The City of Cape Town believes that upgrading various wastewater treatment plants throughout the city will result in an improvement in final effluent quality discharged into the seas and will not have a negative impact on coastal water quality.
Zahid Badroodien, the mayoral committee for water and sanitation, said an independent assessment conducted to examine the compliance of the Hout Bay, Camps Bay, and Green Point marine outfalls revealed that the pre-treatment facility is 97% compliant with all requirements.
This is nearly a year after the Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment, Barbara Creecy announced that she had reversed her decision to grant permits which let the City pump raw sewage into the Atlantic, saying the City’s public participation process was “inadequate, outdated and should be redone” (“Minister pulls chain on City’s poo permits”, June 22, 2023).
“The City used a panel tender to appoint an independent auditor and the professional service provider contracted Dr Marlene van der Merwe-Botha. These have been submitted to DFFE (Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment), but it would be in accordance with the current permit requirements for the outfalls and all analysis must be done through a South African National Accreditation System (SANAS) accredited lab,” said Dr Badroodien.
He said tests are typically conducted weekly or monthly, depending on the criterion being checked.
“However, there was a period of two years, 2021 to November 2023, that no metal testing was undertaken due to equipment difficulties at the City’s Scientific Services Branch. This has since been resolved and metal analysis is taking place at all marine outfalls. The results are fairly consistent overtime with variances during the drought and Covid periods,” he said.
Dr. Cleeve Robertson, National Sea Rescue Institute CEO, said the recent audit complies with the engineering standards of the pipework in the marine outfall plants.
“It has got nothing to do with the biological or chemical consequences that the pipes (from marine outfall plants) have caused. We are polluting the ocean, at a fundamental level we are poisoning the ocean, there can be no defence of that in terms of the constitution. We can’t say that we are complying with pollution, we are polluting the environment so this is complete nonsense,” said Dr Robertson.
Professor Leslie Petrik, group leader of environmental and nano sciences at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), says it’s premature to claim compliance.
“The City uses instantaneous dispersion modelling and enterococci levels at the edge of the zone of initial dispersion to claim compliance. This is different from Green Drop as the compliance is with outfall permit conditions. And they certainly don’t comply with all of those. On top of which the permits were rescinded until the public participation process took its course,” said Professor Petrik.
According to Caroline Marx of the anti-pollution activist group Rethink the Stink, the permit restrictions are easy to comply with because they are high enough to allow for the discharge of raw sewage.
“Ammonia for example is allowed at six times the level toxic to fish even though it is into a marine reserve. What is disturbing is that the treatment improvement plan required by the 2019 Hout Bay permit was never submitted nor was the public oversight body, the permit advisory forum established until recently. So the study around possible alternatives to dumping this untreated sewage into the ocean is a very positive step forward,” said Ms Marx.
According to the City, another alternative is to expand a pipeline, for example extending the Camps Bay outfall 11.6km into the ocean.
Mark Jackson, who made the short film Bays of Sewage, questions whether the City is measuring for the 85000 chemical compounds being discharged.
““Please don’t be fooled! These compliance requirements are completely outdated, and almost irrelevant, because at the end of the day, the City is still dumping around 40 million litres of raw sewage into our National Marine Protected Areas every single day. And the City has made zero provision in the budget for the next 5 years to actually tackle the raw sewage. The R140m being spent in the short term on the outfalls does absolutely zero to address the issue of raw sewage in the sea. If anything, it simply perpetuates the problem,” Mr Jackson said.
