http://theweek.com/articles/668750/how-namibia-turns-sewage-into-drinking-water
Snippet (best click the above link):
On the outskirts of Windhoek, the capital of Namibia, there's a huge, churning vat of nasty brown liquid. It's so stinky that my guide, the man who runs Windhoek's water department, tells me I might want to stay in the car.
But this is what I came to see — raw sewage, on its way to being turned back into drinking water.
The Goreangab waste treatment plant is where most of the wastewater from Windhoek's 300,000 residents ends up. But it's not your run-of-the-mill sewage plant. It's the first stop in the city's pioneering water recycling system.
Cities around the world are wrestling with whether they should build facilities like this. But here, in the middle of a desert in a remote corner of southern Africa, they've been recycling wastewater for almost 50 years.
It's cutting-edge technology, but it's based on the humblest of creatures — bacteria.
"Everything is done biologically, by the organisms," explains Justina Haihambo, a process engineer at the plant. The bacteria help digest the human waste and pull it out of the water, essentially mimicking what happens in nature but a whole lot faster.
Speed was important when the plant was built back in the 1960s, and it's even more important today.
Snippet (best click the above link):
On the outskirts of Windhoek, the capital of Namibia, there's a huge, churning vat of nasty brown liquid. It's so stinky that my guide, the man who runs Windhoek's water department, tells me I might want to stay in the car.
But this is what I came to see — raw sewage, on its way to being turned back into drinking water.
The Goreangab waste treatment plant is where most of the wastewater from Windhoek's 300,000 residents ends up. But it's not your run-of-the-mill sewage plant. It's the first stop in the city's pioneering water recycling system.
Cities around the world are wrestling with whether they should build facilities like this. But here, in the middle of a desert in a remote corner of southern Africa, they've been recycling wastewater for almost 50 years.
It's cutting-edge technology, but it's based on the humblest of creatures — bacteria.
"Everything is done biologically, by the organisms," explains Justina Haihambo, a process engineer at the plant. The bacteria help digest the human waste and pull it out of the water, essentially mimicking what happens in nature but a whole lot faster.
Speed was important when the plant was built back in the 1960s, and it's even more important today.
