[00:00:22] Bridget Scanlon: We are pleased to talk to Kevin Winter on the podcast today. Kevin is a research director at the Water Hub, which is an Urban Living Lab in Western Cape. The Water Hub is administered by the Future Water Institute within the University of Cape Town, and Kevin is an emeritus Professor at University of Cape Town also and was one of the founders of the Future Water Institute.
So he's one of the country's leading and most respected experts in surface water resources management, water quality, and sustainable urban drainage. Thank you so much, Kevin for joining me today.
[00:01:03] Kevin Winter: Well, thank you. Thanks for the invitation.
[00:01:06] Bridget Scanlon: So, Kevin you were heavily involved with the Cape Town Day Zero as probably everybody and their brother when it was going on. But today I think we're going to focus more the of the discussion on the Water Hub and wastewater treatment plant site downstream of an informal settlement and, how you have been advancing that.
But maybe first let's talk a little bit since I already interviewed Dale Barrow from GEOS on the Cape Town Day Zero, and what I was impressed with is, maybe Cape Town comes out a lot stronger after going through Day Zero and more resilient, so maybe you could just briefly say some of the things that you were involved with during Day Zero or what your thoughts were about it.
[00:01:50] Kevin Winter: Yeah, briefly, and it's probably interesting for the academics who might be listening to this, because I decided that that was the moment to actually drop my tools and the things that I was doing at that time, and to see whether we could use this opportunity to really begin to get a message out to the rest of the world, but also to academia and researchers of how to react in a crisis, and what you do in your growing profession, in your career, when those crises sort of help, do you, do you ignore it? Do you go around the corner and just sort of wait for it to blow over or do you get stuck in? And of course, my impulse being probably kind of personality I suppose, but also an optimist and an opportunist.
I have to be frank and say that as well, to say this is an incredible opportunity. And so right from the very beginning, I was invited in very early stages of the day zero crisis building up to it in August of 2017, and from there I started to meet with the city on what was called a Section 80 committee.
And this is also really interesting from the point of view of an academic playing a role in an information gathering and sharing with the city officials, the elected officials and others from various sectors such as business and agriculture who were forming a round table every month we would meet and evaluate where we were in the crisis, heading up to when it really did matter.
Roundabout January, 2018, and there on, we were sort of waiting for the rains. And by 2018, January, we had 90 days left before this crisis was about to blow over. This is a, a big thing for a city of a country, in a country where the resources are quite limited and you've got almost four and a half million people living in the city.
It would've created absolute chaos and a catastrophe of note. So I decided this was the moment and I just left those papers that we write as academia and got stuck into the committees, but most of all got involved with social media and literally hundreds of interviews from across the world.
There were some amazing interviews from Canada, right the way through South America through to even parts of Australia on the other side. What was important too was the number of children, especially from schools around the world, who wrote and asked questions about Day Zero as it gathered.
And of course, enormous number of journalists who suddenly, when they saw a city in crisis, actually wanted to see that city go through the crisis because bad news sells. And so they came and camped on our doorstep. And it was an enormously interesting opportunity to talk to people, to listen to different views, to get stuck in and to also involved in, in running our own task team at our university because we were, and we knew we were, one of the 10 top users of water in the city.
And the Vice Chancellor of the University asked me, "What are the chances of us closing down this university in the next four months because we've got no water?" And it was an absolutely perfect question to ask. And I have to say, and I said to him, I looked him face to face at that stage around the table as his executive were considering the impact.
And he said, I said to them, and I hope I was right at that stage, I said to him, "I think there's no chance of this city running out of water." I knew a little bit of background from some of the work that I'd done with the city at that stage, that there was enough water around. But it was a moment, and I must admit, when I came out of that room and went down the corridor, I said to myself, "I wonder if I'm right."
Because actually, the university then said, "Well, let's do our level best to try and work within the compliance and the guidance of the city of Cape Town in terms of water saving." And we did, we got campaigns running at that stage and I was privileged to run that, but we didn't run out of water.
And I, I sort of, touch wood and all those good things that we do, and we need special luck at this stage in terms of what we say and do. And it, and its fortune didn't it, it passed by, but I think the point I'm making is, is more than anything else, what was really important is for academics to think about these kinds of opportunities that provide a very different avenue to contribute your research and your knowledge and to do it in a way which is, I guess simply put, I often used to say to them at the end of those meetings, "What have we learned? Let's just spend a moment reflecting on that." And there are probably at least four or five different very specific things that I think we did. As a city, as a result of the input of academics, not only me, but others who were represented around the table.
And one for me was very important, "How do you share data? How do you make data a really important part of the decision making and the knowledge gathering?" And that became so important that eventually the city put together a really credible website that reported on its data, on the status of the dams, of our water resources, how much we were using every week on a Monday at two o'clock.
And that website still continues and was highly credited by different organizations, institutions around the world. And I think that's a result of academics taking a slightly different approach and making sure that data became a really important foundation to the decisions that were made.
So that's just some of the things that I was involved in there, and probably the last thought, and it'll take us onto the Water Hub, I'm sure, or onto water quality. I always said that when we were in that crisis. We had spent a lot of money from budgets that were allocated to other aspects of the city that were drawn into the crisis to try to actually save the day.
And as a result, some of those investments that should have been, and capital that should have been placed on the infrastructure on, say, water quality and our wastewater treatment plants, was diverted to try to save the day in terms of water supply in the day zero scenario we were going to or could be potentially going through.
And I'd always said, it's much easier to, relatively speaking, to get supply of water into the system and to do things around supply, including the demand management of that water supply. But what is really difficult is you can bring water in, but it's very difficult to get that water out at a quality that you can discharge that meets compliance standards. And more and more as those little crisis years went through, and of course, COVID didn't help us either because it was COVID, because it was the water crisis, and then it was COVID on top of it. And both, all of those things smashed our own economy and other parts of the world as well. And as a result, our water quality infrastructure program lags significantly behind.
