{"id":72191,"date":"2018-10-18T16:00:45","date_gmt":"2018-10-18T21:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/chicago\/?p=72191"},"modified":"2018-10-18T16:00:59","modified_gmt":"2018-10-18T21:00:59","slug":"what-the-world-can-learn-from-israels-water-reuse-programs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/chicago\/what-the-world-can-learn-from-israels-water-reuse-programs\/","title":{"rendered":"What the world can learn from Israel\u2019s water reuse programs"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Karyn Simpson<\/strong>
\nMedill Reports<\/em><\/p>\n

Negev Desert, Israel \u2013 A country that is 70 percent desert faces a unique challenge in finding sustainable water sources, but by treating and reusing approximately 90 percent of its wastewater, Israel has done just that.<\/p>\n

The small country is light years ahead of the rest of the globe \u2013 the next closest competitor is Spain, which reuses around 30 percent of wastewater, according to Dr. Jack Gilron, head of the department of desalination and water treatment at the Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research.<\/p>\n

Yet Israel\u2019s success in wastewater treatment and reuse likely won\u2019t translate effectively to other countries.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cThe problems are not just technical \u2013 they\u2019re also social, and they\u2019re also political,\u201d Gilron said.<\/p>\n

Sitting in Gilron\u2019s office in the network of buildings, trees and concrete paths that make up Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, it was easy to forget that we were in the middle of the desert in a country with a vastly different political system than the United States when it comes to water. In Israel, almost all water belongs to the State of Israel. From the limited freshwater and groundwater to the more abundant sea water and even wastewater, every drop is a national resource to which the public is only granted temporary usage based on need and availability of sources. This allows Israel to control the water on a countrywide level and prioritize who gets it \u2013 and when.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the [United] States, you don\u2019t have a national authority or the legal basis to treat water as a national resource,\u201d Gilron said. \u201cWater is a private property in the States, so as a result, if it\u2019s on your property, you have water rights to use it. Whereas here, water is a national resource. Nobody can drill a well without first getting permission from Israel Water Authority.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the benefits of this setup, Gilron said, is the ability to control how much groundwater and freshwater is pumped from different sources. This is increasingly important as Israel enters its sixth consecutive year of drought and groundwater and freshwater levels continue to drop, forcing the country to rely more on wastewater reuse and desalination to avoid causing irreparable damage to their aquifers and to the Sea of Galilee.<\/p>\n

This also enables Israel to implement nationwide conservation initiatives. Israeli residents grow up with a conservation-first mindset, said Dr. Elie Rekhess,\u00a0 associate director for Israel Studies and visiting professor in the department of history at Northwestern University. Rekhess grew up in Israel during the infancy of Israel\u2019s National Water Carrier system, and his wife and children still live in Tel Aviv.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe grew up with the mentality that every drop counts,\u201d Rekhess said. \u201cYou simply don\u2019t leave the tap open, and you will be shouted at if you left a tap open\u2026 Water was definitely a commodity that one should economize on and be careful about.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most of Israel\u2019s drinking water is supplied by five seawater desalination plants along the Mediterranean Sea. Treated wastewater is used primarily for agriculture, which receives 546 million cubic meters (about 144 billion gallons) of freshwater to supplement the 473 million cubic meters (about 125 billion gallons) of treated wastewater provided each year.<\/p>\n

Israel is able to transport its treated wastewater to farms all across the country because the country is less than the size of the state of New Jersey.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you\u2019re small enough, the distance between where you generate the water and where you need the water is small enough that the cost to transport the water is reasonable,\u201d Gilron said.<\/p>\n

In a country as large as the United States, or even in an expansive, drought-ridden state such as California, the transportation costs between large municipalities where the wastewater is treated and the agricultural areas where the water is needed might be too cost-prohibitive to allow water reuse for irrigation, Gilron said.<\/p>\n

Gilron recommended that other countries think local if they want wastewater reuse to work effectively, but also advised that wastewater treatment can\u2019t and won\u2019t be the only solution to the global water crisis.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t work on the basis of large plants. You have to think more on the basis of distributive plants, which might be one of the things that become the next wave, or the next trend,\u201d Gilron said. \u201cBut again, it won\u2019t solve the problem if the problem is quantity. If the farmers are taking out more than the rain is providing, then the level will continue to drop.\u201d<\/p>\n

Officials at Shafdan Wastewater Treatment Plant, Israel\u2019s main wastewater treatment facility, are constantly researching new ways to make their treatment process more efficient, but overall, the current processes do not vary significantly from those in other countries.<\/p>\n

