Billions to be spent to boost performance of wastewater treatment plants

The Cape Flats Wastewater Plant is one of the facilities earmarked by the City for an upgrade. Photographer - Tracey Adams/African News Agency (ANA)

The Cape Flats Wastewater Plant is one of the facilities earmarked by the City for an upgrade. Photographer - Tracey Adams/African News Agency (ANA)

Published Jun 26, 2022

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It will cost the City R8 billion over the next 10 years to upgrade its Wastewater Treatment Works (WWTW) to ensure optimal efficiency.

The Auditor-General’s (AG) report on the financial performance of municipalities for 2020/21 released last week also threw the spotlight on the lack of repairs and maintenance of key infrastructure by municipalities.

The report found that the final effluent at wastewater treatment plants across the city did not comply with licence requirements, and the minimum limits for chloride.

Suspended solids and E coli were also found to be significantly exceeded.

The City said it had allocated more than R586 million towards upgrading and increasing the capacity of its water and sanitation infrastructure in the 2022/23 financial year.

Plants earmarked included Potsdam, Zandvliet, Athlone and Macassar and the Cape Flats wastewater treatment plants.

The National Department of Water and Sanitation awarded most of the city’s wastewater systems the Green Drop Certification status.

Water service authorities across the country were subjected to the Green Drop Audit from July 1, 2020, to June 30, 2021.

Green Drop Certification is awarded to wastewater systems that obtain scores of above 90% when compared against the criteria set for wastewater management, while a system that achieved less than 31% is regarded as a dysfunctional system which would require appropriate interventions.

The Green Drop report also noted that some municipal wastewater systems were in a critical state in 2021, with the Western Cape having 11 % of its systems in a critical condition.

However, the breakdown of these facilities was not immediately available.

While experts said the situation in the Western Cape was not as bad as in the rest of the country, they warned that maintenance and repair of infrastructure could not be “put off” by authorities.

They said numerous and frequent raw sewage discharges and overflows caused as a result of lack of repairs and maintenance of the wastewater treatment plants caused a significant impact on communities’ and environmental health and cleanliness.

The experts also believed that the maintenance of all infrastructure by governmental authorities was inadequate in South Africa.

Professor of Chemistry at the University of Western Cape, Leslie Petrik, said the Green Drop report did not show the full picture of the “dismal state” of the plants locally and countrywide.

Petrik said the city’s wastewater treatment plants did not have the capacity to deal with the ever-increasing load of sewage from the growing population.

She called for an urgent expansion and upgrade of the facilities, as well as diligent and frequent maintenance, than “is the current practice”.

Factors that contributed to the deterioration of wastewater treatment plants were varied.

An epidemiologist at Stellenbosch University, Dr Jo Barnes, said repairing existing infrastructure and keeping it functioning was more difficult than building new ones.

“It takes experience and a good deal of training to maintain a system that is already running or functioning.

“Such experience is in critically short supply among our municipal staff tasked with the operation of treatment installations and distribution systems for water and sanitation at local level,” said Barnes.

She also believed that problems caused by lack of maintenance often only showed up when the problems were far advanced.

“When complaints come in in large numbers the damage has often been done and those at present in the posts feel that they were not responsible or accountable for the damage. Thus few officials want to take ownership of these problems,” said Barnes.

A second complication is that the responsibility for running some of those systems is shared by different departments or entities within the governmental structure and co-operation and synchronisation between these different structures are dysfunctional at times.

Barnes warned that no infrastructure problem could be solved by putting off repairs.

“The consequences of this most unfortunate situation are that the health, income and environmental safety of large numbers of inhabitants are severely impacted.

“Many people who frequently fall ill because of the dirty environment they live in, the lack of water to clean themselves etc lose their jobs because of absenteeism and that further impoverishes them,” said Barnes.

Petrik agreed and said the other contributing factors to the dilapidation of wastewater treatment plants could be that many of the sanitation services might be outsourced to external contractors, who cut corners to remain profitable, and lacked adequate external oversight, with minimal repercussions for poor service delivery.

“Further issues compounding the problem could be untrained, or unmotivated, and inefficient staff who are not held to account for negligence, nor subjected to regular performance evaluations.”

The Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa) said even though the City’s wastewater treatment plants were among the better performing plants in the country, this did not relieve them of their duty to comply with safety standards and their Water Use Licenses.

“Through Outa’s independent water testing we have found that continued non-compliant discharges from especially the Potsdam WWTW have caused serious environmental damage to the Diep River and the Milnerton Lagoon,” said Outa’s Andrea Korff.

Korff said the results of poor-functioning plants also posed harm to the environment, as evident in the fish die-offs and loss of other species in the Diep River Catchment.

The AG report also noted that some of the container toilets in the city were not in an adequate health condition as they were not being serviced at required intervals.

The City said it provided more than 8 319 container toilets and these were serviced “four times a week” by a service provider.

Outa believed that the regular servicing of the toilets should also be coupled with educational programmes to encourage communities to handle these with care.

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