The South African Water Chamber says water quality is a disaster waiting to happen.
Earlier this year, President Cyril Ramaphosa spoke about resurrecting the government’s blue drop and green drop certification programme.
It is aimed at improving the enforcement of water standards at the municipal level.
The chamber’s CEO Benoȋt Le Roy says government plans to reduce pollution in our drinking water by 60 percent.
Le Roy said it’s been a slow onset disaster, and it will be slow to rectify, “but the harder we push the quicker it will be rectified.
“Government’s aim is to reduce the pollution by 60-percent in our water resources over 36 months. 36 months is quite a difficult target to meet but it has to be met and see if we can improve on it, but these things unfortunately take a while to resolve, but I think on the blue drop side that can be done a lot quicker.
“The only thing is the pollution in our resources means that the cost of production for potable water for municipalities increases cause there’s more pollutants that we need to remove, so we can remove them, and we do remove them but it costs more money and the user has to play cause there’s no money flying around outside of that.”