Over the next few years, Africa will have to make real commitments if it is to effectively meet the challenge of ever-increasing water stress. For Malek Semar, founder of the “No Water No Us” association, which raises awareness and takes action on water issues on the continent and elsewhere, the 80% of untreated wastewater on the planet needs to be recycled for irrigation, watering, cleaning and drinking, thereby reducing the pressure on clean water resources.
Your fight for access to drinking water began in Kabylia, your native region in northern Algeria, where you spent your entire childhood without water. And today you are continuing the fight, not just for yourself, but for the whole of the African continent. Is the fight for access to drinking water a never-ending battle?
Malek Semar: The fight for water is global, because water knows no borders.
In my native Kabylia, I was born and grew up in a village without water or electricity. Walking a few kilometres every day to fetch water was a normal situation. The oldest of us was 10 and we already felt big, strong and independent in this task. The memories are positive, because it was our time to relax and play, without any adult presence. This experience also anchored the values of scarcity and sharing, even if it was a late awakening to fully realise this a few years ago.
Today, billions of people suffer from a lack of water or unsafe water. So the battle is never-ending. The hardest part is having to accept, with certainty, that we will not save everyone.
You set up the “No Water No Us” association to raise awareness and take action on water. What are its missions?
“No Water No Us” means “No water, no us”. It’s more or less the result of those first years without water, of various industrial projects and of lectures I’ve given on the subject of water.
We have two verbs that characterise us in this non-governmental organisation (NGO): raising awareness and taking action. We focus on three themes: waste water, drinking water and biodiversity. Our guiding principle is the sixth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG6), which aims to guarantee universal access to water and sanitation and ensure sustainable management of water resources by 2030 (editor’s note). Art and sport are our best luggage for the world of tomorrow. So we’re using them to bring people together around water.
To raise awareness through culture, our cornerstone is the show “L’EAU, MAIS” (WATER, BUT), labelled Saison Africa 2020, which I co-wrote with Brice Kapel and which we performed as part of this African season. On the sporting front, we work with top-level athletes, where sporting achievement is used to benefit the social and environmental cause through water.
In addition to art and sport, you suggest reusing wastewater to alleviate the pressure of water stress. But to do that, it has to be exploited. Is that the case today?
According to the United Nations (UN), 80% of the world’s wastewater is discharged untreated into the environment, so yes, it is under-utilised. And of the 20% of wastewater that is treated, I’m not sure that 10% is reused.
Whether it’s industrial or agricultural processes, all activities need a lot of water. By recycling agricultural and industrial wastewater almost ad infinitum, we reduce the pressure on available water. So recycling wastewater is no longer a choice, it’s the way forward. That’s why I call it a lifeline.
So why aren’t we doing it? Perhaps the cost. If we look at my country, Algeria, for example, which is one of the countries that have taken the problem of water stress head on, I think it’s a good example, given the projects under way, even if the reaction is late in coming.
By 2025, the UN predicts that 38% of the world’s population will be exposed to water stress. The water crisis is becoming a geopolitical issue. In the end, we have plenty of water, since the quantity has not changed for 4 billion years, and even the distribution of salt and fresh water has remained virtually the same. All we have to worry about is water quality. In my opinion, and I’ll say it again, we have no choice but to recycle waste water.
To move from words to deeds, you have chosen to acquire a stake in France Industries Assainissement (FIA), a company that is breaking new ground in the water sector with an innovative containerised wastewater treatment plant. What makes your plant different from a standard one?
I joined Jacques Momeux in the FIA company at the end of 2017, then Gilles Picozzi, Blaise Matuidi and Yohan Benalouane joined us with the aim of positively impacting the world and bringing sustainable solutions to the water business, particularly in sanitation.
Coming back to FIA’s innovation, rather than large centralised treatment plants made of cement and pipes, we came up with compact, mobile, modular and less expensive treatment plants. The idea was to have several decentralised, virtuous ecosystems that generate wealth. Wastewater can be reused for irrigation, cleaning, recharging groundwater or even drinking. Sewage sludge can be recycled as fertiliser, bio-compost or energy. As far as the technology used was concerned, the choice of bacteriological treatment, and therefore natural treatment, was an obvious one.
