Water companies are planning to recycle sewage for use as drinking water within a decade because the risk of water shortages in some parts of England is so great.
There are currently 11 proposals for water recycling schemes to be built over the next ten years across the south of England. These schemes would use recycled wastewater to top up regular supplies.
None have been given final planning permission, and while not all are expected to be built, they are part of a multi-billion-pound building spree designed to avert water shortages in the coming years.
The facilities would not be the sole source of drinking water for their surrounding areas; the recycled wastewater would be fed into local reservoirs, where it would mix with existing water from traditional sources such as rivers, streams, and groundwater before being treated and delivered to households.
The largest of the new generation of recycling schemes would be at the Havant Thicket reservoir in Hampshire – the UK’s first new reservoir since 1992.
When it is fully up and running, recycled sewage will boost its supplies, supplying up to 60 million litres of drinking water a day by 2034.
Other proposals are for London – located in either Teddington or Beckton – Lowestoft in Suffolk, Aylesford in Kent, Poole in Dorset and Colchester in Essex.
“Water recycling is now a very important consideration given the challenges we have with water security,” Heather Smith, part of the Ofwat team responsible for developing new water infrastructure, told The i Paper.
“We need to add more to our drinking water supplies but we can’t take more groundwater and more river water as we normally would because we just don’t have the resources.”
The effluent recycling proposals are part of far-ranging measures to overhaul the water system to ensure large areas of the country do not run short, as climate change alters rainfall patterns and increases the risk of drought and the growing population puts huge stress on supplies.
The country needs to find an extra 5 billion litres of water a day by 2050 – more than half of it in the south-east of England – to avoid shortages.
In addition to sewage recycling, there are proposals to build nine new reservoirs, fix leaking pipes on a massive scale, and significantly reduce the nation’s water use by recycling rainwater and fitting more homes with efficient toilets and showers.
Scientists hoping to address the “yuk factor” of drinking recycled sewage insist that any tap water that includes recycled sewage will meet UK drinking water standards.
Any water that leaves the reservoir will be treated and undergo rigorous tests before being piped into UK households.
“It absolutely is safe and any water that came out of your tap would have to meet the same standards as it always has,” Dr Smith, an expert on water governance at Cranfield University, said.
“You’re not actually drinking sewage. There are lots and lots of treatment steps. So water that starts from a wastewater treatment works gets put back in the environment first – say a river or reservoir. Then, it gets re-abstracted and treated for drinking water.
“So you are, in fact, just drinking “drinking water” – because its gone through all of the same treatment processes as the water that currently comes out of your tap.”
Water recycling is already safely used in California, Australia, Singapore, and Namibia, and research supports it.
One key study, carried out by Stanford University in 2022 and published in the journal Nature, compared water samples from recycled sewage with conventional drinking water.
It found that “in all cases, the toxicity of drinking reuse waters is lower than that of drinking waters from surface waters”.
The Drinking Water Inspectorate, which regulates tap water quality in England and Wales, says that water recycling is “safe” and “sustainable.”
For those people still feeling a little squeamish, advocates of sewage recycling point out that many of us have unwittingly been drinking small quantities of recycled sewage water for years – when it is pumped into rivers through the combined sewage overflow pipes that stop houses from flooding when the network is overwhelmed.
This then finds its way back from the river into water treatment facilities and back into our taps.
“We have to get over this fear of dirty water,” Christopher Gasson, a member of the World Bank’s committee for promoting sewage recycling, told The i Paper. “Technology has conquered that long ago in terms of making sure that you can actually take everything possible out of water.”
He added that people in London have been drinking water with elements of wastewater from Oxford, where he lives, for years. “Anyone who complains about drinking purified wastewater – what do they think they’ve been drinking all their lives?” he said.
Opponents say the technology is costly and energy intensive and, in a country that has so much rainfall, they instead want to see money invested on effective rainwater recycling schemes and fixing leaks on a vast scale.
They also say they “reject” water that is discharged at the end of the recycling process is much more concentrated than existing sewage – posing a risk to marine wildlife.
An Environment Agency spokesperson said: “We support the development of resilient water supplies, including exploring alternative options to meet future water demand.
“Water recycling enables water companies to maximise available resources, and any water recycling scheme will include appropriate mitigation measures and the necessary permit conditions to protect and enhance both the environment and human health.”
The Havant Thicket Reservoir:
The Havant Thicket reservoir, currently being built just outside the Hampshire town of Havant, will be the UK’s first new reservoir in more than three decades.
When it is fully up and running, recycled sewage will boost supplies. This is one of a new generation of schemes designed to shore up the country’s water supplies in the face of climate change and population growth.
The project involves purifying recycled wastewater at a new plant, which will then be pumped into the spring-fed reservoir. According to Southern Water, which is responsible for the project, the reservoir water will be treated again to meet strict drinking water standards before being sent into the supply network.
As such, from 2034, the new facility would supply up to 60 million litres of drinking water a day, the amount depending on the strain the local water system is under from drought and other factors affecting demand and supply.
However, there is considerable opposition to the project.
“The quality of the drinking water is not something that I’m personally concerned about in a big way, but some other members of the group are concerned about that. The battle for me is over the environment,” Tracey Viney, who advises the Water Matters campaign group, told The i Paper.
“It’s not necessary; it’s ridiculously expensive, and there are cheaper and more sustainable alternatives. Why are we even thinking about recycling effluent at this stage?,” asks Ms Viney, who was the Havant Thicket reservoir project manager in the planning stages before retiring five years ago.
While Portsmouth Water is managing the reservoir design and construction, Southern Water is responsible for the scheme’s new wastewater recycling facility.
“People that hear about this project overseas say ‘What is Britain doing considering effluent recycling when you get so much rain? Why aren’t you collecting more rain before you think about effluent recycling – because it’s just so energy intensive and doesn’t make any sense’.”
“There is also significant concern about the impact of more concentrated reject water from the effluent recycling process being discharged in to the Solent,” added Ms Viney.
There are also fears that construction work to build the recycling plant on a former landfill site risked contaminating the nearby groundwater, which would flow into the Solent – a strait of water that lies between Britain and the Isle of Wight.
Impurities removed from the recycled water will be released through a pipe back into the Solent around four miles out to sea.
Tim McMahon, Southern Water’s managing director of water, said: “The south-east has one of the fastest growing populations in the UK, and we’re already experiencing the impacts of climate change, with extreme weather and increased risk of droughts.
“The Environment Agency says that by 2050, the region will need almost 2.6 billion extra litres of water every day to maintain supplies. At the same time, we must find ways to leave more water in the environment and protect some of our rarest and most sensitive habitats.
“Water recycling is a safe and sustainable solution that’s already being used in many other countries. It makes use of water that would otherwise be wasted to create robust and resilient supplies to keep rivers and taps flowing.”
Southern Water accepts that water recycling uses more energy than conventional sources of supply, such as groundwater or rivers, but points out that those conventional sources are no longer available to us as they once were.
To protect the surrounding environment, it plans to locate all of the processing plants above ground on foundations piled down to firm strata below the landfill.
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