Blessed with large quantities of groundwater, utilities in Denmark even hold a grand prix to select the best tasting water. The country is now embarking on a journey to turn wastewater treatment plants from energy consumers to producers. WWi finds how an already advanced water supply can be improved further.
By Jeremy Josephs
It is of course with some measure of trepidation that one would seek to take issue with the greatest writer in the history of the English language. But when Shakespeare’s character Marcellus informed us in Hamlet that ‘something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ he was clearly not alluding to issues of water and sanitation.
For the Scandinavian Kingdom is in fact a land positively enriched and enhanced by water, where utilities compete to supply the tastiest product and restaurants serve it with pride. Its citizens enjoy some of the cleanest water in the world, each and every drop pumped up from deep below ground.
Danish Water Grand Prix
Denmark has such large quantities of clean underground water that the country’s entire water needs - domestic, agriculture and industrial - are all met.
But since it is neither filtered and remains chlorine free, its taste varies according to where you might happen to be in the country. It led to the water utilities holding an annual competition - the Danish Water Grand Prix where, wait for it, professional wine tasters choose the tastiest water. Of course the country’s Prime Minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, drinks tap rather than bottled water. It would be tantamount to committing political suicide to be seen carrying a bottle of Perrier or Pellegrino.
But he is in good company - for chef Rasmus Kofoed, a previous winner at the biennial Bocuse d’Or world contest, serves up tap water with the food at his three Michelin-starred biodynamic restaurant Geranium in the elegant capital city of Copenhagen, which is itself crisscrossed by canals and virtually framed by water.
It is against this rather attractive and enticing environmental backdrop that Søren Hvilshøj considers himself rather privileged to work. As global market director for water at the private Danish consulting engineering group Ramboll - whose net income was over $50 million in 2014 and with some 12,300 employees on the payroll worldwide - he finds himself able to combine his two passions in life - water and travel. Hardly surprising that he should have gone on to qualify as a civil engineer specialising in water and the environment, his studies taking him to Valencia in Spain and Tübingen in Germany, where he conducted a significant part of his PhD research which focused on combining inverse groundwater modeling and field testing.
He quickly worked his way up through the world of Danish water, becoming president and then executive board member of the Danish Water Supply Association, a committee member of the Foundation for Innovation and was recently awarded honorary membership of the Danish Academy of Technical Science.
Danish Benchmarking
Although it was the Netherlands which pioneered voluntary benchmarking, Denmark has been a leading proponent in this domain since the turn of the century.
Designed to help service providers improve efficiency, Danish benchmarking is part of a broader North European benchmarking cooperating (NEBC) initiated in 2004 with the support of the International Water Association. Almost half of Denmark’s drinking water is supplied by approximately 2,000 consumer-owned water utilities (these are not-for-profit companies ranging from very small units to medium sized utilities of 25,000 consumers) - with the remaining half run by a few municipal owned water utilities.
Almost all wastewater utilities are also municipally owned, although both Veolia and Suez Environnement do operate a couple of wastewater utilities. But the fact remains that Danish water remains an overwhelming public and not private affair.
High prices
Another key feature is decentralisation. “It’s true that our water sector is very decentralised”, Hvilshøj admits. “This means that there is very little bureaucracy and as and when a problem arises we can act speedily and without undue delay. But the downside is that there are always benefits from large-scale projects too”.
That said the Danish Water Supply Association recently concluded a study demonstrating that drinking water supplied by consumer-owned water utilities is cheaper than from the large scale ones, on the grounds that transportation costs are lower.”
