Waterwise Ways With Waste

A novel project in the Little Karoo village of De Rust to recycle municipal sewage into reusable water for agriculture could be a model for innovation in our drought-stricken land

- Marion Whitehead

“Water is like electricity. You only take notice of it when there isn’t any,” says Jeremy Basson, as we stand at the municipal sewage-treatment works in De Rust. It’s an unusually damp day in this arid corner of the Little Karoo. A light drizzle dusts snow onto the Swartberg mountains behind us as we hunch deeper into our raincoats.

But the folk at the Wetlands Water Wise Project, where Jeremy is a supervisor, aren’t waiting for the taps to run dry in their village – they are being proactive and working with the local municipality to clean effluent sufficiently for it to be safely re-used in agriculture. It’s a novel project that uses plants to ‘scrub’ pathogens and pollutants like heavy metals out of the water, and is believed to be the first joint initiative of this kind with a municipality in South Africa.

“There are water turtles invading our pond and we have three pairs of birds building nests here now. We’ve also seen frogs and tadpoles,” says Jeremy proudly of the secondlast settling pond at the sewage-treatment works, the site of their pilot project. “This wasn’t happening before we started the project just over a year ago.”

Colleague Deon Strydom points out the ingenious rafts they constructed for wetland plants out of shade-cloth cushions stuffed with dry leaves, using 2l empty, plastic, cooldrink bottles as floats. “Bulrushes and fluitjiesriet are planted into the cushions,” he explains.

The enzymes in the roots filter the water, transposing toxins into harmless substances, destroying pathogenic bacteria, viruses and worm eggs, and removing heavy metals and salts – all with photosynthesis as the sole energy source.