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Jodi Xu of the TIME Beijing Bureau writes in a post entitled Now it's Fake Water that really got us wondering about the RMB6 tubs of water that we get in our apartment:
This morning, I heard the news that half of Beijing’s bottled water is counterfeit. I was horrified. It seems that illegal factories fill the used plastic bottles from the tap or with perfunctorily filtered water. The bottle tops and tape that they use to seal the bottle look identical to the genuine ones. The bottles aren’t sterilized and the number of mold fungi and e. coli bacteria that have been found in such water can easily make drinkers sick. An industry report quoted by Beijing Times calculates that more than 100 million bottles of such water were sold last year. The profit derived from these illegal sales exceeded 1 billion RMB, or about $12 million. As a Chinese, I am used to reading about dangerous fakes. But this case really enraged me. This is water that many of us drink every day, after all. And the whole reason people pay extra for bottled water is for the quality—and safety. The Beijing Times did a story a couple of days ago that revealed the illegal business has been going on for five years. One unlicensed water bottler told the newspaper: “I filter the tap water before filling the bottle because I am a moral person and I don’t want to get people sick.”
A whole spate of headling-grabbing environmental and water issues have hit China one after the other lately - algae lakes, desertification and now fake water. It's no wonder the government seems to be scrambling to action to make sure none of its thirsty 1.4 billion people will die for lack of water.
And they've looked to an unlikely source of help - tiny Singapore, which with few natural water sources had to depend on Malaysia for most of its water. Prickly relations between the two and Malaysia's threats to cut off water supply led Singapore to look to other sources - desalination and recycled water.
In its bid to cut reliance on other countries for water and to build a sustainable water supply, Singapore developed NEWater, which could best be defined as recycled household water, or more crudely as distilled piss. NEWater became the butt of a million jokes when it was first launched in 2003, but has gained interest worldwide as water problems everywhere become more acute.
Pictured here is Chinese commerce minister Bo Xilai taking a swig of NEWater, and the verdict? "Good", he said. "It tastes very normal".
Beijing and Singapore are in talks on the possibility of building an eco-city in China, and have just signed a memorandum of understanding on the improvement of the urban environment and integrated utilisation of urban water resources cooperation. So who knows, maybe we will all soon be drinking our own piss in Shanghai!
Picture from Lianhe Zaobao.
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Household recycling systems have been around since the 70s. None of them are cheap, all require skilled, regular maintenance (also not cheap unless you are a good plumber) including replacing those very expensive micropore filters and they also require quite a bit of space inside your home or apartment building.
How many apartment building owners in China are going to install such systems for anyone less than well-off locals and middle to upper class expats?
And for people living in the countryside, these systems are useless.
nanheyangrouchuan
Hi sorry if I wasnt clear enough. These are not individual household recycling systems we're talking about. The city would have several water recycling plants, and in Singapore's case, the recycled water is actually reintroduced back into the reservoirs, and not used as potable water directly because of the psychological barrier of consuming (treated) sewage.
Then the city would do just as well to send sewage to a regular waste treatment plant then to the reservoir. Both systems would require new piping anyway (OTOH, this is china...) unless some people in Shanghai are looking for new green technology to pilfer for copying and resale.
Reverse osmosis as a process to purify water to a point where it is reintroduced to the water supply is not new. Of course, reading the article may not tell that story, many water districts in the US already do it and the renewed water is returned to the reservoirs to then undergo the standard treatment all over again with the rest of the water supply
The point of this process is unfortunately not to supply cleaner tap but to increase the available tap water supply. Reintroducing treated waste water without the RO process would only put a greater drain on old infrastructure, thus would not be ideal. Then again, I suppose TIC and nothing here is ideal.
Usually only smaller communities in the US would use reverse osmosis, the volume of water that can be handled is just not great enough compared to regular treatment plants. And Shanghai needs to dump its old pipes, as do all of China's big cities otherwise they will become the world's largest humanitarian disasters.
But then again, all of that FDI and forex is better spent trying to gain back "lost territory" than provide for the general public's health.