Environmental Science and Policy 89 (2018) 93–99

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Environmental Science and Policy

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/envsci

Nudging greywater acceptability in a Muslim country: Comparisons of T

different greywater reuse framings in Qatar
⁎
Laurent A. Lambert, Jordan Lee
Social and Economic Survey Research Institute (SESRI) of Qatar University, P.O. Box 2713, Doha, Qatar

A R T I C LE I N FO A B S T R A C T

Keywords: With very low annual rainfall and increasingly depleted groundwater resources, the Gulf Cooperation Council
Attitudes (GCC) countries are some of the most water scarce in the world and rely on growing quantities of desalinated
GCC water and Treated Sewage Effluents (TSEs) to meet their ever-increasing water demand. In Qatar, the govern-
Greywater ment heavily subsidizes the desalination and retreatment processes, but the country’s demographic growth
Qatar
coupled with its high water consumption rate of 557 liters/day/inhabitant has led to increasing subsidy costs.
Treated sewage effluents
Water security
These expenses are a concern for the government, especially as it tried to cut costs after the 2014 fall in oil prices.
With little treatment, greywater (i.e. gently used water from showers, swimming pools, AC units, etc.) can
replace more expensive TSEs or desalinated resources for several basic purposes such as landscaping or toilet
flushing in hotels and new public buildings (e.g. mosques, universities, swimming pools). This study presents the
findings of a national survey in Qatar that reveals that the country’s population can be highly accepting of
greywater reuse depending on how people are introduced to the benefits of greywater. This study found that the
framing of greywater reuse as a cost saving or as a water conservation measure generates the highest acceptance
among both Qatari nationals and expatriates.

1. Introduction careful state expenditure management in general (Gengler and

The drylands of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region feature
some of the most arid lands on earth and their nations face severe water
stress, meaning that demand for freshwater largely outstrips their
limited renewable resources (Darwish et al., 2015). As a result, these
countries have been depleting their groundwater resources over the
past decades of strong demographic growth and have increasingly re-
lied on desalination and wastewater treatment plants. Although home
to only 2.2% of the world’s population, the Arabian Gulf region (i.e.
Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Oman, Qatar and the United
Arab Emirates) hosts today over half the world’s desalination capacity
(Shahzad et al., 2017). The governments of these countries have long
provided water to their populations for only a limited fee and still
heavily subsidize their desalination industry and retreatment processes
(Lambert, 2014; Lahn, 2016). Gulf countries also feature strong de-
mographic growth rates and some of the highest per-capita water
consumption figures in the world (Barau and Al Hosani, 2015). As a
consequence, the cost of subsidizing desalination and retreatment
generates a substantial and growing state expenditure. The 2014–2015
fall in oil prices has caused many of these nations to introduce sharp
cost reduction policies in non-revenue generating activities and more
Lambert, 2016; Lahn, 2016). As water demand is projected to grow
steadily across the region alongside demographic growth, water ex-
penditures are also expected to grow considerably if no meaningful and
comprehensive reforms are implemented (Al-Zubari, 2011).
Using Qatar as a case study, this paper investigates how greywater
reuse could be introduced to the population in a publicly acceptable
manner. More precisely, it investigates how the Gulf states can make
greywater reuse largely acceptable in the context of a culture that
generally shuns TSEs (seen as religiously impure in many Gulf Muslim
countries) and where desalinated water bills do not represent a large
cost to households, if any at all, but rather are a growing state ex-
penditure.
Greywater is gently used water coming from showers, swimming
pools, ablutions sinks, AC units, and lavatory sinks. Greywater is dis-
tinct from more heavily polluted blackwater, which comes essentially
from toilets and dishwashers. Consequently, with sometimes little
treatment, greywater can safely be used for several basic purposes, such
as landscaping and toilet flushing. It can replace water resources such
as desalinated seawater or TSEs which are more expensive (Godfrey
et al., 2009). Therefore, recycling greywater could help mitigate the
growth in demand for other unconventional waters, thereby containing

