By Neelam Rahim

After a nine-year hiatus, the long-awaited inexperienced Drop report paints a bleak picture: half the waste treatment works in African nation fail to treat waste product properly and, in several cases, fail to treat it.

Anthony Turton of the Centre for Environmental Management at the University of the Free State says this represents “a wave of excretory product inundating our rivers and dams, while not respite, for quite a decade.”

Green Drop report reveals the size of pollution.

The number of essential treatment works listed within the last report in 2013 was 248. the most recent inexperienced Drop report, discharged on thirty March 2022, reveals waste compliance has plummeted over the years. Of 850 municipal waste treatment works, 334 (39%) area unit in an exceedingly essential state, getting a score of half-hour or less.

“This decline is at the treatment and sewer assortment levels,” the report states. It’s not simply that waste treatment works area unit failing to treat waste product properly before cathartic it back to the setting. A lot of it spills into the environment before even aiming for the treatment works.

The average inexperienced Drop score across all provinces was five-hundredths, indicating that half our raw waste product and industrial waste isn’t being treated to standards that area unit already inadequate, in step with scientists in chemistry and medicine. The typical score in 2013 was sixty one.

Green Drop scores for waste treatment works, and also the sewerage infrastructure conjugation them area unit obtained mistreatment AN equation within which weightings area unit was given to 5 key performance areas: capability management; environmental management; monetary management; technical management; and effluent and sludge compliance, which, at 30%, has the best weight.

The report notes: “The effluent quality should follow to ninetieth (in total) with the authorised limits for the individual classes.”

Analysis of the Department of Water and Sanitation’s (DWS) own information shows that even a few waste treatment works that received many ninetieth area units pollute the setting.

Billions of litres of this raw or partly treated waste empty into our rivers and also the ocean each year. There’s additionally growing concern over chemicals and antibiotics within the effluent, that area unit neither treated nor monitored.