Patrick Lee’s report (from The Star Online) on the amount of treated water going to waste everyday is a shocking discovery. According to his report, 4.27 billion litres of treated water goes to waste from Malaysia’s water supply system every day. And this is all because of old and leaky pipes.
This staggering amount is enough to keep the state of Perlis running for 53 days!
According to the National Water Services Commission (SPAN), non-revenue water accounted for 36% of all water siphoned out of treatment plants across Malaysia in 2013. This amounts to 5.69 billion litres a day and 75% of the non-revenue water can be attributed to problems such as leaky pipes and aging infrastructure.
According to the president of the Association of Water and Energy Research (Awer) S. Piarapakaran, state governments efforts in building new treatment plants to meet growing local demand will still result in the same amount of water being wasted if the old pipes are not fixed.
The Langat 2 water plant project is expected to be completed in 2017. And, once completed, the plant will pump 1,130 million litres of water a day. According to S.Piarapakaran’s comment to The Star, 300 million litres of water a day will be lost in the system if “things don’t change.”
In terms of which state saw the most water lost, Selangor seems to be suffering more.
Fixing these old and leaky pipes is a big project though. According to SPAN’s executive director Mohd Riduan Ismail, fixing the problem involved mapping pipe networks, setting up district metering zones and more. It also “requires a huge investment.”
RM20bil was spent to replace Malaysia’s 43,890km-long asbestos-cement pipes. According to Malaysian Water Association (MWA) president Syed Mohamed Adnan Alhabshi, “you need to spend RM500, 000 to change 1km of these pipes,” money that the state government did not have.
Read The Star Online’s full report here.
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