DAMMAM: Recycling wastewater, even to the high standards needed for drinking, is much lest wasteful of energy than making new desalinated water. Tertiary Sewage Effluent (TSE) can and should, speakers argued in the closing stages of the WEPower 2009 in Dammam on Tuesday, be utilized to the maximum to conserve groundwater, increase the availability of clean water to much of the world’s population and reduce industrial impact on climate change. It was a matter of seeing wastewater as a resource and not a problem, and addressing the social and moral imperatives of providing potable water for all.

Water reuse is defined as Treated Sewage Effluent (TSE) or ‘grey water’ that has undergone tertiary treatment to remove solids and all bacteria. The recycled water is disinfected before being used for irrigation and/or industrial use.

Recycled water can also be returned to a natural water body or storage reservoir and treated later to drinking water quality standard (indirect potable water use). This requires advanced wastewater treatment technology.

Hassan Elkodi, area sales manager for General Electric Water and Process Technologies, quietly delivered a series of statistics that he argued provided the drivers for maximizing water reuse technology most especially in developing countries where budgets are limited. He presented some simple and startling facts: 50 percent of the world does not have access to the quality of water the Romans had two millennia ago, 50 billion man hours every year are spent in Africa collecting and hauling water, 5.2 billion people (60 percent of the world’s population) will suffer from water shortages by 2025 and 1.1 billion people without access at all to clean water. He concluded his list with the fact that 1 child dies every 15 seconds from a water-borne disease (1.1 billion a year). The gross toll of deaths from water borne diseases yearly tops 3.9 billion.

Elkodi said that water cost would continue to rise along with demand and would be accompanied by environmental legislation that would spiral prices up still further.