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For the past 10 years, Mahmud has sold bottles of Aqua and soft drinks from his streetside kiosk in Central Jakarta’s Menteng district. At Rp 2,000 (22 cents) a pop, his profit margin is small, but it’s a living.

But suppose Mahmud had the option of selling a different brand of drinking water that was cheaper for him to buy from distributors, allowing him to increase his profit? Most vendors would jump at the chance. But what if this new  beverage was made from recycled sewage water?

“I don’t think people would buy recycled water like that, so I wouldn’t sell it,” Mahmud, 46, said. “I think maybe if they didn’t know where the water came from, they would drink it. But once they did, I don’t think they would want it.”

Not necessarily. Naysayers in Singapore said the same thing for decades as the city-state’s government worked to resolve its chronic water shortages by recycling wastewater for commercial and industrial use. To prove a point about cleanliness, they also began bottling recycled water for human consumption, publicizing the fact that their “NEWater” product surpasses the World Health Organization’s requirements for safe potable water.

Today there are five plants in Singapore that produce NEWater, primarily for industrial and commercial uses, and it’s targeted to meet up to 30 percent of Singapore’s water needs by this year.

And some NEWater is also sold in mini-marts and grocery stores. One survey even showed that 98 percent of Singaporeans have no problem drinking recycled water, and they’re certainly not alone.

“If you drink from the taps in London, it’s already been through seven stomachs,” said Scott Younger, president commissioner of Glendale Partners, a Jakarta-based project development and consulting firm.

It might sound sick and disgusting, but recycling wastewater is nonetheless an ingenious way to solve water-supply problems, and more cities around the world are doing the same thing. One day, Indonesian cities like Jakarta, which has its own massive water supply woes, may have no choice but to recycle wastewater — even if it’s just for industrial use or to replenish toilets and showers in office buildings, shopping malls and hotels.

In fact, it should already be doing so, according to experts.

“Water is precious and it’s the most important [issue] of this century — forget climate change,” Younger argued, noting that Indonesia only reuses 1 percent of its rainwater. “Reusing water was never a priority for Jakarta, but in Singapore and Hong Kong, it’s part of [public] policy.”

The Jati Luhur reservoir in West Java is literally Jakarta’s lifeline, supplying up to 60 percent of the city’s water needs, but problems with quality and consistent flow keep water experts up at night. Another 25 percent or so of the city’s supply comes from groundwater, but the Jakarta administration has begun to phase that out through prohibitive tariffs to prevent the northern part of the city from sinking and being overrun by high tides.

Luckily, there are some officials outside Jakarta who think creatively about water conservation in their communities. Jakarta may want to look to them as it tries to go green with its water.

Itoc Tochija, mayor of Cimahi, West Java, has invited foreign and Indonesian scientists, development experts and nongovernmental organizations to his town of 600,000 to “share solutions to our problems.” Those problems includes clean water shortages during the dry season, and a complete absence of a sewage system in Cimahi’s slum areas.

Tochija didn’t shy away from trying something new, approving a pilot project for a machine that turns low-to-medium polluted river water into drinking water. He also approved the experimental use of a sewage tank created by a university in Malang, East Java, that cleans wastewater before releasing it into the Cimahi River. Today, two giant tanks are at work in the town’s slum areas.
So why isn’t Jakarta as proactive?

“I don’t know,” Tochija said. “I think some parts of Jakarta are very green. But they are rich — they should at least have communal septic tanks in [slum areas of] North Jakarta like we do here.”

Indeed, Jakarta appears to be the only major city in the world without a centralized municipal wastewater treatment plant.

On one level, that’s just fine for Muhtadi Sjadzali, managing director of Envitech Perkasa, which builds wastewater and water treatment plans for industrial use. The recycled wastewater that emerges from the machines built by the company is of a higher quality than drinking water, and is used to power boilers that create electricity for factories.

Envitech Perkasa built a wastewater treatment plant in Surabaya for Unilever, which paid for itself in just three years from the money saved on electricity costs.

“The driver for recycling in industry, if you talk to them, is that they want zero emissions —  that’s all public relations talk,” Sjadzali said. “It’s really driven by the costs.”

While his company has no shortage of business, Sjadzali is also a proud Indonesian and Jakarta resident, and says he fears the capital has exceeded its carrying capacity for water. He said the only feasible solutions are to stop new construction, desalinate seawater into potable water and recycle existing sewage water.

“Every building in Jakarta should recycle their sewage water, but what do you use it for?” Sjadzali said, estimating that around half of Jakarta’s buildings have their own sewage systems but only a fraction of them recycle. “Psychologically, people won’t accept drinking water from sewage.”

Fair point, but given that wastewater can be turned into high-quality water, it can easily be reused in toilets, sinks and showers.
If the Jakarta administration issued a regulation on mandatory recycling of water within city office buildings, Sjadzali said, ultimately demand could decrease by up to 40 percent.

“But first you have to clean up the [city’s] rivers,” he said. “Recycling is good, but the focus should be on stopping pollution in river water, so it can be used at least for cleaning and showering.”

Experts estimate that around 25 percent  to 30 percent of river water that goes into Jakarta’s treatment plants doesn’t meet official health and quality standards for untreated water. And in Cimahi, Mayor Tochija’s pilot water purifying machine doesn’t work downriver on water that flows past the area’s factories because it’s far too polluted.

In the planned community of Lippo Karawaci, on the outskirts of Jakarta, there are no worries about the quality of the water its saves. All drainage is contained and directed to its golf course and water ponds for storage. The reserve keeps the underground aquifer replenished and it comes in handy when there’s a drought.

All buildings and homes in Karawaci have piped water and are hooked up to a central sewage system, a simple concept with proper planning that must seem alien to Jakarta. Discharged waste is treated in a central sewage treatment plant, and the cleaned water is diverted back to the six water ponds scattered around the community or used for irrigation.

It’s been like this for 15 years.

“This is not rocket science,” said Wahyudi Hadinata, general manager of Lippo Karawaci. “This concept of a water pond is just something new for the government  — they can’t understand it.”

To be fair, the present Jakarta administration didn’t start with 1,000 hectares of open land like Lippo did in the early 1990s. But city officials shouldn’t have any problem understanding that water is an expensive commodity, not to mention the fact that the citywide supply is inconsistent.

Wahyudi suggested a regulation mandating that all buildings — or at least new buildings — treat and reuse sewage water, and collect, treat and use rainwater.

“In the long run, it will be cheaper than the commercial water rate,” he said, adding that to kick-start the process, the city could “raise the water rates. Give them an incentive to change.”

If most Jakartans think like Sanyoto, a 42-year-old private driver, then the recycled water idea could catch on.

“I think if it has been processed correctly, I wouldn’t mind,” he said. “I mean, that’s what water from the [city water utilities] is; it’s source comes from the Ciliwung River, which is polluted. But because it has been processed, it’s clean, so it’s OK.”

OK to use and even reuse for commercial buildings and industry, but for drinking? That’s going to take some time.

“I can’t imagine drinking sewage water — no way,” said Siti, a 17-year-old baby sitter in Jakarta. “I can’t stand the mental image, even if it is clean.”