Israel can help Cape Town

TALI FEINBERG

The most urgent and obvious tool that Israel could offer would be desalinisation, which that country has utilised to make the Jewish state ‘drought-proof’ and able to sell water to its neighbours. As of 2015, approximately half of Israel’s water supply comes from re-used treated waste water, brackish water and desalinated water.

“All you need is a coastline and a lot of money, but nothing beyond the financial capacity of any national government,” writes journalist David Hazony. “For the cost of a few fighter jets, you can build a world-class Reverse Osmosis plant and pump the water into the system. Suddenly, water has transformed from a problem of natural resources to a problem of finding the political will and the budget. Today any country that doesn’t have enough water has only its leaders to blame.”

While the South African government is apparently scrambling to find the money, a quicker and cheaper way to save water would be to treat and utilise waste water, which Israel has been doing for decades. “Israel treats household sewage as a precious resource, recycling and re-using more than 80% of it for agriculture,” writes Seth M. Siegel, author of the bestseller Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World. “In many countries, sewage is dumped. This can threaten public health by contaminating wells and aquifers.”

The government could even look at treating waste water with bubbles, thought to be one of the most effective ways to remove sludge, waste and pollutants. Until recently, this was a costly method usually reserved for small-scale projects. But now, Israel’s Mapal Green Energy is taking the notion of ‘bubble cleaning’ to a mass scale. The company’s cutting-edge aeration systems allow water providers to purify and recycle water quickly and efficiently, resulting in huge savings on energy and operating costs.

Israel can also turn grey water into drinking water. Following a May 2016 earthquake in Ecuador, Israel-based humanitarian aid agency IsraAID brought a new Israeli water-purification technology from NUFiltration, a company which manufactures water filtration systems, to several affected villages. Instead of having to buy bottled drinking water, residents could use the NUF system to turn washing water into purified drinking water without electricity.

A high-tech system that is being used by United Herzlia Schools in Cape Town is extracting water from the air. Just last week, India’s Tata Group signed a memorandum of understanding with Israeli firm Watergen, which specialises in this technology.

Watergen’s president, Mikhael Mirilashvili, showcased his company’s plan for solving the water crisis in India by 2022. Its two models of atmospheric water generators can extract up to 6 000 litres of water from the air every day, depending on humidity, and medium-scale units produce up to 600 litres of water daily.

Fixing leaks is a small change that could make a big difference, and investing in technology is crucial to do this effectively. Probably the most advanced system is employed by Hagihon, the public company that runs Jerusalem’s water system.

“Every day, sensors in the pipelines, powered by little hydroelectric pinwheels, record the sounds of rushing water in 10-second increments. Then they transmit them, via the cellular network, to a central computer that analyses the sounds and crunches the data – because it turns out that flowing water in a pipe sounds different when there’s a leak,” writes Hazony.

“GPS-guided robots crawl through sewers looking for leaks, too. Hagihon can track down small leaks in the infrastructure and get them fixed well before they ever become big ones, saving a huge amount of water.”

Hagihon has brought Jerusalem’s overall water losses down to about 11%, bringing more developed neighbourhoods down by as low as 6%. By comparison, most European countries are between 20% and 40% lower.

Drip irrigation is vital if South Africa wants its agricultural sector to save, instead of waste, water. It would be wise to implement this immediately. In 2015 and 2016, the department of water and sanitation took no action to curtail agricultural water use, despite warning signs of drought. As a result, Cape Town’s safety buffer of 28 000 megalitres was used up, explains Wits University’s David W. Olivier in his article, ‘Cape Town’s water crisis: driven by politics more than drought’.

Drip irrigation, perfected and exported by the Israelis, forces farmers to save water. A tiny amount of water in the right place can make a plant grow a lot bigger and faster than a large amount thrown at it by rain, floods or sprinklers.

How much of a difference does drip irrigation make? Conservative estimates suggest at least 40% of water is saved on a per-acre basis. In addition, crops yield much more, and better quality, crops when using drip irrigation. “So, assuming that the most conservative numbers are correct, water efficiency and crop yields combine to save you more than 70% of the water required for any given crop. In a world getting thirstier and thirstier, that’s revolutionary,” writes Hazony.

Finally, water is seen as a free resource, and so it is used and wasted freely. The Israeli solution? Change the way water is priced. “In the late 2000s, Israel undertook a nationwide experiment in the centralisation of water management. Management of water resources was placed under a single national Water Authority. Although by law all sources of water (even rain) have been considered government property since the country’s founding, in 2008 a new law was passed requiring the whole water system to be revenue-neutral. This meant that the entire cost would be covered by consumers,” explains Hazony.

“Soon, everyone knew just how much water was costing the country. The next year, private consumers suddenly saw a 40% increase in their water bills. People grumbled. But household water use went down immediately by more than 15%. Farmers, too, immediately adopted more water-efficient methods.”

When Day Zero arrives, Cape Town may face disease and contamination, and Israel can help with this too. For example, the Tel Aviv University chapter of Engineers without Borders designed and built a rainwater collection and purification system in a village in Tanzania where the drinking water contained dangerously high amounts of fluoride. Since the project was finished in 2014, it has been supplying safe drinking water to more than 400 children daily.

Israel exports more than $2.2 billion (R26 billion) annually in water-related technology and know-how, and Israeli water technology is being used in more than 150 countries, including some that have no formal ties with Israel. “The world doesn’t need to take the 70 years during which Israel has been solving its water problem,” says author Siegel. “Israel did the work already. The world can emulate it. But it has to get a move-on before the water runs out.”