Singapore quenches the thirst of its population in part with “used water”
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on May 7, 2008 at 5:43 amFrom BBC News:
Singapore’s water shortages have always posed a major challenge.
“Although we’re on the equator and we’ve got lots of rain, we have nowhere to naturally store water,” explains Khoo Teng Chye, chief executive of the city-state’s Public Utilities Board, or PUB. “We have no groundwater.”
Singapore receives much of it’s water from neighboring Malaysia, but a dispute over costs sent Singapore looking at other ways to quench the thirst of its population:
As a first step, a string of massive reservoirs are being constructed to “harvest as much rain as possible”, so that eventually, some two-thirds of the island’s land surface will be under water, up from about half today, Mr Khoo explains. In addition, desalination plants that turn salt water into drinking water provide 10% of Singapore’s current needs.
But the real breakthrough has come from what Mr Khoo describes as NEWater, produced in water reclamation plants from so-called “used” water. “We use the terminology ‘used water’ rather than sewage to create the understanding that water is a resource,” says Mr Khoo with a grin.
The plants use advanced microfiltration or ultrafiltration, reverse osmosis membranes and ultraviolet technology to produce water that is almost as clean as the distilled variety, according to Mr Khoo. Water for industrial use is transported in a separate pipe from Singapore’s drinking water. The rest is mixed in with rainwater in the reservoirs.
Read the rest of this story from BBC News by clicking here.
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We all know that people don’t like to buy used cars, so we have previously-owned cars. How about previously processed water?