It has become an easy prediction to make that the scarcity of oil in a situation of burgeoning demand, coupled with the depletion of a finite resource, will be the cause for the next major conflict. Perhaps the future is already with us in Iraq.
After that, the next best candidate is water. Our government seems to fail to notice. We have solved our permanent drought by investing in reverse osmosis (RO) technology. There is water in our taps with almost no interruption of supply. Happy Malta. Or is it?
With a seriously drier future predicted for the Mediterranean because of climate change, our reliance on groundwater to provide half our drinking water is just as shaky as our reliance on oil to produce the other half. Water is everything. We cannot live without it and our economy will collapse in the face of shortages long before the water runs out altogether.
Water is a security issue for Malta. It is what other countries would definitely go to war about. Threatening their supply is threatening their survival. The threat of terrorism is a gnat bite by comparison. Malta allows the future to approach without preparing for its arrival.
The day after the Budget Speech, the Water Services Corporation and MEPA held a public consultation meeting at the Mellieha school inviting feedback about the plan to erect a sewage treatment plant at Ic-Cumnija ending the scandal of pumping raw sewage into that gift from the gods, Anchor Bay.
It was very poorly attended. The country was digesting the Budget and only Mellieha councillors, a sprinkling of residents and contractors, and a handful of environmentalists filled the first few rows of seats. This too is Malta. Our destiny is decided in our absence. Is it apathy or learned helplessness?
The comments made by the audience forked out in two paths: the Mellieha route and the national one. Mellieha can live with the trade-off of a sewage plant of significant size where no other buildings mar the landscape yet, if it means ending the blasphemy of the current situation. Environmentalists have wider concerns.
For years the promise of sewage treatment has been an aspiration they strove for. For the first time in many millennia Malta would have a permanent river or something close to it. All the freshwater produced by the WSC from groundwater and from its reverse osmosis plants becomes sewage. Whatever can be recovered from it is a very precious resource or should be.
Today sewage treatment is mandatory. The cost, previously ignored by dispersing the long-term harm to the environment, is a given. It is no longer an externality we can exclude from our economic number-crunching. The question now arises whether we should go beyond minimum EU standards to turn second-class water into freshwater, even drinking water. Should we fulfil this obligation of membership and stop there or take the opportunity of available EU funds covering a significant part of the capital investment necessary to invest some of our own and reap the long-term benefits?
The thinking in the present project reminds me of the makeshift mentality that encouraged our entrepreneurs to snap up the plant and machinery cast-offs from other countries thus staying in business a little longer but inexorably losing out to global competition. We made money but less than we could have. We cheated ourselves by dismissing the life quality costs and the environmental damage which was never accounted for anywhere.
Siting the sewage treatment plant at Ic-Cumnija means that the major volume by far of the sewage treated there will continue to be pumped over three major ridges and any second-class water for which use can be found is likely to make the return journey to the Maghtab/Burmarrad area also at a significant energy cost. The sludge, hopefully dry, will travel back in lorries to Maghtab/Ghallis/Ta' Zwejra or whatever title the new landfill acquires in future, also at additional energy costs for the foreseeable future.
The technology adopted is tried and tested but ancient, taking up more land than necessary and producing a second-class water which amazingly has been given zero value in the proposers' calculations. The whole exercise seems to be a minimisation of the pain inflicted by the EU directives rather than a lunge at the opportunity to reduce long-term running costs. Perhaps we do not want to reach out for more because that would impact our deficit reduction. Do we want our public finances to look good at the cost of taking on a long-term extravagance in the fashioning of a crucial, indeed strategic, part of our infrastructure?
One of the major reasons given for not siting the plant at Maghtab, reducing the energy cost of pumping millions of litres of sewage/recovered water back and forth across the country, was the cost of trenching works and new pumps necessary to redirect the present flow. Basically we avoid a cost now to bear an eternal cost afterwards: a cheap, second-hand lorry that consumes more oil than fuel. How cheap? Cheap for whom?
One of the unstated reasons for costing the water produced at zero is its high salinity. Some hotels in Qawra/Bugibba reduce costs by flushing their toilets with seawater, illegally. No sewage treatment short of reverse osmosis can deal with salt. Farmers extracting water from equally illegal boreholes will not be tempted to use water with higher salinity than that which they presently obtain at the insignificant cost of pumping it up.
