South African Breweries (SAB) hopes to expand its water-saving collaboration efforts with municipalities to more water-stressed communities across South Africa, after achieving significant successes in Cape Town and Tshwane.
Working with local municipalities in Cape Town and Tshwane, SAB has managed to help provide a total 4.4-billion litres of additional water a year for use by residents in those cities, SAB announced on Friday.
The additional flow of water is accredited to leak reduction and advanced water pressure management in municipal reticulation networks.
The City of Cape Town has an additional 4.67-million litres a day of water available to residents or 1.7-billion litres a year. This was previously being lost through water leaks in the municipal system.
Cape Town suffered extreme water shortages in 2018 with threats of a looming Day Zero when taps were expected to run dry and water collection points made available for residents’ basic and daily water requirements.
Further, SAB partnered with the City of Tshwane in 2018 to refurbish two existing water pump stations – Groenkloof and Kentron. This enabled the city to reduce its reliance on Rand Water and has contributed an additional 7.5-million litres a day of water for use by residents or a total of 2.7-billion litres a year.
This has enabled the city to save more than R60 000 a day, or R23-million a year.
SAB expects an additional two city partnerships to be launched this year.