The latest Green Drop report, released by South Africa’s Department of Water and Sanitation, reveals that half of all wastewater treatment works in the country fail to treat sewage properly and, in many cases, fail to treat it at all, while it often ends up spilling into the environment before even getting to the treatment works. More concerning perhaps is that fact that a number of treatment plants are listed as “No Monitoring Required”, which means the plant is exempt from having to comply with all or some effluent quality indicators. This, News24 quotes Anthony Turton, of the Centre for Environmental Management at the University of the Free State, as saying, represents “a tsunami of human waste inundating … rivers and dams, without respite, for more than a decade”.
