A group of "curileros" ride in a boat in the bay of Jiquilisco, in the Pacific Ocean off the Salvadoran coast, during the daily task of searching for "curiles", a locally prized mollusk. Two municipalities bordering the bay, Jiquilisco and Puerto El Triunfo, are working to keep a treatment plant that processes wastewater from these towns active, in order to avoid contaminating this important wetland and protect the health of local families and visitors. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
CHIRILAGUA, El Salvador , Oct 25 2023 (IPS)

Insufficient wastewater treatment systems in El Salvador have taken a toll on the environment and the health of the population for decades, but some municipalities are putting more attention on processing their liquid waste.

Various reports warned as early as 2014 that in El Salvador, a country of 6.7 million people, only 8.52 percent of wastewater receives some form of treatment, and the picture has not changed much since then."My job is to provide the proper maintenance so that the plant works well and we make sure that the environment is not polluted.” -- Eduardo Ortega

It is not surprising, then, that only 12 percent of the rivers have good quality water and that dozens of people die each year from diarrhea: this year, as of Sept. 30, 63 people had died from this cause, of a total of more than 164,000 reported cases.

Wastewater includes what is generated in domestic activities, such as the use of toilets, sinks, washbasins and laundry. Wastewater is also produced by industry, but due to its characteristics it requires more complex treatment.

With international assistance

Few municipalities and communities have their own wastewater treatment systems, in some cases created as collective efforts that included their own funds as well as financing from international institutions and from the central government.

“My job is to provide the proper maintenance so that the plant works well and we make sure that the environment is not polluted,” Eduardo Ortega, who runs one of the few treatment plants located in eastern El Salvador, told IPS.

Ortega works in maintenance in the plant located next to La Española, a rural settlement in the municipality of Chirilagua, which borders the Pacific Ocean, in the south of the department of San Miguel.

La Española, a village of 40 houses, was built with Spanish aid funds for 40 fishing families affected by Hurricane Mitch, which left a trail of death and destruction in Central America in October 1998.

The housing project, financed by the government of the southern Spanish region of Andalucía, included a basic sanitation system that is unusual in rural areas: a sewage network that transports wastewater, including human waste, to the treatment plant.

A nearby similar initiative of 278 houses built for 1,500 people, called Flores de Andalucía, in the vicinity of Chirilagua as well, was also financed by humanitarian aid from the regional government of Andalucia.

There are currently 196 “ordinary” treatment plants in the country, in other words, plants that treat wastewater from domestic activities.

Of these, 90 are private, 78 are public and 17 are community-run, among other categories, according to the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources.

Eduardo Ortega (L), in charge of the treatment plant located near Chirilagua, in the department of Usulután in eastern El Salvador, and Edwin Guzmán (R), head of the municipality’s Environmental Unit, are mainly responsible for ensuring that the liquid waste treatment plant is operating at 100 percent. The station was built with financial aid from Spain as part of a housing project to benefit victims of Hurricane Mitch, which devastated large areas in Central America in October 1998. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Bacteria and gravel filters

The process begins with a hydraulic structure that removes sand and other small particles which, before passing into a tank, are filtered through a screen, Edwin Guzmán, head of the environmental unit of the local government of Chirilagua, a municipality of 25,000 people, including the local capital and outlying villages, told IPS.

The liquid then runs into another tank containing bacteria that eliminate the organic matter that has been dissolved into particles before reaching the tank.

After this, the waste passes to the biofiltration areas: rectangular ponds two meters deep, filled with layers of volcanic rock and gravel.

Finally, everything goes to another pond with “percolator” filters, which contain more bacteria to eliminate any remaining organic matter.

“This treated water will not contaminate the San Román river, which is about three kilometers away,” Guzmán said.

He added: “If this treatment plant were not here, there would be terrible pollution of the river, which is one of the few in the area that always has a good flow of water.”

And if the river were polluted, it would also affect the waters of the Pacific, where it flows into from this small Central American country that only has coasts on that ocean.