⁎
Corresponding author at: Social and Economic Survey Research Institute, Qatar University, New Library, 3rd Floor, P.O. Box 2713, Doha, Qatar.
E-mail addresses: llambert@qu.edu.qa (L.A. Lambert), jordan.lee@aya.yale.edu (J. Lee).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2018.07.015
Received 2 May 2018; Received in revised form 20 July 2018; Accepted 20 July 2018
Available online 25 July 2018
1462-9011/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
L.A. Lambert, J. Lee
some of the costs that the government of a water scarce country like
Qatar will have to pay (Tangsubkul et al., 2005).
This research shows that the manner in which greywater reuse is
introduced to the population can lead to different but generally high
levels of public acceptability. The paper proposes an explanation for
these several levels of greywater reuse acceptability in Qatar, according
to the diverse framings used to introduce them.
In the following section, this paper reviews the literature on grey-
water in the Middle East and beyond. It highlights the acceptability
problem of retreated waters in the region, before explaining Qatar’s
freshwater conundrum. The third section of the paper describes the
methodology of the nationally representative telephone survey experi-
ment conducted by the Social and Economic Survey Research Institute
(SESRI) at Qatar University in 2017 and of the face to face semi-
structured interviews of different stakeholders in Qatar’s water in-
dustry. The fourth section of the paper presents the new findings from
the nationally representative survey.
2. Qatar’s water challenges and the question of greywater reuse
Like the other small GCC countries, Qatar has an arid climate, an
areic land and no permanent surface freshwaters (Alsharhan et al.,
2001). To cope with their lack of sufficient freshwater resources, the
governments of the GCC have essentially pursued a supply-side water
strategy ever since the revenues from oil exports enabled them to do so
(Lambert, 2014). This strategy has led to the full reliance on desalina-
tion and TSEs to meet municipal freshwater demand, and to the sig-
nificant depletion of the country’s limited groundwater resources, es-
sentially used for agricultural purposes. Qatar has extracted the latter at
a rate far beyond its estimated replenishment rate. According to Alhaj
et al. (2017), total groundwater withdrawal in Qatar reached 250
million m3/year, which is around 5 times the average natural replen-
ishment rate of 58 million m3/year. This has been all the more un-
sustainable due to the fact that the 2008–2015 period witnessed a de-
crease in average rainfall, as compared to the 1962–2015 average
(MDPS, 2017). The impact of the food blockade against Qatar, which
started in June 2017, and of related new food security projects in the
country are still unknown, but are expected to deteriorate the situation
further (Lambert and Hashim, 2017).
The production of desalinated water has quadrupled during the two
decades prior to the current one and is expected to continue growing
rapidly (Al-Zubari, 2011; Gulf Intelligence, 2016). In Qatar and all
other small GCC coastal states (i.e. Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and the
United Arab Emirates) desalination is used to satisfy most if not all the
freshwater demand in urban areas (Zekri et al., 2014; Gulf Intelligence,
2016). However, desalination is an energy-intensive and costly in-
dustrial process. Because the Qatari government subsidizes water for its
citizens and Qatari companies (who host large numbers of foreign
workers), the state bears a majority of the cost for desalination. In fact,
the Qatari nationals are exempt from paying any utility bill for their
(main) residence. It is worth mentioning though that in Qatar, similarly
to other small Gulf states, the Qatari citizens constitute a small demo-
graphic minority in their own country. The majority of inhabitants is
made of foreign workers, most of whom are blue collar workers
working essentially in the construction sector. The latter generally live
in labour camps or dormitories and do not pay any utility bill, which is
collectively paid by their employer. The white collar foreign workers
however, generally live in the country with their nuclear family in fa-
mily accommodations and are supposed to pay for their water con-
sumption, although some of them live all year long in hotels and never
receive a utility bill, while for some others, their employer may pay for
it as part of their expatriation package. In the end, only a minority of
Qatar’s inhabitants have to pay a water and electricity bill. Also, the
national legislation forbids the ownership of a land or accommodation
in Qatar by a foreigner, except in very few and small special economic
areas, such as the Pearl Qatar. This means that most of those who own
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Environmental Science and Policy 89 (2018) 93–99
their housing (essentially, the Qatari nationals), do not pay water bills,
and the populations who do not own their accomodation (i.e. most
foreign residents) are the ones who have to pay a utility bill. This means
that homeowners have no direct interest in investing in water efficiency
devices. The government however, has been subsidizing water and
electricity services for decades at an increasingly heavy cost, largely
due to the steady demographic growth and an opaque system of cross-
subsidies.
2.1. The cost of desalination
Qatar, like the other GCC states, primarily uses thermal processes
(such as multi-stage flash distillation, or ‘MSF’) to desalinate seawater.
A 2015 report from Kahramaa (the state-owned corporation that runs
all of Qatar’s desalination processes) assessed that over 99% of the 535
million m3 of water that was desalinated in Qatar the year before was
produced by thermal processes, which largely dominate the desalina-
tion industry in the Gulf. However, reverse-osmosis (RO) technology is
more popular in the rest of the world, because it is (1) more energy
efficient and thus (2) less expensive to run overall, particularly during
periods of high energy prices. But the readily available and low cost
hydrocarbon resources in the Gulf states have long made countries like
Qatar less sensitive to energy cost efficiency concerns. It has allowed
them to continue using thermal desalination processes, which are also
better suited for the geochemistry of the Gulf waters. Mohamed (2017)
emphasized the embedded energy gap between Qatar’s thermal desa-
