Water Treatment Technologies and Their Costs - Global Drinking Water Management and Conservation - page 44

per cubic meter. These are obviously expensive technologies and possibly not
suitable for small water systems. 8

3.6 Examples of Actual Costs of a Few Existing Plants

In this section, we present costs and flow rates at some existing water treatment

plants in select small communities in British Columbia (BC), Canada. As before,
the costs are made up as follows: (1) capital costs, amortized over a 20-year period,
and (2) O&M costs, that include labor, materials, and energy costs for given ow

rates. Some of these plants are managed by private corporations as operators, and
therefore include their pro

t markup. The cost information was obtained from the
managers of these water treatment plants.
Table 3.6 shows the Class and flow rate as well as its associated average

operating cost per cubic meter per day. The largest flow rate plant analyzed here

produces the least expensive drinking water (compared to other facilities in the
same province) at $0.39 per cubic meter per day. The plant that provides the most
costly drinking water also has one of the lowest

ow rates.
Using the actual data from these select small systems in BC, we estimate various
cost functions for different classes of technology. Note that for Class 1, for some of
these communities, the costs re t markup for private sector manage-

ment, (b) higher transportation costs of hazardous materials such as chlorine and (c)
higher transportation costs due to remoteness. These privately managed water
systems have costs that include a 100 percent markup on labor costs. We estimated
the average cost functions based on the NLLS estimation procedure (see Table 3.7 ).

ect (a) pro

Table 3.6 Some examples of existing small water treatment facilities in BC for 2008
Class Treatment used Scale

(m 3 /
day)

Operating
Cost per
year ($)

Unit Operating
cost ($ per m 3 /
day)

1 Chlorination only 92 41,128 1.23

1 Chlorination only 50 23, 536 1.28

1 Chlorination only 126 40,496 0.88

1 Chlorination only 38 30,202 2.16

1 Chlorination only 778 111,641 0.39

2 Chlorination plus removal of suspended

solids

46 46,247 2.72

4 Chlorination plus removal of suspended

solids, protozoa and dissolved organic
content

640 100,000 0.59

8 In this chapter we do not pursue these costs; POU systems are being investigated in a separate
research project.