South Africa’s sewage pollution crisis is impacting our food safety

The 2022 theme for World Toilet Day on 19 November is “making the invisible visible” as the focus is on sewage spills into groundwater. In South Africa, sewage pollution is anything but invisible and in the past year, much has been said and written about it.

Since 2013, the United Nations observes World Toilet Day each year as a campaign for ensuring that people have access to safe and reliable sanitation in accordance with Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6, to have water and sanitation for all by 2030.

Besides creating awareness on sanitation, the purpose of this day is also to focus on the overflows and leaks from pipes and poor wastewater treatment works that result in untreated human waste being pumped into rivers, streams, oceans and groundwater causing harm to human and ecosystem health.

South Africa’s performance on SDG 6 is rather poor and it is quite probable that the country will not meet its SDG targets in water and sanitation by 2030. In previous reports to the United Nations on SDG 6, South Africa appears to be doing well with “95% of the population using safely managed drinking water services” and “83% in 2018 (StatsSA, 2019) of its population using safely managed sanitation services”.

However, government’s own admission suggests that there are still approximately 2.8 million households (17%) without access to improved sanitation services and almost 280,791 households that practice open defecation (Department of Water and Sanitation Report to Parliament, 2021/2022).

In 2018, it was estimated that there were 4,500 schools still using pit latrines. That number is now sitting at almost 1,000 but the ongoing challenge for many of these schools is a lack of access to water.

The way government defines access and safely managed sanitation must be explored. Many of these sanitation services are shared or communal toilets that have additional challenges such as safety, no water, poor hygiene and crime.

The 83% of people using “safe” sanitation services must be further unpacked. In cases of communal toilets and pit latrines, these should not be included in the government’s report to the UN on its SDG target. The reality is the government is really struggling to provide toilets to schools and poor communities.

Not only is there a lack of toilets for people to use but the management of wastewater is in a dire state in the country. It is a fact that billions of litres of sewage and wastewater are spilling into rivers and oceans every day from industrial, pharmaceutical and hospital wastewater. The contaminants associated with the wastewater can contain excessive nutrients, pharmaceutical remains, trace metals, and pathogens such as viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites.