PRESERVING WATER QUALITY
THE RESOURCE PRODUCTIVITY FACTOR

Anthony Milburn

Executive Director,
International Association on Water Quality (IAWQ)
Duchess House 20 Mason’s Yard Duke Street St James
London SW1Y 6BU - ENGLAND
fax : +44 (0) 171 839 8299
email : 100065.3664@compuserve.com
www : http://www.iawq.org.uk

This paper argues that there is no such thing as a water sector per se, that to speak of a water industry is to misrepresent the true position. The water sector is "disintegrated" and at the mercy of the main user groups, such as agriculture, municipalities, industry, etc. Thus the causes of water pollution are largely a result of "open loop" use of water in agriculture, industry and municipalities, allied to wasteful use of raw materials and electric power, exacerbated by badly controlled discharge of wastewater back into the environment. The intimate linkage between water and electric power use plus processing of materials is acknowledged. Wrongful, current attitudes and behaviours, inadequate regulatory regimes, fiscal policy, taxation and trade policy, all conspire to worsen the situation. The longer term solution to moving from the present to a sustainable future lies in a revolution in productivity of resources water, power, materials. New thinking on regulatory regimes and taxation; new technology and techniques in urban water management; closed-loop, high resource productivity manufacturing; evolutionary and some revolutionary approaches in agriculture; all taken together offer great hope in increasing resource use productivity and minimising pollution. The challenge is one of social science and social engineering plus new and evolving sciences and technologies. The paper sets out a general line of thinking and is not intended to be wholly definitive or prescriptive.