Why waste water?
Wednesday, March 22, was World Water Day, a day set aside to celebrate fresh water by the United Nations since 1993. As is the custom, the annual event is celebrated on a different theme.
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This year’s theme: “Water and Waste Water” provides an important opportunity to learn more about how wastewater can be used as a valuable resource in the circular economy with its safe management, an efficient investment in the health of humans and ecosystems.
Many of us think of dirty water as waste water, but the definition of waste from the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary is “not use well”. Hence, wastewater by inference is water not used well.
Wastewater, then, is water that has been used in homes and businesses in ways that negatively impact its quality with high concentrations of pollutants. Waste water is largely made up of human waste, oils, grease, chemicals, dirt and soaps from sinks, showers, washing machines and effluent from industries; commercial businesses and institutions. Thus humans create vast quantities of waste water through inefficiencies and poor management of water systems.
The wasting of water, therefore, poses sustainability challenges, depletes energy reserves and undermines human water security and the health of the ecosystem. Ghana, like most parts of the world, is currently faced with an insurmountable challenge of providing adequate clean water for her growing populations. Rapid population growth, a quest for better life, climate change, emerging pollutants, as well as industrial advancements, have all contributed to the worsening water quality problems. Water pollution and water scarcity also have huge negative impacts on the cost of treatment. This problem is not limited to surface water but ground water quality is equally affected mainly by human activities. While surface water is susceptible to pollution from a wide range of activities such as agriculture, mining, sewer overflows and other industrial activities, ground water suffers from leachate from untreated solid and liquid waste from properly engineered land fill sites, illegal mining and other land use practices that threaten the integrity of ground water resources.
Wastewater as valuable resource
The first step to managing waste water is to recognise waste water and sanitation waste as valuable resources which safe management is an efficient investment in long-term sustainability of fresh water resources.
Statistics suggests that just 330 km of municipal waste water produced globally each year is enough to irrigate 40 million hectares of farmlands, which is equivalent to 15 per cent of all currently irrigated land. When excreta from on-site systems such as pit latrines, still common across much of the world, and other organic waste such as livestock and agricultural residues and food waste are included, the potential for productive reuse gets much greater since it can alternatively be used to power 130 million households through biogas generation.
Furthermore, these waste streams are a rich source of plant nutrients which are essential for agriculture; globally produced municipal waste- water alone contains the equivalent of 25 per cent of the nitrogen and 15 per cent of the phosphorus applied as chemical fertilisers, as well as vital micro-nutrients and organic matter that chemical fertilisers lack. Unfortunately, in just one day, a city of 10 million flushes enough nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium to fertilise about 500,000 hectares of agricultural land.
This scenario, when played out on the national scale in Ghana, cannot only make her the neatest country in Africa, if not the world through proper disposal and reuse of the filth that is engulfing us, but can equally boost agricultural prodution and energy requirements.
Globally, there are more than 663 million people living without safe water supply close to home, spending countless hours queuing or trekking to distant sources, and coping with the health impacts of using contaminated water. Ghana has her fair share of this number, due to our wanton destruction of our fresh water resources with galamsey and other inappropriate land use practices, which had resulted in the shutting down of a number of water treatment plants by the Ghana Water Company Limited.
Domestic and agro-waste
How to sustainably deal with domestic and agro-waste is one of the most pressing issues in waste management in Ghana. As most cities in Africa grapple with the challenge of energy security, recovering energy from waste offers benefits of improving waste management whilst providing reliable energy to an emerging urbanising country.
Meanwhile, wastewater treatment goes a long way in addressing water sustainability through the reuse of treated water for agricultural purposes, washing cars, flushing toilets, cooling power plants, recharging groundwater aquifers, etc. Water reclamation and the need to treat water fit for domestic purposes are some of the interventions aimed at addressing the water-scarcity challenges.
Globally, the vast majority of all the wastewater from our homes, cities, industry and agriculture flows back to nature without being treated or reused, polluting the environment and losing valuable nutrients and other recoverable materials.
We are all wasters when it comes to water use. Every time we use water, we produce wastewater. And instead of reusing it, we let 80 per cent of it just flow down the drain. We all need to reduce and reuse water as much as we can. World Water Day, on March 22, every year, is about taking action to tackle the water crisis. Instead of wasting wastewater, we need to reduce and reuse it. In our homes, we can reuse grey water in our gardens and plots. In our cities, we can treat and reuse wastewater for green spaces. In industry and agriculture, we can treat and recycle discharge for things like cooling systems and irrigation.
By exploiting this valuable resource, - wastewater- we will make the water cycle work better for every living thing. This is because the water passing through us and our homes is on a journey through the water cycle. By reducing the quantity and pollution loads of our wastewater, and by safely reusing it as much as we can, all of us will be making a good effort to protect our most precious resource, water!