And we've become increasingly challenged, I think right now, in the city with our waterways and our near coastal shores around the city of Cape Town being highly compromised by poor water quality that is so difficult to abate. And once it runs away with you, it is so difficult to actually recapture.
[00:09:33] Bridget Scanlon: Right, right. Yeah, that, that's very interesting. I mean, you, your emphasis on water data is very valuable because, I mean, if I hear, " We're in a drought," or whatever, I will look at the US drought monitor and, and I'll see how is this drought relative to previous droughts, and stuff like that.
So, so the organizations that put these data available out on the web and everything and make them available, hugely valuable. And California, with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, has really improved their data. They report how many wells went dry and all of these things, and in Texas we have water data for Texas and they have all the reservoir data, from the beginning of when they were constructed in the times here.
So I, I saw the website that you had on the six reservoirs and, and all the details and the water use and everything, which. Sectors were using the water. So that was extremely valuable. And so it's really nice to see that. I mean, we get it in the news media, but that's just snippets. And so to be able to look at the data and absorb it, is very important.
So you mentioned, I guess another issue when we chatted before, with South Africa is the informal settlements, which is an issue also for the water quality that you just mentioned. And I was reading maybe there's about 4,000 informal settlements in South Africa and that house about 2 million people.
I don’t know if those numbers are anywhere close. But even in Cape Town, about 400 of these settlements, is a population of 5 million. So maybe you can just put that in context for us because I know, it is relevant for the Water Hub that you'll be discussing.
[00:11:13] Kevin Winter: Thanks, for that, And those figures are more or less right. And it was so interesting earlier this evening when I was at a meeting with city officials one of them again brought up the challenge of these informal settlements in Cape Town especially, and, and, and said, you know what? We have got very little idea of how those, to the extent to which those informal settlements are even expanding.
You may, for instance, find you have over the last three days another a hundred households that have found themselves in usually land that is not easy to create a settlement to a household on because they're unsafe, they're low lying, they're flood prone, and so forth. And that could be happening overnight.
So the officials admitted that we don't even know exactly what those numbers are, so what you've quoted, 4,000 settlements across the country is probably sort of within the ball park, but it's growing all the time and it's growing, and this is really complicated. So I don't want to take listeners through a very long complex history of South Africa, but our urbanization is growing rapidly in this country.
And it's growing partly because of those legacies of apartheid where people were confined to rural areas and to what was then called so-called "independent homelands" and confined to these rural areas. And as a result, we've now seen the change, this transition slowly where people now need effective services, education, health, among other things, but most all jobs and those are found within the urban areas. So there's a movement towards these cities, particularly the metropolitan cities. And Cape Town has been one of those that has been reasonably successful in its governance and is fighting very hard to try and provide housing through the National Housing Development Agency.
But it's clearly not enough in terms of the wave of movement to people and just generally population growth in the country itself. So these are big challenges. And the, the, the aftermath of all of this big challenge is the scene of of drainage and runoff from these informal settlements because of ineffective services that people are exposed to and very limited ones and dysfunctional ones if they are in place in the first, in their first instance.
[00:13:42] Bridget Scanlon: Right, and we have similar issues in Texas along the Texas-Mexico border, and we have a study at the moment where we are mapping colonias development along the border and trying to, the, the last formal maps were developed in 2014, so we were using a lot of remote sensing, Planet data and other data to, to map how these have evolved over time and using machine learning to, to ground reference them and all these sorts of things.
So I think this is a common issue, trying to keep track of what's happening and as you say, people coming to the cities for jobs. And I think the settlement that's north of the Water Hub, I think indicated that it began in 1993 or 1994 when people were coming for jobs in in that region maybe, and, and then it formed. So, so wastewater treatment, then, water quality issues you mentioned, and wastewater treatment is a huge issue globally. I see it in a lot of places and I, I think Edward Jones and Michelle Van Vliet in, in Utrecht university did a really nice global study where they said, only 60% of wastewater is collected only half of wastewater is treated.
And so it means that a lot of wastewater is discharged directly to rivers without any treatment. And I'm not sure what the numbers are like in South Africa, but possibly similar or, or whatever. So this is a huge issue and I've seen it in many regions, Brazil and other places. Do you think it's that scale in, in South Africa or-
[00:15:14] Kevin Winter: I mean, I think that your figures in terms of how much water is reused from wastewater, we are very, very low and much lower in the percentages that were quoted there. So I don't have the exact figures in mind, but I'm, I'm fairly certain from my experience, this is a very low amount of water that has been a volume of water that's been reused in some way, and treated at a very poor stage of its treatment process.
Anyway. We do have something like 600 different wastewater treatment plants around the country. Many of them are not compliant in terms of our own South African standards and compliance for us in terms of wastewater treatment plant is confined to about 34 37 rather different parameters that are measured.
We are not measuring things like, and this is true for the global stage out there as well. We are not measuring microplastics and PFAS and PFAS and compounds that are coming through drugs and pharmaceuticals and so on, when you look at the water coming from an informal settlement as we are at the Water Hub you get all of that.
A smorgasbord of compounds that potentially have a bioaccumulation effect, both in the environment in which they land, which is usually water bodies, rivers, estuaries, coastlines, but also the uptake within plants and also species, including fish. So our protein potentially is at risk here as well because it, it feeds back into the ecology, into the human diet and so on.
And we know so little about this. We know so little about this worldwide. As well. We've got models. We've got some impression of what is going to happen, but it's possible we are going to need to have clinical trials over another generation before we understand the impact of what happens and what we put down our toilets.
Or in the case of informal settlements, what actually finds its way into the river systems in a way that is what I call the convenient conduits that find it easy way into a river. Imagine if you were in informal settlement, for instance, and you lived therefore two or three years and you've been struggling to dispose of your water around your house.
In terms of your used water, there is no toilet. There are communal toilets. Those toilets are usually, and the law is and and a guiding law, put it that way, is one toilet to five families. Five families could be anything between five or four and five people up to even eight or 10, who are all using one toilet and shared with five households.