A view of part of the infrastructure of the treatment plant set up next to Jardines de Andalucía, the second housing project built in 2003 mostly with Spanish aid near the Salvadoran municipality of Chirilagua, on the coastal strip of the eastern department of Usulután. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

A cleaner sea

The larger Flores de Andalucía plant also receives sewage from El Cuco, a beach located about two kilometers to the south, visited by tourists drawn by its kilometers of gray sandy beaches and the gentle waves of the sea.

The inhabitants of El Cuco have always been dedicated to fishing, but there are also businesses, small hostels and restaurants, whose wastewater no longer goes directly into the sea.

The wastewater is collected in a tank and, fueled by a gasoline engine, is pumped uphill through a pipeline to the plant, its final destination.

“Before, all that water went straight to the sea,” José Henríquez, one of the plant’s operators, told IPS.

“It is important to treat the water, because otherwise we are contaminating ourselves,” said Henríquez, while cleaning the plant’s pipelines.

But despite this initiative, it is estimated that only 60 percent of the wastewater from El Cuco and surrounding areas is treated, as there are people and businesses that, for some reason, bypass the regulations and continue the old practice of dumping their wastewater on the beach.

Moreover, the municipalities near Chirilagua do not have treatment plants and, consequently, much of their waste is discharged into the rivers, which carry it to the sea.

Official figures show that 61.5 percent of Salvadoran households throw gray water, from washing clothes, hands, dishes, etc., into the street or outdoors, 33 percent dispose of it through sewage systems and 2.3 percent through septic tanks. The remaining 3.1 percent discharge their gray water into rivers or use other means.

El Cuco beach, on the Pacific coast of El Salvador, is a community whose wastewater is pumped through a pipeline uphill to the treatment plant located in Jardines de Andalucía, near Chirilagua, to prevent contamination generated by the villlage’s shops, homes, restaurants and hostels from reaching the sea. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

A bay without pollution

Further west on the Salvadoran coast is Jiquilisco Bay, the country’s main wetland, a place of exuberant natural beauty covering more than 600,000 hectares, home to numerous marine-coastal plant and animal species.

The municipality of Puerto El Triunfo, population 20,000, is located on the edge of the bay’s estuary in the south of the department of Usulután. A treatment plant that has been processing the municipality’s wastewater since the end of 2009 is located nearby.

The Puerto El Triunfo plant was also partially financed by aid from Spain, which contributed approximately 50 percent of the cost of the work, which totaled 660,000 dollars.

The rest of the investment came from the municipal and central governments.

“The water used to be dumped untreated into the mangrove swamp and into the bay; now it is discharged treated, cleaner,” Evelio Álvarez, in charge of the Environmental Unit of the Puerto El Triunfo municipal government, told IPS.

Álvarez said that in 2010, due to financial problems, the municipality could no longer afford to run the plant and ceded control to the government’s National Aqueduct and Sewer Administration, which has managed it ever since.

The facility also processes liquid waste from Jiquilisco, a municipality of some 50,000 inhabitants located about eight kilometers north of Puerto El Triunfo, from where the wastewater is pumped down to the station.

In the past, the waste from Jiquilisco went directly into the El Paso River, which flows into the bay.

Only 8.52 percent of the wastewater generated in El Salvador receives some type of treatment, and much of the waste is dumped untreated into rivers and streams, which end up depositing it in important wetlands in the country, contaminating ecosystems and affecting people’s health. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

“Most of the families make their living from fishing, and all that pollution was going raw into the mangroves,” agro-ecologist Etelvina Pineda, head of the environmental unit of the Jiquilisco municipal government, told IPS.

From the mangrove swamp and its web of canals the pollution spread to the lowlands bordering the bay, and as a result the homemade wells that supplied the coastal communities in the area had high concentrations of Escherichia coli, a bacterium present in human feces.

In addition, in the mangroves, “we ended up contaminating the mollusks, crustaceans and all the marine fauna that live there, through feces and heavy materials,” said Pineda.

As a result, people got sick from eating improperly cooked seafood. The pollution also decimated the marine fauna, a source of income for local families.

However, as in Chirilagua, Pineda pointed out that the pollution has not been stopped 100 percent.

She stressed that this would require a broader and more comprehensive effort, including the other four municipalities with an impact on the bay: Usulután, San Dionisio, Concepción Batres and Jucuarán.

