NEWater facility uses reverse osmosis to treat waste water.

Courtesy Public Untilites Board

With three billion people in the world expected to face water shortages over the next 25 years, Singapore is taking steps to ensure that water will be plentiful and pure.

Singapore has depended almost totally upon Malaysia for drinking water, delivered by pipeline, since its independence in 1965. Water has been a source of friction between the two countries. In an effort to diversify its supply of drinking water, a new government program called NEWater has been launched to produce reclaimed water as part of a new strategy to reduce its water dependence. The idea is to blend reclaimed water with reservoir water and further treat the mixture to produce drinking water.

Convincing people that reclaimed water is nothing to worry about requires some salesmanship, however, as the program has met with skepticism about its safety and taste. In his National Day speech in August, Singapore’s Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong made a point of showing his audience that NEWater was nothing to be concerned about and drank some from a bottle.

NEWater is produced with stringent purification and treatment processes using advanced dual-membrane (micro-filtration and reverse osmosis) and ultra-violet technologies. NEWater is of consistently high quality, well within the drinking-water standards of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the World Health Organization. Noting that NEWater's pricing is competitive, Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong says: "If Singapore intends to buy water from other sources, it has to be competitive with NEWater. Otherwise, it makes no sense."

Starting next February, according to a report in Singapore’s newspaper, The Straits Times, every glass of tap water will have a little NEWater in it, with the government giving the go-ahead to release the reclaimed water into reservoirs.

During the past several months, the government has been holding seminars on NEWater for grassroots leaders, members of business associations, working adults and students in an effort to increase public understanding of the program.

More than 98 per cent of the 3,000 participants supported the idea of mixing NEWater with reservoir water. More than 650,000 bottles of NEWater were given out.

A similar water-reclaiming program has been operating successfully for years in the water-short community, Orange County, CA.