Now Singapore is turning to technology to alleviate its water shortage. The government plans to spend millions on an array of water-purifying technologies over the next decade, including several plants to take the salt out of seawater and filter sewage water, as well as structures to collect rainwater and direct it to reservoirs. As the population grows, the new water will be all the more crucial. “Usually, armies are the way to solve water conflicts,” says Leon Awerbuch, former president of the International Desalination Association. “But Singapore is finding alternatives.”
The jewel of this new campaign is the Newater factory, a pilot plant that demonstrates partly homegrown technology for filtering sewage (engineers plan to use a version of the same technology for desalinating seawater). The plant is on the banks of a pond where signs warn against swimming and fishing and rows of towers hold raw sewage. Harry Seah, the plant manager, is not put off by the stench. “You get used to it,” he says. Newater incorporates the cutting edge of filtering technology. Sludge comes in and passes through thousands of white plastic spaghetti-like tubes. Since the pores along the sides of the tubes are only as wide as 60 water molecules, water is squeezed out easily but solid particles are not. “The trade secret,” says Dee Dee Ng, an executive of Hyflux, one of the Singapore companies that make these tubes, “is how you get the holes so small.” The filtrated water is then forced through a membrane with even smaller pores, removing anything that would have made it this far. And just for good measure, the water is irradiated with intense ultraviolet light.
With all that purifying, you would think that Singapore would have no trouble convincing its citizens that the filtered water is safe for everyday use. “In Singapore, people generally trust the government,” says Seah. “We are working with them to build a dialogue.” Nationalism also helps the government’s hand. When Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid, during a political spat with Singapore last November, asked Malaysia to suspend its water supply, a letter in the Singapore Straits Times was clear: “Let us stop buying submarines and cut down on missile expenditure and invest the billions saved on water desalination plants.” Not leaving anything to chance, the government has put water conservation into its school curriculum, including comic books with scary analogies, such as a wasted planet that consumed all its water.
The semiconductor industry has been more skeptical of the new project. The government hopes the country’s four semiconductor parks, which will eventually consume 15 percent of Singapore’s total water supply, will agree to switch to the recycled water. But water is also crucial to the delicate process of manufacturing chips; huge amounts are used to clean them as they roll off the assembly line. These days government technicians spend hours trying to win over Sunny Chan, vice president of Tech Semiconductor, one of Singapore’s most productive fabrication lines. They show him test results that ostensibly prove the purity of Newater. The problem is not that the water is dirty but that it may be too pure. The Tech factory is optimized for imported (and less pure) water from Malaysia. Chan, who worked at Hewlett-Packard in California, knows that the slightest difference in water, even a lack of certain trace chemicals and minerals, could throw off a plant’s processes. At the same time Chan worries that shareholders won’t take kindly to his using water that once ran through sewers, even though it has been purified. “I think the country has very scarce natural resources, especially water,” he says, nursing a cup of warm water in the company cafeteria. “But if I use this new water, if it fouls my plant, it will create more burdens for my shareholders.”
The government hopes that within a year the fabs will agree to accept Newater. Singaporeans, who value cleanliness highly, may take longer to convince; for the moment, officials aren’t even trying. Instead, they’ve found a temporary use for the recycled water. Every morning steel tanker trucks drive up to the plant, suck up the reycled water, then cart it off to the city’s golf courses.