In addition to the lack of financial resources to carry out such a program, Pineda argued that there is an absence of political will on the part of local governments and the central government, which she said are not committed to solving the environmental problems of this area or the country as a whole.

Bellandur Lake, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India. Credit: SIWI

By Torgny Holmgren
STOCKHOLM, Mar 21 2017 (IPS)

Water is a finite resource. With a growing population, an expanding global middle class and a rise in energy and industrial production, the demand for water is reaching new levels. According to the OECD, global demand for freshwater will increase by 55 percent between 2000 and 2050. By 2050 it is expected that roughly 6.4 billion people will live in cities, making urban water management an essential building block for resilience and sustainable growth.

A growing number of users with competing demands further propels the issue of global water scarcity. A variable climate with unpredictable precipitation patterns intensifies this issue. It is now more important than ever to find ways to be more careful with the water we have and to better balance competing water needs between different users.

The good news is that we know we can be far more efficient in our use of water, and many actors, such as cities already are.

At SIWI, we believe that a circular economy in which water is reused and waste is managed as an economic asset are important parts of the solution to this challenge.

By 2050 it is expected that roughly 6.4 billion people will live in cities, making urban water management an essential building block for resilience and sustainable growth.
The opportunities for exploiting wastewater are enormous. When properly harnessed, wastewater is an affordable and sustainable source of water, energy, nutrients and other consumables. This is one of the many reasons why the theme of the world’s leading annual event on water and development – World Water Week in Stockholm – is ‘Water and waste: reduce and reuse’.

The Week will address the challenges presented by two ambitious targets set out in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Goal 6, target 3:
“by 2030, improve water quality by reducing pollution, eliminating dumping and minimizing release of hazardous chemicals and materials, halving the proportion of untreated wastewater and substantially increasing recycling and safe reuse globally”

Goal 12, target 5:
“by 2030, substantially reduce waste generation through prevention, reduction, recycling and reuse”.

These are just two of the 169 SDG targets, that along with the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the annual Global Risk Report by the World Economic Forum, highlight our challenge to achieve sustainable development in a changing world.

Water is a great connector and is at the core of sustainable development. It is the ‘blue thread’ that runs through the SDGs – without reliable access to water almost none of the Sustainable Development Goals can be achieved.

In recent years, business leaders and city mayors have become more engaged in water and sustainable development, becoming important partners in achieving a water wise world.

Torgny Holmgren

Cities are increasingly recognized as critical to achieving the SDGs. They are the frontline for institutional, economic and social change; they are the future for humanity and the stage upon which the SDGs will unfold.

While wastewater isn’t only an urban challenge, cities can serve as a hub for wastewater innovation as they present some of the greatest wastewater challenges. Challenges from sewage management, stormwater runoff and urban flooding are further exaggerated by intensified urbanization and climate change.

Water supply, sanitation and stormwater are integral components of the urban water system, yet they are often not planned or operated in an integrated way. Viewing them as a single system can greatly enhance the utility of water, both in the context of everyday use and under stress.

This calls for new approaches to ‘smart cities’, with greater emphasis on integrated urban water and wastewater management, with stronger links to spatial planning and inter-institutional collaboration.

Success in urban water management relies on people, good governance and cross-sectoral collaboration. World Water Week offers a place for addressing this by bringing together scientists, policy makers, and private sector and civil society actors to network, exchange ideas and foster new thinking. I invite you to join SIWI at World Water Week, 27 August – 1 September, to help develop expertise and discuss today’s biggest water-related issues.

Torgny Holmgren is Executive Director at Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI)

Excerpt:

Fish cages on the Nile River. Experts are calling for a more holistic approach to aquaculture. Credit: Cam Mcgrath/IPS

By Cam McGrath
CAIRO, Jul 26 2014 (IPS)

Less than four percent of Egypt’s land mass is suitable for agriculture, and most of it confined to the densely populated Nile River Valley and Delta. With the nation’s population of 85 million expected to double by 2050, government officials are grappling with ways of ensuring food security and raising nutritional standards.

