Green Business Platform is wise when it comes to water
Water rehabilitation and future availability took centre stage at the March Green Business Platform meeting
JOHANNESBURG – Water has been labelled the invisible elephant in the room. Water fit for human consumption is reaching frighteningly low percentages.
GBP speaker, co-author to two chapters of the World Water Assessment Program 2012 and former advisor to the Executive Management of Mintails (Ltd) Anthony Turton undertook to explain the national hydraulic platform that is now under considerable strain.
“We’ve run to the infinite of our water supply,” said Turton. “The overall water reticulation system is in fact a series of subsystems, each nested discreetly. We are now seeing failure at sub-system level for a variety of reasons.
“These are manifesting as risk to business, already under strain for many other reasons. Larger corporations have the capacity to understand water as a strategic risk and develop internal mitigation strategies. SMME’s are different, with the executive management stretched to breaking point dealing with other matters of survival.”
This talk assisted attendees and executives in SMME’s in understanding the nature and scale of risk they are facing, enabling them to develop a viable mitigation strategy.
There’re insufficient funds set aside for water rehabilitation by the government, and Turton predicts that Johannesburg, a growing city, will endure crisis due to the engineering infrastructure being under severe pressure. Another issue is skills shortages in the engineering sector.
Every pipe has a design life and needs maintenance. “We have to replace our hard infrastructure; we’ll have to replace at least 60 per cent of the infrastructure.”
“The country will start recycling water. Rand Water doesn’t have a filter for microsystem. They haven’t convinced me that they filter for microsystem. You can’t sort out microsystem by just pouring chlorine, microsystem is too strong,” explained Turton.
“We’re already recycling our water, but the government won’t admit it,” he said.
The repercussions of recycling water are the effects on women’s bodies and birth control as micro-organisms living in inadequately treated water could lead to the birth of intersex babies of indeterminate sex.
The guest expert also revealed that the micro source of the countries water that is not suitable to drink will increase to 50%.