So 50 people using one toilet. Well, it's just unworkable. And so in order to try to build that kind of resilience and dignity in your own home if you've lived in formal settlement long enough, and you know where storm water pipelines are, which are generally a lot shallower than a surge pipeline, depending on, you will find a quick way to actually bring that water from your home, your toilet, or from your kitchen and your shower or basin, whatever you've got in your home, and attach it to the stormwater pipe.
And it'll go directly as a point source into the river, which is exactly the case that we are dealing with in the Water Hub. And maybe I, we can talk a bit more about the, the setting of that, just now, but essentially getting the picture of what happens when water is completely unregulated, finding its way into a river system without any treatment at all, can sometimes have a much higher concentration of various parameters.
Take their nutrients and bacteria and viruses and pathogens and so on then would normally be expected to arrive in a formalized wastewater treatment plant. And therein lies the problem. And moving towards an absolute failure of a system that is collapsing under the strain from large and growing informal settlements.
And no easy answers. There are really no silver bullets to this at all. There's no magic wand that can actually suddenly bring this about rapidly and reform currently in the way in which we are managing housing, which is developing formal houses, which is a slow development and certainly not keeping up with the demand that is required.
[00:19:41] Bridget Scanlon: Yeah, that's very interesting. I mean, I think listeners in the US would be flabbergasted. Everybody has en suite almost, and there are four or five bathrooms in the house oftentimes or whatever. But so, you serve as the Director of the Water Hub and, and I was very impressed when I looked at the website and you described it recently to me, and this was just designed within the old, I'm not sure if I'm going to pronounce this correctly, Franschhoek Wastewater Treatment Works and downstream of Langrug informal settlement.
So maybe you can describe how you got that going I mean, it seems like a huge effort. And I see a lot of wastewater treatment plants that are defunct and everything. And so I feel like it could serve as a template for many, many areas. Maybe you can describe how you got interested in working in this and how you got it off the ground.
[00:20:31] Kevin Winter: I hope I won't sound like a maverick academic when I give you the story. because I really told you something about my actions within the Day Zero and that dropping tools was for me and, and the tools for us as academia is to research and to write and all the rest of it. And I got tired of having written an article and being cited by half a dozen people and years later there's still half a dozen people still there sort of thing.
How do you make an impact? And of course, in South Africa we've got so many challenges that are kind of wicked problems that are so difficult to solve and are felt often frustrated as an academic because we weren't making much impact on that. Particular context that we're working in. So that's kind of one more of a philosophical approach to what I'm about to tell you right now that may be quite useful in South Africa too. I think given our context and our history, academics and scientists and researchers in general have a really important responsibility to respond to society and to society's needs. So a social response through our research, I think is something that is much more akin to our practice as academics in South Africa than probably a lot of other countries that don't have the kind of challenges that we have to deal with right now.
And you can either respond to them or you can put your head under the blanket and just let it pass by. And you can focus on the things that you think are really important. And if citations and your papers are important and there are too many, and I fully understand that that is the way you float your boat.
And it's different to the way I'm going to float my boat at all as well. I also was as and I formerly, in fact, before I got into academia, I was involved in secondary school teaching. And I did that for about seven or eight years as well. And for me, teaching and learning and learning together is a really important component to what I I did in academia.
There are very few trained teachers in academics who actually understand the learning process and the cognitive development. And that stood me, I think, in a lot of of a good stead. And one of the things that I wanted to do as a scientist was to try to take my students out of the laboratory. We did too many nice fine experiments, which we could control, and it looked all nice and we could write the papers from that.
But when you take people out into the real world and you try to do things at scale or close to scale, what we call field scale, the challenges are much more serious and much more difficult to handle. And so that's what I was looking for. And so these kind of funny things that happen when you are align yourself with people who are in government, for instance, and other private sector involvement and so on.
And I happen to be with the Premier on one occasion when we were looking at a project, evaluating a project in t, it's a very difficult word to say. Langrug is an informal settlement, which is a kilometer upstream from the Water Hub, which I'll explain this now, but we were looking at a previous project we'd been involved basically as a future water institute then in about 2007.
And we were helping households to try to deal with their water in a responsible way. And we had created small little drains, soak aways around their homes, very simple filtration mechanisms, and showed people how and what you could do. And then provided some materials and said, that's it. We've shown you how to do it, you've attended the workshop, this is the material.
You can come and get stones or whatever else you need, or even spades. And do it. And it made a sort of a very small dent and very small improvement into the drainage for some people who want to take up the task and, and to dig the hole and to get the drainage running properly. That was followed by a government project which stepped in and said, let's try and upscale what Kevin Winter and others have done there, and let's see if we can make something of it.
And they put a lot of investment in this and so. Where I was coming to in my story is that I met the Minister of the Western Cape province, our province, our country's divided into nine different provinces, and she's a real go-getter minister or premier at that time, at that stage called Helen Zille. And she looked at this wastewater treatment plant that we were watching from the project that we just examined.
So, looked down the hill and she said, innocently, what are we going to do with that wastewater treatment plant that is now no longer in use? And I piped up naively probably and said, why don't we turn that into a research center. And, that was about all. There were a couple of officials around me at the time, and I didn't expect anything more to come of it.
And it probably was a bit of a naive comment to say anyway, but I had in mind, how do I get my students out into the field? How do we start to use and demonstrate to a point of living laboratories that actually can really become centers for learning? And to that center of learning is not just for academics, it's for people who live in the settlement who can gain knowledge and build their capacities and skills and pay, maybe even offer employment through a center like that.
Well, that later became a tender that was put out and the universities were offered it. First of all. It then went to a private contractor who I knew well, came back to us at the university and said, why don't you come and help us? And we had a little bit of money to build a business case and a little bit of money to do the first part of transforming that site, repurposing the drying beds at that conventional wastewater treatment plant.
And what I first wanted to do was to say, let's repurpose those so that we turn them into large biofiltration systems and run the water through that. And let's see what we can do using a nature-based kind of concept. And so that's exactly what we did. We had a little bit of money to start that whole exercise, and it was called eventually, the center initially was called a sustainable urban drainage center.
