Leaks, pollution, and the urgent need for reform. South Africa’s leaking sewage systems threaten water security, public health, and ecosystems due to poor wastewater management.
Millions of litres of sewage leak daily before reaching treatment plants
Leaking wastewater severely pollutes rivers, threatening health and ecosystems
South Africa’s monitoring system lacks data on uncollected, untreated sewage
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By Nicholas B. Pattinson and Mark Graham*
Wastewater is the water we flush down our toilets, send down the drain from our showers and sinks or discharge from factories. It’s supposed to travel through intact pipes to be cleaned at wastewater works. If it gets into rivers and streams, it pollutes and contaminates these with nutrients, antibiotics, antiretrovirals, heavy metals, plastics, and pesticides. It can cause a full-scale ecological collapse by polluting freshwater so badly that life in the system is wiped out.
As populations grow, it’s vital for governments to monitor wastewater closely. In South Africa, the government initiated the Green Drop assessment programme in 2008 to report on all the wastewater treatment works. But the programme only ran for five years before stopping for eight years. It was eventually relaunched in 2021. What happened in those missing eight years? Aquatic ecologist Mark Graham, research scientist Nicholas B. Pattinson and water and sanitation engineer Dave Still found that tens of millions of litres of sewage went missing through leaks. They tell The Conversation Africa more about their research.
What’s the big problem with wastewater?
Less and less wastewater is being treated in South Africa even though the population is growing. Our data shows that the volume of wastewater reaching South Africa’s treatment plants did not grow from 2013 to 2021, even though the South African population increased by about 5.52 million people (10%) during that period.
This means the wastewater is going missing somewhere en route to the wastewater treatment works. Even where treatment capacity is increased or treatment plants are upgraded, this will be ineffectual if wastewater does not reach the wastewater treatment works.
As part of our larger investigations, we conducted a case study on the Darvill wastewater treatment works in Pietermaritzburg, an inland city that is capital of the second most populous province in South Africa, KwaZulu-Natal.
