WATCH | Bhekisisa: Why your toilet water is turned into drinking water — and which provinces get this right

Healthy lives depend on healthy water — from growing food to making sure we live in hygienic conditions. 

But it’s a limited resource: of all the water on Earth only about 3% is fresh, and of that, only 0.5% is easily accessible to humans. 

It’s also a finite resource, because the water found on the surface of our planet — in dams, lakes and rivers — is locked into a continuous loop between the clouds and the ground, called the water cycle. The water we have on Earth today is all we’ll ever have. 

This means the water going out of our homes’ drains and toilets needs to be cleaned so that it can go back into rivers and dams and get drawn out again to run into our taps. 

But about four in 10 wastewater treatment plants in South Africa don’t produce clean discharge and about half of the facilities that have to make sure clean water goes into our taps don’t work well either. 

“So is it safer to use borehole water or store water in a tank instead?” Mia Malan asked environmental scientist Ayesha Laher during the latest episode of Health Beat, Bhekisisa’s monthly TV show.

This story was produced by the Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism. Sign up for the newsletter.