Could we do this kind of thing? And that's how it all began. So a small little conversation, small little idea, turned to a premier who had at least a vision, caught it. And decided to try and make it work from there. And of course, yes, it's a lot of work, et cetera. There's enormous amount of training running a site of about four, five hectares in site.
Small as it is, but there's lots of issues around it. It's in the midst of quite wealthy farmers around us, but also an informal settlement. And people are looking down the hill just as we did in 2013, thinking, what are you doing with that site? And why can't we get access to that site? Why should researchers do that?
And they're so slow at what they're doing anyway. So, it's, when are we going to get my turn to actually get involved in it? And, and we have spent a lot of time just gathering data, we've had lots of workshops on the site and we bring schools into the site and so on. So in that sense, it, it has a community link to it, but it's nowhere near where we want it to get to in terms of a social enterprise and so forth.
But I think the first exercise was for me. And this is probably for any of the social scientists looking at this and listening to me thinking, here's a scientist who's got a top down approach. We are going to do this, and they're going to write now papers on a whole lot of esoteric type things and generate data and all the rest of it.
But what I've always said to people, and social scientists will have the absolute opposite to this in terms of the approach, but what I've always said to people is, I didn't think that we could do what we are doing right now. Five years ago, I did not think that we could turn very highly contaminated water into water that actually meets irrigation standards.
That when you look at that water in a, a flask from the laboratory, for instance, and you compare it with clean water from the municipality, which has been properly treated, and you look at the water from the river, well, you will find it is almost impossible just by viewing it. At any rate, the comparison between the river, the municipal water, and the actual water that we clean in the river. Water is easy because you can see it's, it's got sediment in it and so forth. This water's absolutely sparkling clean. I didn't think we could get to that. And, and, and so it was been quite a long time just trying to get to the point of how do we remove the drugs, pharmaceuticals, the pathogens, the viruses, the bacteria and so on and on the nutrients to some extent from that water.
And most of all, turn the center into a decentralized wastewater treatment sense work where that is nature-based and that we are able to reuse the water for productive means. And if it becomes productive means how do we offer people who've been marginalized through the history of South Africa and how do we bring them into an enterprise like this?
And that's where the real challenge lies right now. And there are future projects that are moving towards that end in terms of building that capacity and so on. But it was an interesting. And, and hopefully the story as I've described, it gives people some sense of how you see an opportunity. Hold tight, stay loyal to your vision, and work with it slowly as you gather the data, understand the system, and I think now we can fly the flag, whereas three years ago, if I'd brought people into it and said, this is what we can do, I think we would've failed miserably because we would never have got the water to the state and quality that we ought to have gotten it.
Right. Now, how do you clean water? This is a real world challenge right now. Global challenge. How do you clean water without adding more chemicals? We've got enough chemicals in our water that we're treating. We don't need more chlorine to just kill everything off and have impacts to further downstream.
And we also want to try and use renewable energy to do so as well. If we have to shift water around, let's use other alternative energies and really try and embrace a sustainable approach to what we're trying to do. And probably where I'm going to go to in the story a bit later here is that people, you would come and look at the water and say, ah, you've got clean water.
But, but so what? And it is only when we start to grow plants and vegetables breed fish that people began to say, ah, there's a purpose to this. And we can start to think differently about not only clean water, but the opportunities that it offers from there.
[00:31:26] Bridget Scanlon: Wow, that's amazing. And sometimes people ask you why did you go down this road, or that road, and, and when you think back, it was maybe something that somebody said to you and it's flipped a switch and whatever. But a lot of people talk about, oh, I have a five year plan, or I have a 10 year plan.
I tell them, I have no plan. I just try to make the best out of every opportunity or whatever. But that's just the different types of people. But that is amazing. And so, Franschhoek was a traditional water treatment plant to begin with, and maybe you can describe that a little bit to provide context then for this nature-based solution to treat the water.
[00:32:03] Kevin Winter: So the name of the town is called Franschhoek. It's difficult to pronounce because it's actually a Dutch name. So here is the Colonial engagement with this South Africa. And, and the Dutch were dominant in those very early 1700s, 1800s in South Africa. In between in 1789 we had the aftermath of the French Revolution and the French Huguenots came over to South Africa as well and they brought with them a viticulture experience, so French and Franschhoek as it's called right now, but it is really French Corner, a hook in Dutch is corner, and it's in a valley with an apex to it. A beautiful valley, an actual fact an absolutely stunning place for scenery, for mountain passes nearby beautiful area that's attracted a lot of multinationals, in fact in more contemporary times right now.
But in those old days it was the French were confined to this corner. They brought their viticulture and they were incredibly successful in what they were doing. They had all the right soils, all the sunshine that they needed, the slopes, the drainage, and so on. And that's become as a result of very old farms that are sometimes 300 years old, maybe a bit more where vineyards are king, mostly all in the valley and wines which are exported all around the world, some well-known significant wines come from this very valley. And today we've got two towns which are almost separate from each other. A formal friendship, which was typically a white skin color that is in terms of maybe called even European hue, lived in this area of this formal town of Franschhoek and it was fairly small at that stage in the wastewater treatment plant at Franschhoek Served that formal area with a population of no more than about 1500 people living in at that stage in the 1960s when it was first built.
Then came the apartheid.A blip on the horizon and people who were living in as laborers in cottages about three kilometers away from the formal town. And they were largely people who were seasonal workers, but also working on the farm. And they were mixed race, if I can put it that way. But after 1948 when the national government came into South Africa, they passed a law called the Group Areas Act, which then forced black and white people to separate.
And it left this town three kilometers away, which I've explained wasn't really a town, but certainly a settlement. Mainly of workers who were working in those farms, left their houses bereft as it were. And they were moved in separate race groups as a result of this group areas act.
And from there from around about the late 1980s and, but especially in the 19, early 1990s, 1990, to 93, you saw this growth in the informal settlement, which has happened ever since from there. And so you've got a tale of two towns demonstrating the history of South Africa particularly in from the 1940s onwards.
