Spain: Europe’s leader in wastewater recycling • FRANCE 24 English

[Music] water from toilets, kitchens, washing machines. For the last 17 years, Manuel Martinez has been watering his 22 hectares of orange trees with the town’s waste water. This is the area which has been watered. All the area that you see here, we call these circons. It’s the area where the roots are and where a pipe waters them drop by drop at a rate of four liters an hour. Here, every tree has six watering points. 10% of the water that irrigates this land comes directly from waste water, a vital resource in a region hit by drought. Morthia gets 350 mm of rain a year, the lowest amount in Europe. This water has got one advantage. It comes with the guarantee that we can have it all year round. And in the end, it’s all the different water from different sources that allows us to survive. A few kilometers away, the neighboring purification plant purifies soiled water through a specialist treatment. In the region’s 100 plants, the waste water is cleaned up using active carbon and ultraviolet rays to make it suitable to irrigate the fields. The ultraviolet treatment uses lamps that emit longwave radiation that damages the microorganisms DNA. When the microorganisms DNA is damaged, they can’t reproduce and they die. The idea of reusing waste water can be off-putting, but Pedro Simon says it’s perfectly safe. For it to be a problem for people, you would have to eat 300 kilos of lettuce a day, which means the danger is really minimal. In Mortia, 98% of waste water is recycled for agricultural use, a record in Europe. But some people want to go further still. In Lora, they’re testing a new idea. As well as the usual recycled waste water, the farmers receive part of the water used at the town’s nine tanning factories. Every day, the tanning process requires 220 cubic meters of water. The lion share is consumed by these gigantic washing machines where the dye is added. The water that comes out of the drums is filtered to get rid of any solid matter. That’s the lever that has dissolved once the process is finished. But the most toxic product remains, the chromium used to preserve the animals skin. To reduce its concentration, Pedro disinfects the water with chemicals before a final treatment at a purification plant. We can only expel up to 5 ppms of chromium in the water. The water that comes out of the tannery contains between 0.5 and 1 ppm. So, we are well below what the law allows. And of course, there is a second treatment, which means if something remains in the water, the second treatment eliminates it completely. Entirely eliminating chromium from the water is technically impossible, say the project’s critics. by the river Guadalantine. The spokesman for the left-wing coalition in Lordka shows us where some of the waste water from tanning factories has been discharged for some years. He argues even a second treatment doesn’t clean up the water. We’ve had a long experience here of the tanning industry. I’ve worked in that industry and I’ve seen a lot of colleagues die of cancer. If you don’t get rid of chromium from the water, then in the end you finish up contaminating everything. What they want to do is really odd. It’s true that you’re going to dilute it in more water, so it won’t be as black, but it’ll still be there. A worry shared by many locals. A few hundred meters from their home. Carmen and her daughter Maria aren’t happy about this brown water. The thing is wherever it ends up, it contaminates things and it gets into the food that we eat. I don’t know why they keep flowing it in here knowing it is so toxic and so bad. If they don’t manage to clean it up completely, they shouldn’t be using it to water crops. But if they do clean it, then they should use it because we don’t have enough water and it’s very expensive. The town’s water operator says the pilot study will last several months with regular lab tests.

Spain recycles 15 percent of its wastewater, compared to less than 1 percent in neighbouring France. The Murcia region is a pioneer, recycling 98 percent of its wastewater, mainly for agriculture. It’s a huge help during periods of drought. But while many people consider recycling wastewater the most sustainable way to manage the resource, some are worried about the effects on people’s health. FRANCE 24’s Maude Petit-Jové, Léa Le Denmat and Sarah Morris report from the Murcia region.
#Spain #wastewater #health

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12 comments

  3. A really interesting idea.
    If the waste water is controlled and cleaned up for contaminants, there is a future for it. But I'm suspicious.

  7. La depuradora integral es el presente, el futuro es vertido cero al mar y generación de ríos inversos, en puntos donde las aguas tienen niveles altos de nitratos se bombea de nuevo a cabecera.
    El agua es el bien que más se va a revalorizar en el futuro.
    Es vida.

  9. I remember in Germany they used waste from the paper industry as crop fertilizers. Then consumers started getting cancer from those crops. Now that agriculrural land is unusabe cos it is impossible to clean. Sewage is full of chemicals. The tanning industry uses chromium and lead. This is a horrible experiment on people.

  10. Spain is a country one can look up to! I speak Spanish and have been travelling to the country almost every year in the last 20 years. The progress the country has made is impressive! Today it is one of the most progressive countries in the EU. CONGRATS!

  11. In Israel they've been doing it for decades. 70% of agriculture irrigation comes from treated wastewater.

  12. LOL. We have to. We are becoming a desert. Other countries in Europe don't need it fortunately for them

Comments are closed.