“With the drive toward increasing food production and efficiency, Egypt is going to have to become smarter in how it uses water and land for food production,” says aquaculture expert Malcolm Beveridge. “It would make sense to bring aquaculture together with agriculture in order to increase food production per unit of land and water.”“Why are we using water first for agriculture then taking the drainage for aquaculture? Surely it should be the opposite – use water first for aquaculture and after that to irrigate fields” – Sherif Sadek, general manager of the Cairo-based Aquaculture Consultant Office

One possibility under study is to adopt integrated aquaculture, a holistic approach to food production in which the wastes of one commercially cultured species are recycled as food or fertiliser for another. Projects typically co-culture several aquatic species, but the synergistic approach also encourages the broader integration of fish production, livestock rearing and agriculture.

“An integrated approach would seem the logical next step for Egypt’s aquaculture industry in that it can significantly reduce water requirements while increasing fish farmers’ revenues,” Beveridge told IPS.

Egypt’s aquaculture sector has witnessed explosive growth in recent decades. Annual production of farmed fish climbed from 50,000 tonnes in the late 1990s to over one million tonnes last year – exceeding the combined output of all other Middle East and African nations.

But fish farming as it is predominantly practised in Egypt – by simply digging a pit and filling it with water and fish – has a major drawback. A decades-old government decree requires that drinking water and crop irrigation be given first call on Nile water, leaving aquaculture projects to operate in downstream filth, contaminating fish and limiting productivity.

“Over 90 percent of the aquaculture in Egypt is based on agricultural drainage water, with plenty of pesticides, sewage and industrial effluents,” says Sherif Sadek, general manager of the Cairo-based Aquaculture Consultant Office.

“Why are we using water first for agriculture then taking the drainage for aquaculture? Surely it should be the opposite – use water first for aquaculture and after that to irrigate fields.”

Integrated aquaculture reverses the water-use paradigm, with tangible benefits to both fish farms and farmers’ crops. While the practice is still in its infancy in Egypt, several projects have demonstrated its commercial viability.

At the El Keram farm in the desert northwest of Cairo, farmers use pumped water for tilapia culture, recycling the water into ponds where catfish are raised. The drainage from the catfish ponds, rich in organic nutrients, is then used to irrigate and fertilise clover fields. Sheep and goats that graze on these fields generate manure that is used to produce biogas to heat the tanks where fish fry are raised, or to warm the fish ponds in the winter.

“The project has demonstrated how farmers who switched to aquaculture after salinity rendered their fields infertile can increase their productivity and profits using the same volume of water,” says Sadek.

Other integrated projects on reclaimed desert land culture marine aquatic species such as sea bass and sea bream, directing the downstream wastewater to pools of red tilapia, a table fish able to tolerate high salinity. According to Sadek, the brine from these ponds can be used to grow salicornia, a halophyte in demand as a biofuel input, livestock fodder and as a gourmet salad ingredient.

“Salicornia can be irrigated with extremely salty water and produces seeds and oil, as well as fodder for camels and sheep,” says Sadek.

According to development experts, integrated aquaculture delivers greater efficiencies, requiring up to 70 percent less water than comparable non-integrated production systems. It is also a cost-effective method of disposing of wastes and saves resource-poor farmers from having to purchase fertilisers.

Beveridge says small-scale Egyptian aquaculture ventures unable to afford the complex closed-loop system employed at El Keram could still benefit from integrated practices that would allow them to harvest commercial food products year-round.

“Egypt’s aquaculture industry has a problem in that the growing season is relatively short,” he notes. “During the months of December to February temperatures are too low to sustain much (fish) growth. And during that period, farmers who try to overwinter their fish often lose substantial numbers to stress and disease.”

Pilot studies have shown that fish farmers are able to capitalise on the nutrients locked up in the mud at the bottom of their earthen fish ponds.

“The idea is that you drain down your ponds in November, harvest your fish, then plant a crop of wheat in your pond bottom that you would harvest in March before flooding the stubble area with water and reintroducing young fish,” Beveridge explains.

A boy walks with his bicycle on a flooded street in Georgetown, Guyana. About 80 percent of wastewater that enters the Caribbean Sea is only partially treated or untreated. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
GEORGETOWN, Guyana, Nov 30 2013 (IPS)

It’s a dirty, smelly business, but wastewater is gaining prominence across the Caribbean as countries from Jamaica in the west to Guyana in the south increasingly recognise its effects on the environment and the importance of improving its management.

