Tehran Municipality’s unwillingness to use treated wastewater for watering parks and green spaces is pushing the province over the edge, managing director of the provincial sewerage company said.
“TM withdraws close to 200 million cubic meters of water from underground resources for parks and green spaces annually, while wastewater treatment plants’ output in the city has exceeded 250 mcm per annum,” Abbasali Mesrzadeh was also quoted as saying by ISNA.
As per a contract between the Energy Ministry and TM signed in 2020, the latter was obliged to lay pipelines to transfer recycled wastewater from sewage treatment facilities to parks, but the initiative has not got off the ground yet, he added.
Tehran wastewater treatment plants are located in Shahrak-e Gharb, Shahrak-e Mahallati, Ekbatan Town, Zargandeh, Qeytariyeh and Sahebqaraniyeh districts, Malard (50 kilometers southwest of Tehran), Safadasht (on the province’s southwestern flank) and Eslamshahr (a working district in the southwest).
Mesrzadeh noted that despite Abfa’s warnings, large volumes of reclaimed sewage from nine wastewater treatment facilities in the capital are dumped into canals and plains because of the lack of infrastructure to transfer it to the 2,000 parks in and around Tehran that cover almost 11% of the megacity’s area.
It is regrettable that TM officials have not taken the ongoing water crisis seriously and still insist on extracting water from the rapidly diminishing aquifers instead of tapping into unconventional resources.
According to the official, water consumption in Tehran has reached a massive 4 million liters per day, of which 40% are extracted from depleting water tables.
Long-Term Drought
This is the third consecutive dry year with low rainfall in Tehran and the water stress has been unprecedented in the capital for the past 50 years, as the city has never witnessed such a long-term drought.
Over the last two decades, an estimated $2 billion have been spent on expanding wastewater infrastructure in the capital that is home to 12 million people and growing. But a lot more needs to be done to make those in charge realize that for restoring groundwater resources, replacing well water with treated wastewater is more effective than pushing (unsuccessfully) for judicious consumption or cloud seeding.
Wastewater treatment has long become a matter of compulsion, not convenience. In addition to environmental and health benefits, treated wastewater has economic benefits through its reuse in different sectors. Its byproducts, such as nutrients and biogas, can be used for farming and energy generation.
Unlike some countries, recycled wastewater is not used for drinking purposes in Iran, as it is against Islamic tenets.
Wastewater reuse has been universally recognized as a necessary and pragmatic solution to the water crisis. However, it is regrettable that municipalities, industries and farmers in Iran’s dry and arid regions, including Tehran, Hormozgan and South Khorasan, insist on extracting water from depleting ground tables instead of tapping into unconventional sources that is not only available but can easily meet their need, he rued.
“A paradigm shift is a must for creating and supporting an [efficient] economic system in which wastewater is and should be considered a precious resource rather than a liability.”
Tehran is zoned into 22 municipal districts, of which only districts 1 and 2 meet a limited portion of their need from reclaimed wastewater.
