Innovative thinking secures continuous water supply

Originally built to mitigate the effect of the current drought, especially on businesses in the Sembcorp Siza Water (SSW) supply area, the Frazers water recycling plant now directly augments water by three million litres per day.

This has made it possible for SSW to reduce water restrictions within its concession area from 50 to 20 per cent for residential consumers and to 10 per cent for commercial users.

“We are very proud of our achievements as a company to ensure continuous water supply to our customers and providing sustainable and safe alternatives during these challenging times,” said SSW managing director, Shyam Misra.

SSW, a Singaporean company, owns and operates the one of the largest water recycling plants in the world in Singapore. Misra said he and his team visited the 228 million litres per day Changi NEWater plant and piggybacked off its world class technology to build the new plant at Frazers.

The Frazers plant treats only final effluent (not raw sewerage) and has four buffers in place to make sure every drop of water that goes back into the system is clean.

First the water is sand filtrated, then ultra filtrated before it goes through a process of reverse osmosis and finally is chlorinated. The plant itself has online monitoring of quality that provides live analysis of the water quality. As an additional security measure, SSW takes hourly samples and network samples to guarantee water quality.

“Talbot Laboratories also take independent samples for us and we are glad to report that all test results correlate providing us the assurance that the plant is operating to provide SANS214:2015 water,” said Misra.

The plant also has protocols in place to shut off itself if the online water quality monitoring system detects a breach of the water quality parameters.

“During the testing phase we simulated a failure and the plant immediately shut down so we are confident of the quality of the water that is put back into the system meets all the SANS 241, Drinking Water Quality Standards,” said Misra.

The Frasers plant has been awarded the Wilson Award of Excellence by the Water Institute of South Africa and is also Green Drop accredited by the department of water and sanitation and this is in addition to the compliance that Sembcorp Siza requires for compliance to its Safety, Heath, Environment and Quality (SHEQ) Systems that the company is ISO approved for.

“Sembcorp Siza Water is ranked as the country’s number one water service provider, per the Department of Water & Sanitations Blue Drop Accreditation and in addition Sembcorp occupies 20 per cent of the top 15 Blue Drop Systems in South Africa,” ” said Misra.

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