Coordinator of the Guyana Wastewater Revolving Fund Marlon Daniels told IPS that with the advent of climate change, protecting the environment has become more of a challenge for countries of the region.The impact of sea-level rise on [urban] wastewater systems may be particularly severe." -- Dr. Adrian Cashman

He explained that climate change has resulted in unusual weather patterns, including more rainfall and flash flooding, and these have caused an increase in sewerage entering the sea.

“One of the effects of improving access to water, as required under Goal 7 of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, is that more people instead of using a pit latrine now use a flush toilet, so they have an on-site treatment in the form of a septic tank,” Daniels said.

“When you have a huge storm or heavy rain, you have a toxic soup. There is refuse from septic tanks, which is not as dirty as raw sewerage but it’s still rich in nutrients and pathogens. All of that wastewater ends up in the environment as floodwater and you have populations being exposed to that.”

View with discretion: The intake at the sole wastewater treatement facility in Guyana’s capital Georgetown. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

Dr. Donna-May Sakura-Lemessy, deputy director at the Trinidad-based Institute of Marine Affairs (IMA), says while the Caribbean benefits tremendously from the tourism industry – last year visitors spent an estimated 26 billion dollars – tourism-dependent economies of small island Caribbean states suffer the most from untreated wastewater with the destruction of reefs and the pollution of beaches.

“Poor wastewater management leads to degradation of both your potable water sources and your environmental resources. So what will happen is that your swimming waters will be contaminated and this could lead to gastro-intestinal diseases and things like ear infections,” Sakura-Lemessy told IPS.

“When people have to come into a country, they pay to go where they can enjoy themselves. They don’t want to come into a country and hear that no bathing or swimming is allowed or knowing that there is a risk that they could get ill if they bathe in the water.

“So if the resources are degraded then the chances of you maintaining a healthy tourism sector are minimised and you would lose out on whatever revenue tourism would bring to you.”

In some Caribbean countries, tourism employs eight out of 10 people, she stressed.

Daniels noted that fishing industries are also affected where pollution has destroyed fish breeding areas and food supply, and the interaction of untreated wastewater with stressed environmental systems makes future adaptation to climate change more difficult.

Persistent rainfall in Guyana on Nov. 26 left many areas of the capital flooded, prompting the country’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Shamdeo Persaud to advise residents to pay special attention to water safety and personal hygiene.

“Stay out of the water as much as possible, as it can greatly reduce your chances of contracting diseases such as skin infections, leptospirosis, diarrhoeal diseases and other water-borne diseases,” Persaud said in an advisory.

She also urged residents to keep food separate, protected from the flood water; to throw away all food that has been in contact with the flood waters; and to wash all fruits and vegetables with treated water.

University of the West Indies (UWI) lecturer Dr. Adrian Cashman said the impacts of climate change on wastewater management will be through changes in temperature, precipitation patterns, sea level rise, and storm related damages.

“Many of the urban areas in the Caribbean are located in low-lying coastal areas with some 40 percent of the population living within two kilometres of the coast,” Cashman said.

“Given that the majority of urban areas are not serviced by centralised sewerage systems and therefore rely on other means of disposal, the impact of sea-level rise on these wastewater systems may be particularly severe.

“The potential effects are higher groundwater levels which will restrict the ability to soak away effluent and back-up systems as well as restrict biological activity that provides the assimilative capacity. This in turn will lead to elevated levels of beach and marine pollution, contribute to eutrophication of bathing waters and the creation of marine dead zones,” Cashman added.

In 2011, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) began funding a four-year project – the Caribbean Regional Fund for Wastewater Management (CReW) – that seeks to provide sustainable financing for the wastewater sector, support policy and legislative reform, and foster regional dialogue and knowledge exchange among key stakeholders in the Wider Caribbean Region.

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) are the co-implementing agencies for the project. The Project Coordination Group based in Jamaica carries out the day-to-day management of the CReW project, supported by Pilot Executing Agencies (PEA) in Jamaica, Belize, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago.

Project Coordinator of the GEF CReW Denise Forrest said that about 80 percent of domestic wastewater that enters the Caribbean Sea is only partially treated or untreated.

