Deadline to respond to water effluent plan is drawing near, warns action group

The proposed Havant reverse osmosis recycling plant will be the first scheme of its kind in the UK, but, if given the go-ahead, it could be replicated across the country, SOSCA says.

“It seems extraordinary that a country with a high rainfall and increasing flooding isn’t focussing on collecting more rainfall and preventing leaks and fresh water wastage to provide its population with sufficient supplies of fresh drinking water and to protect itself from flooding, rather than spending billions on energy and capital intensive schemes that will result in us all consuming more forever chemicals,” said Libby Alexander, founder of SOSCA, the Save Our South Coast Alliance.

“In the UK we only collect 1% of rainfall and Southern Water alone loses 100 million litres of water every day to leaks. That’s a whopping 19% of all the water it abstracts, and which customers pay to treat, wasted through leakage in their distribution system,” she pointed out.

Instead of repairing its leaky system and creating small and large reservoirs near to customers, to capture rainwater and help reduced flood risk, Southern Water is planning to spend £1.2 billion on an energy intensive reverse osmosis recycling plant near Havant. The plant will recycle wastewater from SW’s Budd Farm Wastewater Treatment Works before depositing it into Portsmouth Water’s proposed Havant Thicket reservoir. The water from the new reservoir will then be distributed through hundreds of miles of new pipes to taps across 18 constituencies in Hampshire and Sussex.

Southern Water and Portsmouth Water claim that the scheme will reduce the amount of water abstracted from chalk streams and that reverse osmosis is used around the world to treat wastewater.

Opponents to the scheme claim that there are much better and more sustainable and cost-effective ways of reducing water abstraction from rivers and aquifers, including collecting more rainwater in reservoirs, water buts and storage tanks, fixing leaking pipes, recycling water for grey water usage, moving abstraction points closer to the sea to preserve chalk streams, and encouraging less water consumption.

They also point out that reverse osmosis, which requires huge amounts of energy and expensive equipment that must be regularly replaced, is only used in drought ridden countries and, even then, often only used for grey water or agricultural use.

To learn more about the proposed scheme and how to respond to the government consultation visit http://havantmatters.org.water

The deadline for responding to the consultation is December 4. Responses can be emailed to [email protected].