AfriForum: only 19% of wastewater treatment meets standards, 48% in the W Cape

With national oversight of infrastructure quality being rather poor, Afriforum has taken it upon themselves to investigate the quality of water being released into the environment.

They have come to the conclusion that South Africa’s sewage treatment system is approaching a crisis, according their green- and blue-drop reports.

The green- and blue-drop standards are benchmarks used by the national Department of Water and Sanitation for drinking water (blue) and wastewater (green).

The green drop report, focusing on processed sewage water quality, reveals that 81% of sewage discharge is inadequately treated before entering rivers. This increases damage to local ecosystems through the release of drug metabolites, hormones, and bacterial blooms which harm natural water sources.

Nationally, only 19% of treatment works meet minimum standards, with 26 out of 140 sewage wastewater treatment plants meeting these standards. The Eastern Cape and the Free State are the worst-performing provinces, with none of the tested treated sewage meeting minimum standards.

The Western Cape performs the best, but here standards are also sub-par – only 48% of green drop tests indicate treated sewage meets the standard.

This comes on the back of a lawsuit levelled at the City of Cape Town by Action SA for failure to meet these standards, and specifically for dumping raw sewage into the bay. The City has recently initiated new infrastructure for wastewater treatment, but it has come after many years of polluting.

However in the blue drop report, 96% of drinking water nationally is still deemed safe for human consumption, with several provinces, including Limpopo, North West, Northern Cape, Eastern Cape, Western Cape, and Gauteng, providing 100% clean potable water in all sources tested.

Mpumalanga and the Free State however, show slightly lower percentages of safe drinking water, with a few contaminated sources.

AfriForum’s testing raises serious concerns about South Africa’s overall water management, highlighting potential impacts on drinking water quality and costs.

AfriForum’s environmental affairs manager Lambert de Klerk warned about a potential vicious cycle if wastewater weren’t treated, since many of the bodies of water from which we draw drinking water are connected to those in which wastewater is dumped.

“This will ultimately have a significant impact on the cost of drinking water. We still pay relatively little for drinking water, but it will become more and more expensive to purify water and therefore, the price of drinking water will go up.”

AfriForum has set up a text-based access line for people to request water purity testing in their towns. By sending an SMS with the name of your town to 45340 (R1) one can give AfriForum the mandate to test the water quality.