“We have to recognise that wastewater management and its effective treatment is not something that we can say is a low priority or something that we can ignore. It is in fact a significant development requirement, particularly in the context of a region whose development and quality of life for its people rests on its natural resource base,” she told IPS.

“If we fail to treat with the issue of managing wastewater effectively, we are perhaps dooming our region to a future that is not prosperous both in terms of our economic development, in terms of the health of our people, in terms of the quality of life, and in terms of hedging our bets in terms of how we adapt to climate change.

“It is absolutely essential that we deal with this issue,” Forest added.

Drought has left some parts of Sri Lanka's dry zone scorched and crops devastated. Credit: Photostock

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Sep 9 2013 (IPS)

Drought and chronic water shortages played a significant role in sparking Syria’s civil war and in unrest throughout much of the Middle East, water experts now believe.

Around the world, water demand already exceeds supply in regions with more than 40 percent of the world’s population. That may climb to 60 percent in the coming decade, a new study has found."Disease outbreaks from using wastewater do happen but it is rarely cited as the cause." -- Manzoor Qadir of United Nations University

“Water-scarce regions can’t grow enough food to feed their own people,” said co-author Manzoor Qadir of United Nations University’s Canadian-based Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH).

About 70 percent of the world’s freshwater – and up to 95 percent in some countries – is used for irrigation. There is intense competition for freshwater between municipal, industrial, and agricultural uses. Increasingly, agriculture has been losing out, particularly in water-stressed regions, Qadir told IPS.

Between 2006 and 2011, up to 60 percent of Syria’s land experienced its worst ever drought and a series of crop failures. In 2009, the U.N. reported that over 800,000 Syrians lost their livelihoods and fled to cities as result of the drought.

The entire Mediterranean region is undergoing a prolonged drought that has been linked to climate change, according to a recent U.S. study. If climate-altering carbon emissions continue at current rates, droughts in the region will worsen and lengthen.

As water supplies fall, many regions are using urban wastewater, a very valuable resource if it is treated properly, says the study “Global, regional, and country level need for data on wastewater generation, treatment, and use“, published Sep. 5 in the journal Agricultural Water Management.

This is the first study to look at how wastewater is used in 181 countries. One of the key findings is that only 55 countries have good data. Synthesising what data there are, researchers found that high-income countries treat 70 percent of their wastewater while middle-income countries treat 28 to 38 percent. Just eight percent of wastewater generated in low-income countries undergoes any kind of treatment.

“From the earliest of times, most wastewater has truly been wasted. However, it is a vast resource if we reclaim it properly, which includes the separation of municipal from industrial wastewater,” said UNU-INWEH Director Zafar Adeel.

The volume of wastewater potentially available worldwide each year is equivalent to 14 months of outflow from the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico, Adeel told IPS.

In poor, water-scarce countries, wastewater is widely used to irrigate foodlands – some estimate as much as 300 million hectares producing 10 percent of the world’s food, the study says.

However, there is little data to confirm this. It is often a country’s ‘dirty little secret’ that much of the food consumed in urban areas is grown using untreated wastewater.

Wastewater is valuable because it has very high level of nutrients, including potash, nitrogen and phosphorus, eliminating the need and cost of fertilisers. However, untreated wastewater can transmit diseases such as cholera. Chile experienced cholera outbreaks and banned the use of untreated wastewater in 1992.

“Disease outbreaks from using wastewater do happen but it is rarely cited as the cause,” said Qadir.

One reason is that few studies have been done. A few years ago Qadir and colleagues discovered higher rates of waterborne diseases like gastroenteritis in children in the Mediterranean who were eating food grown using untreated wastewater.

In the 1990s, fruit and vegetable exports from Jordan were banned for similar reasons. Jordan has since implemented an aggressive campaign to rehabilitate and improve wastewater treatment plants and introduced enforceable standards.

“Israel uses nearly every drop of its wastewater with specific uses determined by the quality”, Qadir said.

Many homes in California have separate grey and black water collection systems. Grey water from showers and dishwashing is reused to water lawns and gardens, the report said.

People are generally reluctant to eat food grown using wastewater but it is perfectly safe if treated properly, Qadir stressed.

“Unfortunately, water treatment is not seen as a priority in many countries.”