You also state that your solution converts wastewater into drinking water. This is still not a widespread practice in Africa, although it has been used in Namibia for several years. Is it now possible to drink treated wastewater without fearing for one’s health? And how can African populations be persuaded to start using it?
The techniques for reusing wastewater have been around for a long time. All we’re doing is improving them to make the water even better, while recovering the organic waste in the process. So, yes, the technology does make waste water perfectly drinkable, and this is already commonplace in Namibia, but also in California in the United States of America.
Psychologically, it does seem difficult to think about drinking the water that comes out of the toilet. Strangely enough, there is no debate about drinking water from the river into which billions of people pour their sewage. The focus should be elsewhere, not on whether or not we drink treated wastewater, because the quantity of water we drink is so tiny (3 litres a day) compared with the overall quantity needed for our way of life, i.e. 300 litres a day, or thousands of litres if we think in terms of our water footprint.
What’s more, if we reuse treated effluent for irrigation, watering, cleaning and in industrial and agricultural processes, this will slow down the depletion of water intended for consumption, which is currently over-exploited.
Is wastewater treatment really cost-effective?
When it comes to the economic development of a country, there are two paths. The human way and the water way. Health is a good example. The human path consists of investing a huge amount of money in a health system to treat as many sick people as possible. For this model to work, you need a system that creates as many patients as possible and generates more money.
Water is a different story. If we invest in waste water treatment and my water becomes clean, then I’m bound to make the inhabitants less sick and consequently I’m going to invest less in health systems.
Coming back to the economic aspect, the water market is worth around €600 billion a year. Only 20% of wastewater is treated. This means that the 80% of untreated wastewater represents a major market that nobody is addressing. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), 1 euro invested in water and sanitation generates 4 euros in the economy. So even from an economic point of view, it’s an aberration not to treat wastewater.
In the end, wastewater treatment is good for human life, good for biodiversity, good for the planet, but it’s also good for the wallet because it generates wealth.
And what about the energy cost?
We’re already managing to make wastewater treatment plants energy self-sufficient by powering them with solar energy. We’re also thinking about reusing the water at the outlet and turning Archimedes’ screws upside down to create energy that would power the wastewater treatment plants in the process, or creating hydrogen, because you need water to produce hydrogen.
As well as reusing treated wastewater, countries such as Algeria, Egypt and Morocco are banking on seawater desalination to alleviate water pressure. Do you approve of this alternative?
There’s an adage that says “better one bad move than no move at all”. This will undoubtedly help us to learn and better understand Nelson Mandela when he said “either you win or you learn”. I think we’ll lose out on desalination in the long term and I hope we’ll learn to do it better over time.
Quite apart from the environmental and energy impact, there’s a kind of inconsistency in doing it. I spoke to you about the parallel between the human way and the water way to develop a country. Desalination is another example.
We pay a lot of money to treat seawater, from an environmental point of view because we release highly concentrated brine into the ocean, which kills biodiversity, and from an energy point of view because it uses a lot of energy. Once the water has been desalinated, it is used. It is then returned to the sea to be salted and desalinated later. So I pay to desalinate and re-salt ad infinitum. That’s the human way.
The water way would simply involve treating and reusing wastewater and even rainwater rather than dumping it back into the sea to be re-salted. It could be stored to recharge the water table, for example.
Man always takes the easy way out. I can understand the urgency of turning to desalination for countries that have no other access to water. But I remain convinced that this is just a stop-gap solution. First, let’s treat and reuse all urban, industrial and agricultural wastewater.
The very first African Water Forum (AWF) has just ended in Rabat, the Moroccan capital, where the future of water in Africa was discussed. Can such an event contribute to better water management?
As far as the Forum itself is concerned, it’s another strong sign of Africa’s growing awareness of these issues, since we’re talking about human lives and geopolitical crisis.
Beyond the speeches, which are also aimed at raising awareness, I expect real action, which must be local, because the problems of access to water are specific to each country. If the solutions have to be local, we need to think about a kind of global governance, because we have to share the same water. And when in doubt, recycling more wastewater, even if it means having to clean up after it, is a way in which we can all win.
Interview by Inès Magoum