And, and that becomes, for me, a real tragedy, but also something which represents the microcosm of a lot of what's going on in South Africa where people have been confined to informal settlements on the periphery of towns, and then a formal town with high levels of inequality separating the two and access to resources.
And, and South Africa has got the highest Gini coefficient in the world in terms of its inequalities. And so it's really important for us as researchers to start saying, how do we make a difference in a context like that?
[00:35:58] Bridget Scanlon: The treatment plant, then, was a traditional treatment plant?
[00:36:02] Kevin Winter: Conventional, indeed. So there, you had all the stuff that was built in the 1960s, drying beds settling ponds, slow oxidation, stirring type of ponds, and then a final maturation pond at the end, and a chlorine dousing harbor as it were, in, in trying to re remove some of the bacteria before it moved out and quite clearly what happened from around about 2007, that functionality of that started to deteriorate quite considerably. And farmers further downstream were complaining that they could not use that water any longer. And eventually by 2013 or thereabouts, the wastewater treatment plant was abandoned.
And you make the point earlier on too, you very seldom see in, certainly in Africa, wastewater treatment plants being abandoned. This is the first one I'd ever seen, and I found some of my counterparts, researchers and German partners of mine are doing something very similar in Berlin, but I've very seldom seen an abandoned one.
What they tend to do is to sort of build on, expand slightly and, and do things and remain to a large extent within a fairly conventional approach to managing wastewater and that's well known. And to move from conventional wastewater treatment plants into very expensive membrane and reverse osmosis and those kinds of buffers that are now in vogue and are being implemented in some of my wastewater treatment plants in this country now as well, but at huge expense.
But it's a huge leap and it takes time to evolve to that position. What I was much more interested in here is how could we start to intercept that water, which was coming down from the informal settlement and to treat it again through a nature-based process to do so, so that it required minimal capital investment, minimal amount of maintenance, and ease is in terms of skills and capacity to operate the system. And that is the kind of African solution that we are going to have to look for more and more to try and deal with the crises and the failures that we've seen both in South Africa and in so many other parts of Africa as well.
[00:38:12] Bridget Scanlon: Yeah, I totally agree. Because I mean, what you see is somebody will come in with a big capital, expensive system, very sophisticated and everything, but nobody will be able to keep it operational. And so, it gets abandoned. And we see that with the groundwater wells and many different things.
But I mean, if you are co-developing this with these people and stuff, then you know, what, what is feasible and, what they can maintain. So maybe you can describe the nature-based solutions, like the stone biofilters and, and, and how the different processes it goes through before it gets discharged. So, so a river comes down from Langrug, is it, and then goes to the Water Hub, and then you put it through different pathways and then discharge the treated water.
[00:39:00] Kevin Winter: Correct. So this is what I emphasize is now is a decentralized, smaller, locally available site that can be accessed and we can start to use that water. That's the philosophy behind it. And there are very good reasons for us to be considering centralized high tech type sites elsewhere. Because there's a volume of water that that has to be contained within a large and growing city.
So I don't want to give centralized systems a bad name. I want to see them advance as much as possible and to be much more careful in how they recover resources from those wastewater treatment plants. I think that's what the real challenge is across the world right now. If we get into desalination, how do we recover the resources from that?
How do you reduce the amount of brine that comes out of a desalination plant, for instance, and so on, and, and how do we obviously reuse that water that comes from these wastewater treatment plants? In this case, this is a slightly different situation that I'm about to explain to you because it is about a very small and decentralized area where there is an economic opportunity, and most of all, an opportunity to restore a degraded environment and to release water of a quality that can actually sustain that degraded environment in perpetuity, as it were.
So what we did to start off with was to have a look at these drying beds which to give you a bit of idea of their size they are cells. And we began with six cells, which were in a very bad condition. We repurposed them rebuilt them as it were and then covered them with some plastic, well, polyurethane as it were.
To try to create a seal. So essentially think about a swimming pool type thing and just create a membrane within them. And these six different cells were used initially as an indication of which kind of media works well. And we began by putting the three cells that were in the 6, 6, 6 configuration of them.
But these three cells were filled with a large stone aggregate. So 19-20 millimeters in size. Then we took them into a peach pit cell. So I had, I knew I could get peach pits from a local factory nearby, and we put those in which was reasonably cost ineffective peach pits. Offer a carbon source which is useful in terms of dealing with ammonia in the water and they also have a furrowed surface.
So I knew I could capture quite a lot of the bioslimes around those peach pits and get them to actually harbor the kind of microbes and the bacteria that I was wanting in the treatment of the water, largely in an anaerobic environment. So the top part is aerobic and the bottom part is anaerobic.
And that's where most activity in terms of treatment is going to take place. And if I can get that water to go through slowly and retain the time that it spends there, I've got much greater opportunity for the water, dirty water to come in and to interact with the microbes and the bacteria that are helpful and algae that might be in that water.
And then it goes through a very fine sand or clay at the very end, an aggregate of something between seven and nine millimeters in size. And that's how we began. We kept the three cells, we eventually connected together as a treatment train, and we left that without any vegetation in it and the cells alongside it, the other three, and I probably explained that a little bit badly earlier on, but the other three, which became a phytoremediation. So we had the same media in those cells, but put in local plants. Plants that were typically and very easy to grow. And that any municipal official, if you sort would say, oh, well that's easy.
I can get them to grow in there quite easily, and to look at those differences. And we know that, for instance, when you put reeds into a wetland, a constructed wetland. You get a habitat that's forming around the microbes can actually form around those root structures of those reeds and so on.
And we started to do this and run it as a batch flow initially. And now we've just got to a stage where we actually bringing that water through at about a thousand liters an hour and getting this very clean water absence of bacteria in it, and about 70% of the compounds, a range of them from caffeine to antiretroviral drugs, TB drugs antimicrobial resistant drugs and so on.
