acid will gush from Johannesburg’s Wemmer Pan and seep into the city’s streets and gardens.

“It is acutely toxic,” said Mariette Liefferink, who leads a group of non-governmental organisations lobbying for action. “It affects the soil and neural development of the foetus, which leads to mental retardation; it will cause cancer, cognitive problems, skin lesions,” she said.

“These are all the foreseeable risks if we do not manage our AMD.”

Cape Town – The government on Tuesday admitted it has for years failed to properly regulate municipal sewage works, many of which are discharging untreated or only partially-treated human waste into rivers around the country.

“The regulation function was to some extent neglected,” water affairs acting chief director of regulations Helgard Muller told members of Parliament’s water affairs portfolio committee.

“Let me admit, I think that immediately after 1994, and for some years, this function was not getting the right attention… We had to prioritise due to limited resources,” he said.

Muller’s admission comes a fortnight after the release of his department’s Green Drop Report, which assessed 449 of the country’s 852 waste water treatment plants.

It found only 32 of them qualified for so-called Green Drop status, broadly equivalent to them complying with international standards.

Source: News 24

I was shocked to hear that many of these pharmaceutical show up in city drinking water after they were flushed down the toilet. What chemicals and medication are we taking in through our drinking water? How can we help our Waste water treatment plants treat our sewage sufficiently to remove dangerous chemicals from the water?

Dangerous chemicals is water

An expert panel that advises the president on cancer said Thursday that Americans are facing “grievous harm” from chemicals in the air, food and water that have largely gone unregulated and ignored.

The President’s Cancer Panel called for a new national strategy that focuses on such threats in the environment and workplaces.

Epidemiologists have long maintained that tobacco use, diet and other factors are responsible for most cancers, and that chemicals and pollutants cause only a small portion — perhaps 5 percent.

The presidential panel said that figure has been “grossly underestimated” but it did not provide a new estimate.

With the growing body of evidence linking environmental exposures to cancer, the public is becoming increasingly aware of the unacceptable burden of cancer resulting from environmental and occupational exposures that could have been prevented through appropriate national action.

About 80,000 chemicals are in commercial use in the United States, but federal regulators have assessed only about 200 for safety

Source: Washington Post

Wastewater Treatment Plant

The findings of the green Drop Report:

1. Of the 449 treatment plants assessed, 7% were classified as excellently managed, and 38% scored between 50% and 89% when measured against the set criteria.
2. Only 449 of the 852 municipalities in the country were assessed because many did not “adhere to the call” for assessment, weren’t “sufficiently confident” to be tested, or were unable to provide enough information.
3. 45% of the plants assessed scored above 50%.
4. One of the plants not assessed was that of the Madibeng Municipality in North West. Raw sewage is flowing into the Hartbeesport Dam, which falls under the municipality’s jurisdiction. (The municipality’s water and sanitation head, Lerato Sabidi, said the department “knows why we could not comply”.)

Dr Mark Graham, a water scientist who has extensively tested pollution in South African rivers, said the Green Drop report and the state of the country’s sewage systems was “critical”. He said the management of sewage was “intermediately linked” to the quality of the country’s drinking water and that unless the situation was remedied, drinking water quality would ultimately be affected.

Source: Times live

South Africa would need about R23-billion to prevent the country’s wastewater treatment works from collapsing, Water and Environmental Affairs Minister Buyelwa Sonjica said on Thursday, at the launch of the long-awaited ‘Green Drop’ report.