Following the completion of the City’s first Advanced Water Reclamation Plant (AWRP) in December 2024, the City proudly celebrates another milestone towards excellence, as the AWRP was named Jury Winner in the Factories and Warehouses category at the prestigious 13th Annual Architizer A+Awards in June 2025, in New York. The AWRP is situated next to the Cape Flats Wastewater Treatment Works (WWTW) in Pelican Park and is a vital part of the City’s groundwater action plan to build Cape Town’s water resilient future.
The state-of-the-art AWRP is one of the key facilities in implementing the Water and Sanitation Directorate’s New Water Programme. The AWRP will play a crucial role in the managed injection of treated secondary effluent into the Cape Flats Aquifer, replenishing this vital groundwater source. This will enable the City to abstract water from the aquifer sustainably, which will then undergo further treatment at potable water treatment plants (WTPs) to meet SANS 241 drinking water standards.
The AWRP is a fundamental component of the Cape Flats Aquifer Management Scheme, which is expected to yield up to 54 million litres of water per day.
‘The Cape Flats AWRP is a major public infrastructure investment towards improving water security and climate resilience. Every rand spent on this facility contributes towards building a more drought-resilient Cape Town.
‘This international award shows that South African infrastructure can lead the world not just in advanced functionality, but also in aesthetically pleasing and purposeful design. Just as the building has achieved top honours in design, the City is striving towards implementing top-quality processes as well, once the facility is completed in April 2027.
‘Work on the next phase is currently under way, which will see the installation of mechanical and electrical components such as: ozone generators, ultra-violet disinfection, pumps and filter media,’ said Mayoral Committee Member for Water and Sanitation, Councillor Zahid Badroodien.
Striving for excellence
Local civil engineers working in water and wastewater alongside SALT Architects, led to the momentous accolade in the Factories and Warehouses category at the 13th Annual Architizer A+Awards.
Selected from over 5 000 entries spanning 80 countries, the Cape Flats AWRP is now officially recognised as one of the best-designed buildings in the world in its category.
This is a major global architecture prize and a remarkable achievement for South African architecture.
The significance of the award
- Global recognition: The Architizer A+Awards is the largest international awards programme for architecture, where projects are judged by a panel of global leaders in architecture, technology, media and business.
- Appraised local municipal infrastructure: This is a rare moment where a South African public works project has been recognised internationally – not just for engineering, but for design excellence.
- Sustainability in water supply: The project exemplifies how municipalities can lead in implementing water resilience projects with thoughtful, future-oriented design.
Polar Bee
The Man who could only Drink Milk
I know an old man who had lived a life full of adventure, but his health started to catch up with him. He\’d run the Boston Marathon, was an avid surfer, and climbed Everest, but he\’d started to have abdominal pains around his 85th birthday and went to see a doctor. Sadly, he ultimately was diagnosed with a rare degenerative liver disease that slowly made him allergic to everything he ate.
He kept copious notes, and as an avid gastronomist slowly grew to despair as everything he\’d spent his life enjoying became something he could no longer eat. Alcohol went first, then mushrooms, then bread, then root vegetables, then coffee, one at a time he had to remove them from his diet. The doctor was clear: if he kept eating something his liver rejected the autoimmune response would be quick and severe, and would lead to a painful death. Little by little, everything was taken away as an option, until the only thing that remained was milk.
In some ways, this actually made life easier, because the mental strain of remembering what he could and couldn\’t eat was gone, but then so was the joy in variety. But he took it in stride, and got his own cow and took classes from a farmer to learn everything he could about the only thing that could give him sustenance. And even within milk, he could still have yogurt, butter, cream, some cheeses, and other milk-derived products he hadn\’t fully rejected yet, so it wasn\’t all bad. But then one day a few months later he felt the pain again, and he knew cow\’s milk was no longer an option.
Lacking other options, he tried goat\’s milk, and he was delighted that it worked! The protein structure is just different enough that his body still tolerated it. That bought him another month. And that\’s when we came up with a wonderful plan to go on one last grand adventure around the world. If he could get one month of life out of the milk of every mammal, he\’d actually have a few more years to enjoy life to the fullest and see the world in all its beauty. Each month, we\’d pick a place with a new mammal, and he would immerse himself fully with the locals, learn all the ways to prepare the milk, and just enjoy the hand he had been dealt as much as he could.
We milked sheep in New Zealand. Camels in Egypt. Zebras in South Africa. Giant bats in Indonesia. Do you know how many Peruvian cuy you need to milk to get a single glass? I do. Even as his health slowly faded, he stayed cheerful, and I felt lucky to join him on the adventure of a lifetime. That brings us to today when he got to the very end of his spreadsheet, and declared that he was now allergic to every mammal. He\’d enjoyed his journey, but his time had come to an end, for there was nothing left to milk.
To which I said nonsense, I bet we can milk a few thousand karma out of this post.
hang 11
Fun South African Fact: The South African flag was used for the first time on Freedom Day 1994.