We are able to capture about 70% of those broadly using the system. And remember that conventional wastewater treatment plants can't do this at all. They're not geared for this kind of treatment at all. So how do we look to a tertiary system that actually is post a treatment of a conventional system and clean that up before it actually finds its way into our rivers and so on?
And from there, once we've got our more or less our, act together to some extent, but once we'd really understood the science and the data and how it varied seasonally, how it varied even on a day-to-day basis, we were able to then see how we could use that water for growing vegetables and edible vegetables further down downstream on the gardens in the site.
And probably what's important to also just say is that we have a small pump that abstracts that water into three different tanks. We can take up about 30,000 liters of water every day, and it pumps for about five or six hours. And then that water trickles down through the head of the pump, the pressure in the actual tanks, I should say, and then gravity feeds into the bio filters.
So very much a case of it's easy technology. The only thing that can go wrong is that the pumps clog up sort of thing. And all of that energy for pumping is all done through a solar power. And of course we've got lots of that in South Africa. It's a no brainer. We don't need to go and look at biogas and other forms of methane, et cetera.
That makes it a little more complex. This is really easy. The passive energy comes into that system and we are able to harness it and also store it in some lithium batteries as well. That's the picture in terms of what we started off doing with these repurposing of the conventional wastewater treatment system.
[00:45:23] Bridget Scanlon: So each of these cells is about the size of an Olympic swimming pool or a large scale.
[00:45:28] Kevin Winter: Yeah, good. I was about to explain and I didn't. In terms of cells, each of the cells are 16 meters long, about three meters wide, and just under a meter deep. And packed with the media right to the very top of the surface.
[00:45:41] Bridget Scanlon: Right. And then the stone biofilters, then did you initially inoculate those with the bacteria and stuff that you wanted or that you did you develop some cultures and and then to prime the system and then the slime grows and then, and a lot of it then is biodegradation with these bacteria.
Is there much absorption on the media versus how much is degraded? And you said the top is oxic, but then anoxic depth. So you have nitrification and denitrification. So, it's amazing how complex natural systems are.
[00:46:19] Kevin Winter: Absolutely.. And, and I mean, you are asking all the right questions and, and just about every person with the kind of knowledge that you have, comes onto our site and, and ask those kind of questions in terms of what happens to the whole process from there. We didn't inoculate at all.
And that was a big purpose. I'm not experienced enough to work with enzymes and I try to avoid enzymes and other kind of feedstocks that are doing things that I don't understand well enough. I'm not a microbiologist. And that's a very complex field. And to balance that out and to understand the mass balances through the system when you are then using another feedstock I think is quite difficult.
I didn't have to do that at all because actually we are using the microbes that are already in the system and all it does is takes a bit more time. Enzymes from my experience now sort of speeds up the system and sometimes you over feed it. This takes a little while, so it took us almost 18 months before we started to see a more stable system where the bio slimes had started to build up within the media and the microbes and the diversity of them, and we've looked at these quite clearly in terms of this structure. Their morphology in urate under electron scanning microscope, so you can get a pretty good idea about the diatoms, the algae some of the structures of those within the biome, some of the structures of the actual microbes themselves, and of course we've looked at them under the microscope and identified them as well.
But essentially, diversity always wins. Probably one of those maximums we say. So often when you've got biodiversity in your system, you have a rich living system and the health of that system becomes much more effective. So we've gotta be taking time to do that. If you work with nature based solutions, you've got to work with nature and nature does things at a different pace to what you think you should be trying to achieve out of the system.
And it's a very important learning curve that we've all been through. And you've got to wait and be patient. If there are things that disrupt the system, it takes a good couple of weeks before that system re-energize itself and you get the kind of equilibrium and balances of energy within the system as well.
So those are very important points, but we certainly have not had to actually manage the feedstock in any sort of way. What I did find, and let's come back to the nitrification and denitrification process very briefly, and some might be interested in this as well. What I didn't know is when I put the peach pips in that they were, they'd come from a factory in which they had actually removed the fruit using a sulfide, and that that sulfide had remained, hydrogen sulfide had remained actually on, embedded in the actual peach pips themselves.
And I always wondered why I was struggling to get, as, as a better or more performance out of the carbon source in terms of the reduction of ammonia. Ammonia is very high indeed. To give you some quick idea here, we often take in ammonia. This is again for those who are probably more chemistry minded, but sometimes between 20 and 40 milligrams per liter, that's pretty high.
That's kind of what a wastewater treatment plant from a conventional formal town would be expected to produce, or at least process. This was coming in raw like this and we now having to find a system that actually does that. And the peach pits didn't work because they ended up with this contaminant on it. And I only realized that whole lot later. I didn't have enough time when we first put it all in to do this kind of test and would've taken a lot longer to do so. But again, everything creates an opportunity. So we took out the the peach pits or peach kernel as, as probably others would note in the world, and I replaced it with a biochar.
And that's another game changer because we suddenly began to realize that yes, people were putting in biochar, a process that involved taking trees and putting them through pyrolysis, taking them through a temperature of 600 to 800 degrees Celsius in a constant temperature. And many of them were using them and inoculating that and putting into soil and adding the carbon source for South Africa, one of our biggest scourges is alien vegetation or exotic vegetation that inhabits our catchment areas and absorbs an enormous amount of water.
And again, coming back to a water scarce region, one that has gone through a a scare, a real scare in terms of its city that makes a lot of sense to remove these large water absorbers and to find, well, what do you do with it after that? Where's the marketplace for this? And we started to work with a small community who were battling with their own business at that time building or making compost.
And we said, why didn't you make for us some biochar? And they used very, very simple means, which to make that biochar. And we then started to have another relationship with a disaffected or marginalized community on our, one of our coastlines to produce this biochar for us. And the biochar became a game changer when we started to work with it in the lab and to recycle the water through that, we saw that it actually removed, absorbed and degraded the ammonia. Turned that into a nitrite and into a nitrate, released the nitrogen into the atmosphere and removed 97% of the ammonia. And we thought that's exactly what we need to do in with these particular cells that we were working in these biofilters that we were working in.
