Excerpt
A drinkable water supply in Latin America is a major problem due chiefly to a concentration of population in a small land area. Sixty percent of the people live in cities of over 279 million and this population is concentrated in 20% of an area with only 5% of the region's water resources.
In Latin America, 71% of the population has a drinkable water supply but only 38% have sewer service. Nineteen percent of the wastewater receives some type of treatment while only 8% receives a secondary treatment. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) (1997), 567 m3 s−l of untreated urban wastewater is disposed of in surface waters. If, by the year 2010, this type of disposal service were expanded to 90% of the population, more than 100 million m3 of sewage would be produced, seriously aggravating the water contamination problem (CEIPS 1997).
Wastewater reuse. Agricultural and rural communities around the cities often use wastewater discharges; therefore, wastewater resuse for …
Footnotes
Eng. Hugo Nava Cueto is Vice Rector Academico of the Universidad Nacional Agraria at La Molina in Lima, Peru.
- Copyright 2001 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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