Re-use Of Water From Wastage

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32396, 8 September 1970, Page 14

Re-use Of Water From Wastage

Science can make it “socially acceptable” to re-use water that many regard as a city’s wastage, the chief chemist of the Christchurch Drainage Board (Mr A. E. Lambden) told a gathering in Christchurch last evening.

Addressing the Canterbury branch of the Workers Educational Association on “Moral and Social Issues in Science Today,” Mr Lambden said that with an increasing world shortage of water there were some places where city liquid wastes were treated in a way which made them perfectly palatable for human re-use.

“If anyone were to suggest to some areas in New Zealand that they were drinking water from a river that a city or town further up-stream had cast off as waste they would be shocked—but this is occurring,” he said “Is it a moral thing to do, to use it once and then throw it away? Shouldn’t it be used more than once after proper re-treatment?” he said. All this would demand a change in community attitudes, Mr Lambden said, similar in manner to those which surrounded the controversy over detergent foam which at times banked up on rivers and estuaries in New Zealand.

"Detergents do not have to foam to do their job properly,” he said. “It is the manufacturers who add something to make them foam. If the manufacturers can persuade people, through advertising,

that detergent has -to foam to work properly they can equally well persuade the public by the same method that the foaming process is not necessary.”