So we replaced those pipes with that biochar and have started to grow that whole area both in an anaerobic environment and then also create in one of the separate cells an aerobic environment, in other words, pumping more oxygen into the biochar. And then you get an even more accelerated effect of the ammonia being converted into the nitrogen release in it in that way.
So again, just learning how to we, how almost we surprised by nature. And when you start to look at the biochar under a scanning microscope, you get absolutely surprised at what nature does. When we look at Pine, for instance, as a feedstock, when you look at it as a cross-section, you can see these hexagonal capillaries that run up and down the branches and trunks of these trees.
And that becomes the place where the microbes, the bacteria are housed in a very small piece of biochar. The area, the surface area is massive. And so you've got yourself an incredible engine a microbial engine that were working for you in a small piece. And of course, when you've got a good few cubes of that it starts to make an impact on the actual ammonia production.
So on. So that's a long story, but again it's just refreshing to discover how nature actually could operate in this way and how the natural vegetation can be turned, or in this case in non-indigenous vegetation can be turned into something productive and once it becomes sort of clogged at which it will at some stage and provided it's safe to do so, and we still got quite a lot of science to actually examine all of that, we will crush that further and put it into the soil.
We've really then got some nutrients captured, absorbed into the biochar, and we can use it as a carbon source and as a local fertilizer as well in the soil. So that's a nice story. We still, we've done quite a lot of work on it right now at an experimental scale at the Water Hub. We are now about to go and create a large farmed area of about 1.5 hectares in which we will start to do an agroecology approach, and we will be using that biochar to enhance the carbon of that soil and, and to look at carbon sequestration in a very practical way.
[00:54:17] Bridget Scanlon: Well, that sounds fantastic. And I guess it's sort of like a regenerative agriculture. So, another thing that I found fascinating Kevin, when, when we spoke before was, how you look at the behavior in the upstream, in in Langrug settlement, and, the difference between the weekdays and the weekends and what you expect the discharge to be, and whether they're doing their washing on the weekend or, and, and then about 40% of those people living in informal settlements are maybe HIV positive.
So there's a lot of pharmaceuticals coming and other things. And so, connecting your treatment then with the human behavior and what to expect in the discharge. I think that that was very interesting.
[00:55:00] Kevin Winter: Yeah, thank you for raising that because it is very interesting to see how a river and the concentration of pollutants in that river vary with a 24 hour cycle in a weekly cycle. And of course, a seasonal cycle which is related to rainfall. We are in a Mediterranean climate, so we get rainfall during the wintertime and summertime we get low flows.
Low flows are when you're going to get the highest concentration. What we were really interested in doing is to make sure that when we treated that water, we were treating it as close to peak concentrations as possible. And so we began by characterizing, in order to understand that process, began by characterizing the river, using auto samplers that were set to take a sample every half an hour, for instance, over 24 hours, and then focused largely on the nutrient behavior.
And if you follow a nutrient such as as ammonia for instance. You can again then use it as a surrogate for lots of other things that are likely to be in that river at the time. And we used ammonia, electrical conductivity for quite basic things to understand this trend or pattern within the water quality.
And what was interesting for us is that it took, and we are about a kilometer just by the way, a kilometer down. So, a mile and a half down from the from the actual informal settlement where some of the major point sources are entering the river. And when we started to take their samples we are quite amazed over a number of weeks, got the very similar pattern.
During the daytime, you start to see peak flows in terms of concentrations. That is, it peaks around about 10 o'clock, remains like that until about four o'clock in the afternoon. And then tapers off to the early hours of the morning and then starts up again like that on a Saturday morning. You get a very different pressure.
You start to get peak flows and much higher peak flows in the course of the morning when people are doing their washing and more people are around settlement and doing things like that. Those patterns were quite useful to have a look at. And, and, and we then started to make sure that when we pumped water up into our system, that those pumps were running from 10 o'clock until four o'clock in the afternoon because we knew we could then get the highest concentrations that we were looking at.
So characterizing the river and data-driven type of response to that and what that means for managing the treatment of the water became very important.
[00:57:26] Bridget Scanlon: Right. And I, I think it's fascinating what you guys have done at the Water Hub and then you participated in an Urban Living lab comparison in international study where there were sites from Brazil and the Netherlands and UK and your site. These urban living labs, I guess, are designed to, to improve conditions in urban settings: water, energy and food aspects.
Maybe you could describe that a little bit, Kevin.
[00:57:56] Kevin Winter: Yeah well, I think we felt ourselves being slightly different because of all the things I've described. A very different kind of urban living lab to the others in Rotterdam, in Bristol and and so on, that were much more involved in infrastructure and recycling and reuse of the resources. That was simply the principle of that living lab, that particular exercise.
Ours was very different in the sense that it was, again, in a setting that was quite unreal for those living in parts of Europe. It was difficult to actually see that comparison work. And they're always convinced by the way that when we get into these large consortia, that these comparisons become really meaningful in the end, particularly when you start looking at North and South and you see the contextual differences really do make comparisons really difficult.
And it wasn't, for the, a lack of trying, of saying what's common here? What do we see as a common thread? And invariably there is no common thread at all. It's what these sites are doing are very context specific. They do things very differently. They're managed very differently in, in many ways.
There's not to say that we can't learn from each other, but actually the overall systems that are in place and how they evolve are actually very site specific and context specific. So probably that's best I can say. We are doing science around the world. Improving that science by our relationships that we build with each other.
Science advances its knowledge and its practice through building strong relationships with the researchers and academia out there. And it's something we should never forget. We can't work in isolation. So I love these projects that bring us together, but our expectations should not necessarily be about what's common and what we've learned together and the focus that may be less important than building the strengths of these relations and, and the collegiality and advancing each other's ideas through, challenge them in different contexts that they come.
Differences become much more important to the way you advance that knowledge.
[01:00:13] Bridget Scanlon: Right, right. And one of the aspects of the Water Hub, I mean it has several components, is so, there's the water treatment, there's the research aspect, there's the education, which is fascinating, and you capacity building in the area. So you have some students from the settlement who are studying agriculture and the community college and, and so they're hired to, to help with the project.
