Another luxury Cape Town hotel is joining the sustainability movement and has officially built its own desalination plant to enable the five-star establishment to go off the city’s water grid.
Granger Bay’s Radisson Blu Hotel Waterfront can now produce 7 000 litres of fresh water an hour by using sea water pumped from a 100-metre borehole and converting it into fresh water.
The hotel has now become Cape Town’s largest business to install its own reverse-osmosis desalination plant, making it completely water-independent.
A borehole was engineered for the hotel that allows 11 500 litres of Atlantic Ocean water to pump into a tank each hour, the hotel has a 70 000-litre fresh water tank to hold all of the newly-processed water.
“We sunk a borehole underneath the hotel to access the water source,” explained Gary Bowers, Chief Engineer of the project. “This allows us to pump enough water through our reverse osmosis plant in order to keep our hotel’s freshwater tank full at all times.”
Clinton Thom, General Manager of Radisson Blu Hotel Waterfront, said, “We are delighted to have implemented an alternate water source with our desalination plant. Using a desalination plant allows us to operate completely off the municipal water supply. Through this, we are able to play our part when it comes to water-saving during this water-scarce time. Our guests can rest assured that they are not putting pressure on local water supply when staying with us.”
It was not too long ago that Cape Town was in the clutches of a devastating drought and each hotel, business or establishment that makes moves to go off the water grid helps to ensure the city never has to experience “Day Zero”.
Commenting on the initiative, CEO of Cape Town Tourism, Enver Duminy, said, “We applaud Radisson Blu Hotel Waterfront Cape Town for taking this step. Only 1% of people in the Western Cape, at any one time, are comprised of overseas tourists and visitors, but it’s essential that the tourism industry leads the way in sustainable practices.”
Dams are currently teetering on the 50% mark and water restrictions were recently lowered from level 5 to level 3, but the Mother City has not given up on the fight against the drought and continues to strive towards being more water-wise everyday.
