Graywater Reuse in Jordan -- continued --

5.0 Graywater in Jordan – the Way Forward

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This report represents the current situation regarding graywater reuse in Jordan in November 2003 – at the completion of the Ministry of Planning funding component for CSBE’s graywater project. It is clear that during the last 14 months, the Jordanian graywater debate has begun in earnest, although it is still at an early stage, and many people remain to be convinced. 

CSBE has received funding from the British Embassy Small Grants Scheme to continue monitoring and assessing some of the ongoing graywater schemes until February 2004. Other institutions and individuals have begun to experiment with graywater and have begun to communicate openly together. It is hoped that other initiatives and schemes will be developed in the near future as graywater reuse becomes more widely known. However, there is clearly further work required in Jordan in order to provide user friendly information about graywater reuse, to demonstrate its lack of risk, and to encourage its acceptance. One encouraging development is the Ministry of Water and Irrigation’s decision to form a Water Demand Management Committee to investigate how the use of graywater could be promoted and facilitated.

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This project has seen the development of a small number of simple applications of graywater reuse. It is likely that others will be instigated as a result of the spread of information and interest generated. However, due to the short time scale of this project, a thorough assessment of the schemes – performance, appropriateness to the context, health and environmental impacts, cost  - over a sufficient period of time was not possible.  

What is now required is an assessment of some graywater projects over a period of time. In particular, assessment of the long term effects on soil, plants and groundwater should be made. Investigations to date have not indicated that serious detrimental effects will ensue from the long term reuse of graywater. However, none of the projects reviewed here represent a systematic, concerted attempt at making this determination to any significant degree. It is possible that a number of well-designed, properly funded pilot plants, with involvement of respected institutions such as a university or the Ministry of Water and Irrigation, will greatly help in assuaging public confidence in graywater reuse. Such projects will provide sufficient data to highlight the low level of impact which properly developed graywater schemes should have. Expansion of the scheme at JUST to include other types of plants, together with more systematic monitoring is a possible example.

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Assessment of the impact of graywater schemes necessitates a degree of testing. Many decision makers will wish to see test data, before being convinced of the ‘safety’ of graywater reuse. It is natural for those from a municipal water and wastewater background to desire to see water quality data, and it is also natural for those from a scientific background, and also the general public, to want to see some hard science which demonstrates the safety of graywater reuse. However, care must be taken with regard to exactly what testing can tell us about small scale graywater reuse. Municipal authorities use testing to determine the quality of the wastewater influent to and effluent from their treatment facilities. Drinking water quality is also assessed by water quality testing. Various standards exist against which the quality of water and wastewater is assessed. In each case, the actual water quality is assessed against the appropriate standard. There will be temptation to bring in a graywater standard by which the quality of graywater is assessed. However, there are important reasons why this may not be appropriate.  

Graywater is produced at a household level, and is intermittent in nature. The quantity and quality of graywater produced by a household will vary both during the day, and during the week. For example, graywater output on laundry day will be significantly different to that produced on a non-laundry day. Graywater production during morning shower time will not be the same as that produced during mid-day meal preparation. Spot samples of graywater will not give meaningful results at a household level. This contrasts to the monitoring of wastewater at a municipal level, which contains significant averaging due to the large number of households contributing to the wastewater effluent, although variations in quantity from hour to hour are a known feature. Test results on graywater collected at a particular time from a particular household will reveal very little other than the characteristics of the graywater being produced at that particular time, which may have little connection to the quality at any other time. Therefore attempts to require graywater to conform to particular characteristics may be misguided, in addition to being expensive to monitor and costly to regulate. 

In terms of the determination of the long-term effects of graywater reuse at a particular site, it has been argued that the soil characteristics may provide the best indication of the long-term effects of the use of graywater at that site. For example, in this report, the absence of significant contaminant levels at the HB House after a 2-year period of graywater reuse is used to argue for the low impact of this particular approach. However, ideally the soil characteristic should be monitored before irrigation by graywater is begun, as well as before and during the rainfall period, in order to mark changes in the soil as a result of flushing by rainwater.  

Monitoring of the impact on the plants themselves may also be a useful indicator, although careful controls should be taken to ensure that levels of parameters monitored are a result of irrigation by graywater and not other causes.

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It has become apparent even during the course of this short project, that different contexts require different solutions. A rural community has different expectations regarding risk and water use from a villa household. Graywater from the ablutions water produced in a mosque requires less intervention and treatment from an apartment community whose graywater will contain laundry water and will be combined to irrigate a common area. One pitfall to be avoided in the quest for graywater solutions in Jordan is a ‘one design fits all’ mentality. The design of each system should be based on the initial graywater quality, the desired end use of the system and the degree of risk acceptable. This will be reflected in the cost of the system.