And then one of the managers, I guess for the project is also from the settlement. So this capacity building is fantastic and I think ensures that the project will be sustainable and then it benefits all of these different groups. Maybe you can describe that a little bit, Kevin.
[01:00:53] Kevin Winter: Yeah, I suppose one of the success stories that I always like to tell is that the man who is a manager on the site, who's our research assistant and sets up things for us as a lab. Laboratory and research assistant once lived in the informal settlement. And when he came to work in our early development of the site, and there was lots to do because it was a complete wreck we saw a man that knew exactly how to wield a spade.
And here's a good example of what I mean by that. I've never seen anyone dig a hole about a meter deep with a circumference of probably no more than 40 centimeters, and he can get his spade in there and get it out and to do it more than I could ever, ever try. I mean, we've tried this over and over again.
His name is KJW Simphiwe and he isis just an incredible faithful guy who began on the Water Hub site where every problem looked like it required a hammer. And now to see this incredible advancement of saying, I need that tool, or that's the way we can do it. And I've often asked him the question, I'm puzzled. I don’t know how we're going to solve the problem today. We've got to fix something or we've got to do something here. How do you think you would do it? And his ability to be able to come up with the answer better than mine often because he's much more practical than what I am in solving those kinds of problems.
So long term capacity building and the sustainability you mentioned just now, are critical factors enabling someone to gain experience and the opportunity to do exactly the kind of work that he's doing. And then of course, on the farms that we are about to create, and we have done this quite a bit before it does offer opportunities for young students who are largely unemployed post-school, have got a keen interest in growing food and in food in general, and food and health.
And we are attracting those to the site. And we have got at least some funds in the next, from September onwards with a small group of about six people to start understanding an agroecology approach to farming. And we will start to work with them, for instance. And that's just one of the many examples you've got there. And probably the other one that's really worth just saying at the stage is that the opportunity to bring schools further from the schools, further in the catchment, further upstream from us. We are working with teachers at the moment and those teachers are co-developing materials and activities that can be done at the Water Hub.
And the important thing around that is we don't want to create a conventional kind of education approach. I am a teacher, you listen to me, here's the knowledge. Suck it up kind of thing. It's very much experiential and inspiring and most of all fun. So the fun part is really important and that we do in activities that are related to water, related to climate science and related to food and energy and building models and things like that.
We can do with sometimes building as we do next Wednesday. Building a fountain using hydraulic pressure and understanding how hydraulic pressure creates perpetual motion and a fountain that doesn't require any energy other than hydraulic pressure and air pressure. And then building a water wheel which they're doing in small groups.
It's things like that. Just to give you some practical examples of the kinds of work that we are doing and as teachers who are creating these with a little bit of inspiration from us leading them, but creating the kind of language and the approach and the context in which they teaching that it makes sense to them as teachers.
And we are writing that up into materials and photographing and videoing that kind of thing so that we can start to make some contribution to education and build a living lab as what we call a living lab is one in our case, is that we are going beyond the factory fence. In other words, we are going beyond the boundaries of the actual site and moving more and more into community work and bringing people together on the site, but also in further upstream as well as to how we make a difference in, in a very degraded and very poor environment.
[01:05:10] Bridget Scanlon: And so my last question then, Kevin, is how do you see this? Do you think that the, the Water Hub could be a template then? I mean, there are a lot of water quality issues many regions globally. Do you see other places possibly picking up this approach and, doing it, or, what are your thoughts?
[01:05:31] Kevin Winter: Yeah. I think that's again, a very important and commonly asked question as to how you upscale from here. Initially in our program in the next two, three years now, we will upscale the volume of water that we treating. And we've got research partners who are helping us to do just that.
We've got an agricultural ground we are about to actually establish in a variety of ways and there's lots more I could talk about that, but probably that's too boring and for another occasion. But essentially that will show an expansion of what we try to do on the site. And we see living labs now becoming environments in which they become lighthouses.
In other words, they really do begin to show how what we are doing and the methods and the approach we're using can be transferred elsewhere. And it's absolutely critical that we do that. And we are working in a space which says we are not trying to put municipalities and municipal officials and their budgets under great strain.
We try to show what can be done with minimal resources, minimal skills development, so that you can actually deal and address with some of your problems and meet those challenges. That actually does show that sustainability does show that we actually need to recover resources and that there's a tremendous potential for reusing resources when you start to treat and work in this particular way and most of all work with nature and to address the kind of failures that we are seeing all over our country at the moment, unfortunately.
So that's the big thing. And of course it becomes a training ground for people coming to the site. And we get many of those visitors almost every week to the site. And try to inspire them as to how we can go further forward. I think what our country needs most of all right now is real hope. And hope is found in small things.
Sometimes it's practical things. You need expertise to lead that expert that practical working out and where hope might be found. But moving forward with these kinds of practical activities, I think is where we need to pitch our particular kind of branding of the Water Hub so that it can be transferred in a way that doesn't complicate, that doesn't look like it's going to cost enormous amount.
It's the way I think we should be trying to inspire and therefore to show that kind of lighthouse kind of, scenario of we can shine elsewhere, look upwards and get inspired. See that there is hope there in the light, and start to actually do things for yourself as well. It's not complicated, it's not, it's not rocket science as we sometimes seem to have to say in that expression, but it does take a little bit of learning to be able to know how to operate this and to think differently and to act differently.
[01:08:15] Bridget Scanlon: Well thank you so much Kevin. Our guest today was Kevin Winter. He's the research director at the Water Hub, which is administered through the Future Water Institute within the University of Cape Town. And thank you for your time and good luck with your work and it is a lighthouse for all of us. And maybe we don't take it, the whole picture to some other piece, but maybe components of it and many different ways.
And I think in small ways we can all try to help in different things. So thank you so much, Kevin.
[01:08:45] Kevin Winter: Thank you for the conversation.
