Overstrand Municipality (OM) walked away proud after being named winner in the 2022 Municipal Green Economy Change Champions Competition for significant upgrades to the water and wastewater treatment facilities.
GreenCape and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation (FNF) bestowed the Green Economy Innovation Awards in an online event on 12 October, in recognition of the municipality’s ability to apply sustainable green technologies that improve service delivery.
“There are many extraordinarily innovative and sustainable municipal initiatives that are not adequately spoken about, shared or celebrated,” said Cecelia Kok, FNF’s head of research and advocacy projects, South Africa. “These projects are implemented in complex environments, with numerous challenges, and often have strong replication potential.
“GreenCape and FNF therefore reached out to municipalities across the country to nominate sustainability projects that they have implemented or are in the process of implementing.”
Through this competition municipalities are able to celebrate and share learnings from novel green economy solutions that have been tested and implemented successfully.
“What stood out to us about this project was the long-term vision of the Overstrand Municipality,” said Taahirah Ghoor, Senior Analyst, Circular Economy at GreenCape.
“The municipality made significant upgrades to their wastewater treatment facilities, increasing capacity by 40%, but also introduced new Nereda technology, reverse osmosis, bio-filtration, ultra-filtration and anaerobic digestion technologies, which facilitated the need for highly skilled operations and maintenance personnel.”
Dean O’Neill, Overstrand Municipal Manager, thanked the entire project team. “We hope other municipalities can replicate this project,” he said. “We are also proud that it demonstrates a long-term vision, with the outsourced operation and maintenance of the water services infrastructure ensuring its longevity and addressing the long-term water service delivery needs of communities.”