\"Shafdan
The researchers at Shafdan hope that their tests will eventually uncover a way to filter wastewater as well or better than their current final stage of treatment, soil aquifer treatment (SAT), so that they can discontinue SAT usage. They are looking to find something that is more time and space efficient, since SAT requires large amounts of open land above an aquifer, as well as three months to a year to properly filter the water. (Karyn Simpson\/MEDILL)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Israel\u2019s wastewater, which is funneled primarily through Shafdan, is treated in a multi-step process that includes basic filtration and biological treatments and ends with a natural form of filtration called soil aquifer treatment (SAT). SAT allows the country\u2019s abundant sand to filter remaining pollutants from the water \u2013 a six-month to one-year filtration process which deposits the water in an agriculture-specific aquifer beneath the filtration fields.<\/p>\n

\u201c[SAT] relatively consumes more land than other processes,\u201d said Sivan Bleich, water treatment and supply department manager at WaTech \u2013 Mekorot, the group that oversees innovation at the Shafdan plant. \u201cSo here we are trying to simulate and test more intensive, more industrialized solutions for the last polishing step of treating the effluent to reach a very high water quality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shafdan researchers have narrowed alternatives down to two approaches, Bleich said \u2013 more pretreatment before using SAT to allow for more expedited filtration, or focusing on new technologies that could achieve comparable water quality to using SAT.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt could be a combination of many technologies \u2013 ultra-filtration, ozonation, absorbance, biological processes, membrane treatment,\u201d Bleich said. \u201cWe are trying to optimize the right combination in terms of the water quality, and of course in terms of the costs.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Shafdan
Researchers at Shafdan Wastewater Treatment Plant are using pressurized vessels encasing membranes to experiment with different, more specific methods of wastewater filtration. (Karyn Simpson\/MEDILL)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While reusing treated wastewater for agriculture has allowed Israel to become relatively water solvent, concerns remain about using treated wastewater to grow crops. For example, Israel\u2019s current processes are effective at removing some organic compounds present in effluent, but research is not conclusive on any long-term danger from irrigating crops with water that may still contain endocrine-disrupting compounds (EDCs) found in birth control and hormones, which may not be removed by traditional treatment processes.<\/p>\n

Gal Shoham, professional instructor in the operation and process department at Shafdan, said the levels of EDCs were too low to be of concern. But Bleich said, later, that removing EDCs was a target for \u201call the pilots,\u201d meaning for all the test studies Shafdan researchers are currently performing.<\/p>\n

In addition to reusing wastewater, Israel\u2019s desalination plants and countrywide water conservation campaigns have given the country some distance from total water scarcity \u2013 quite an accomplishment for a country riddled with drought and with little available fresh water.<\/p>\n

There is still room for innovation in wastewater treatment, Gilron said. While other countries may be circumstantially different from Israel, they can still move toward a more sustainable treatment and reuse model.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt first requires becoming aware of the problem and being willing to look at the problem straight on and not sweep it under the rug,\u201d Gilron said. \u201cTechnical is only part of it. The technical can provide the tools, some of the tools, but when it comes to decision making and allocation of resources, you need actually legal and social tools that allow you to effective deploy the technical tools.\u201d<\/p>\n

Photo at top: Israel is largely a desert region with little available fresh water, so every drop matters. In order to fulfill the country\u2019s water needs, Israel uses sea- and brackish-water desalination, groundwater and freshwater pumping, conservation campaigns, and wastewater treatment and reuse for agriculture.
\n(Karyn Simpson\/MEDILL)<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Karyn Simpson Medill Reports Negev Desert, Israel \u2013 A country that is 70 percent desert faces a unique challenge in finding sustainable water sources, but by treating and reusing approximately 90 percent of its wastewater, Israel has done just that. The small country is light years ahead of the rest of the globe \u2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":515,"featured_media":72197,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4447,29,497],"tags":[4454,2630,4452,4453,733],"class_list":["post-72191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fall-2018","category-health-and-science","category-medill-newsmakers","tag-abroad","tag-israel","tag-wastewater","tag-wastewater-treatment","tag-water"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat the world can learn from Israel\u2019s water reuse programs - Medill Reports Chicago<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/chicago\/what-the-world-can-learn-from-israels-water-reuse-programs\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What the world can learn from Israel\u2019s water reuse programs - Medill Reports Chicago\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"By Karyn Simpson Medill Reports Negev Desert, Israel \u2013 A country that is 70 percent desert faces a unique challenge in finding sustainable water sources, but by treating and reusing approximately 90 percent of its wastewater, Israel has done just that. 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