Some of them have found delivering water to swimming pools more lucrative than farming - more blatant black economy. Legal mayhem makes the produce of our sewage treatment plants of zero value. Political spinelessness with cheating farmers and hoteliers deny the country its potential to reuse water originally produced at exorbitant costs in reverse osmosis plants. Farmers and hoteliers make money, all others pay twice.
The cost of bottled water also extracted from the aquifer in common ownership is close to a thousand times the price of tapwater, which is exactly the same thing plus chlorine to make its distribution safe. When it was bottled in PVC, the dioxin and the cancer risks came free. What a country!
Reality will sink its teeth deep into our economy once the EU's Water Framework directive comes into force here. All the hanky-panky will have to go and cheating-free costs will impact the third of our economy currently on water cost holiday. Exploiting the potential of treated effluent could be our salvation. Why can we not think holistically and in advance of a crisis?
One of the reasons given for not treating water back to drinking water quality was public squeamishness. It is perfectly alright to drink ex-seawater for years. It is no problem at all to drink water with excess nitrates which expose the children of mothers who drink it in pregnancy to a higher likelihood of respiratory ailments. It occurs to nobody to be squeamish about the fact that half our drinking water, the best around, RO water, comes out of a sea which is the toilet for zillions of fish large and small, apart from 400,000 Maltese and 1.2 million visitors per annum. The government is not confident that it can persuade the public.
Not so the municipal government of Vienna. The Viennese drink their own treated sewage. So do we when we visit their splendid city. They are smart enough to realise that they can and should short-circuit the natural recycling of water because they impose a major burden on it through the impact of concentration of pollutants by their city. They could easily fulfil EU standards by returning second-class water to the Danube for it to be diluted and reused downstream.
We propose to pump the treated water into the sea where nobody can use it except at significant cost. How can this make sense for Vienna and not for Malta? Need we mention Singapore, which calls its treated sewage Newater, taking up one per cent per year of the total public drinking water supply and the rest piped to industrial estates to reduce the burden in the potable water supply? Why Singapore and not Malta?
Our future is being decided now. In fact the public consultation exercise was something of a futile ritual: the contracts of works for the project have already been signed. It is far too late to rethink the whole project now because any further delay caused by objectors would make them enemies-of-the people: they would be accused of threatening the available EU funds and of exposing the country to fines. Brilliant: a fiasco imposed by political arm twisting.
Just as happened with our waste management strategy, the decisions of operators and contractors, piecemeal implementation, are prejudicing the concerted application of a long-awaited national Water Policy which has not yet seen the light of day. The Malta Resources Authority will have to rewrite its draft water policy before the ink has dried on it. Where is the MRA anyway? Is it on hold just like our Draft Local Plans were kept in suspended animation while whatever went contrary to basic planning commonsense was built?
It is a repeat of the Sant'Antnin shambles. Go through the motions on public consultation. If anyone kicks up a fuss, make a media blitz accusing him or them of betrayal of environmental values and of the country's ability to tap EU funds. It too was a fait accompli years before it became public. The siting was determined by the same thinking exactly: use the existing site whether or not it is the best one, do not incur extra costs even if there is a long-term benefit. The site selection exercise was unanimously denounced as a sham except by its prepetrators. The project is recognisably beneficial and the PR assault team will wipe out the objectors. Never mind that it could have been infinitely more beneficial.
EU membership has changed everything and it has changed nothing. We no longer have a Prime Minister who snorts, smirks or sneers at anything environmental. Once he is obliged to perform eco-friendly deeds because of EU commitments, he might as well claim to be greener than Green, even while he is proposing golf courses over aquifers.
Nothing has changed in the non-consultation of stakeholders. We go through the motions, a ritual to satisfy EU requirements. The contracts are still a fait accompli. There is more tbazwir of EU rules (bending of rules) going on now than Dr Alfred Sant will ever be able to perform should he ever become prime minister. He unwisely announces his intentions, the present government bends rules, pays lip service, cheats itself and future generations without making public declarations.
There is no consciousness of the moral violence this implies, the betrayal of the aspirations of those who voted for EU membership. It is business as usual. The long-term economic and environmental damage continues unabated, the cost will be unending also. It will never be noted in any annual budget. Will some twit plead ignorance in future just as our politicians now plead ignorance for their past eco-crimes? We will have to pay for their extravagance. We do not have to reward them for it.
Dr Vassallo is chairman of Alternattiva Demokratika - The Green Party
hcvassallo@kemmunet.net.mt