lination which typically consumes 9–15 kW h per distilled m3 of potable
water, and water treatment in the UK which requires less than 1 kW h
per m3. As long as the population of the Gulf states remained small
however, using thermal desalination did not generate too much eco-
nomic damage in the absolute. With the rapid demographic growth of
the past decades however, total water and energy demand have only
been escalating and made the Gulf states’ policy of supply side man-
agement (i.e. always increasing the production of desalinated water to
meet the demand) a growing drain on the state budget. Based on data
from Kahramaa (Kahramaa Statistics Report, 2015), this paper assesses
the total annual cost for desalination alone in Qatar to be at least 327
million USD, as can be seen in Table 1 below (see also Zotalis et al.,
2014; Ghaffour et al., 2013; Mordor Intelligence, 2016).
The Qatari government also fully subsidizes wastewater treatment,
which, by the lowest estimates, costed about 89 million USD in 2015
(Jeuland, 2015; Mohamed, 2017). This is approximately equal to the
total revenue collected from all public utility fees in Qatar the previous
fiscal year (MDPS, 2014, 22). What’s more, population and water de-
mand in Qatar are projected to grow considerably in the near and
medium-term future (Kemp, 2014), meaning that the country will have
to increase its desalination and wastewater treatment outputs, expect-
ingly resulting in higher total subsidy costs for the state. The govern-
ment of Qatar’s online platform (‘Hukoomi’) explains in explicit terms
its difficult situation as follows:
“Seawater is the most important source of water for the people of
Qatar, accounting for about half of the water used. Water is desa-
linated though a costly and energy-intensive thermal process.
Production of desalinated water has quadrupled during the last two
decades, a trend that is expected to continue.”1
2.2. The beginning of reforms
Faced with the high costs of a supply-side water strategy, several
governments in the Gulf regional have implemented demand manage-
ment programs to try and ease pressure on their water and energy
1
See ‘Water and Desalination’, available at: http://www.hukoomi.qa/wps/
portal/topics/Environment+and+Agriculture/wateranddesalination
L.A. Lambert, J. Lee
Table 1
Key Data on Qatar’s Water Sector.
Population (2018)a 2,731,910
Projected Population in 2030b 3,700,000
GDP per capita (2016, USD)c 60,732.90
Total Water Demand (2016, m3)d 522,686,700
Water Demand per capita (2016, m3/person/year)e 203
Production of Desalinated Water (2015, m3) 535,400,000
Production of Retreated Wastewater (2015, m3) 183,000,000
Cost of Desalination (USD/m3) 0.61–0.92
Cost of Wastewater Treatment (USD/m3) 0.46–0.77
a
MDPS (Ministry of Development Planning and Statistics) (2018).
b (Godfrey et al., 2009).
Euromonitor International (2017).
c
World Economic Outlook Database (2016).
d
Kahramaa, 2018.
e
World Bank (2018).
resources. In 2011, Abu Dhabi introduced the Estidama Pearl rating
system, which ranks buildings in the emirate based on their adherence
to various sustainable and environmentally-friendly designs, including
reduced energy and water consumption (Assaf and Nour, 2015). Simi-
larly, Dubai introduced the Al-Safat rating system in 2016, which re-
quires both new and existing buildings to comply with a set of sus-
tainability standards, and aims to reduce the emirate’s water and
electricity consumption by 15% and 20% respectively (Saseendran,
2016). In 2012, Qatar implemented the Tarsheed awareness program,
which encourages the country’s residents to reduce their water and
energy use (Alhaj et al., 2017), and has tempered the rise in the
country’s water provision costs (Krarti et al., 2017). But despite the
promising potential of these and other conservation programs, addi-
tional tools are required to counter growing demand nevertheless
(Flores-Lopez et al., 2016).
In Qatar, the policy to heavily rely on desalination and over-ex-
traction of groundwater comes at the expense of the full reuse of the
country’s total TSEs, of which only 24% are reused annually according
to government statistics (Hukoomi, 2018). The Government explains
that there is presently a lack of infrastructure to supply the retreated
sewage effluents (TSEs) and that since people are not always ready to
pay for this retreated water, there is not enough investment in this
infrastructure. Qualitative interviews of water professionals performed
for this research also revealed that there is a cultural influence. The
citizens of Qatar and of the Gulf countries may indeed perceive TSEs as
‘najasa’ (i.e. a source of religious impurity) (Abderrahman, 2001),
which have thus been traditionally rejected into the Gulf, lagoons or
desert. At best, some TSEs have been allocated to marginal purposes,
such as road construction or some specific landscaping. They are not
used in the agriculture for human consumption in the Gulf states as they
are (widely) used in some other Middle Eastern countries, such as
Egypt, Israel, Jordan and Turkey. Although the majority of water pro-
fessionals interviewed in Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Kuwait have long ex-
pressed their interests in a greater role for TSEs, at least to be more
utilized for various non-eating and drinking purposes, the authorities of
the Gulf have not frontally challenged the long-held popular rejection,
and have heavily relied on the desalination solution. The small Gulf
states’ water authorities have so far privileged their citizens’ known
preference and contentment over international best practices, techno-
crats’ opinions, or energy cost-efficiency. The 2014 fall in oil prices
however, has led the authorities of these hydrocarbons-exporting
countries to seriously reconsider some public policies and initiate re-
forms to limit the cost of utilities (Gengler and Lambert, 2016).
2.3. The untapped greywater resource in Arabian countries
Recycling a share of Qatar’s annual production of greywater holds
the potential to relieve some of the pressure on Qatar’s other water
resources and slow the growth of the state’s water expenditure (Al-
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Environmental Science and Policy 89 (2018) 93–99
Jayyousi, 2003), while simultaneously avoiding the contentious use of
TSEs. A number of pilot projects and demonstration sites in the Gulf
region and the broader Middle East have shown that greywater from
hotels, mosques, and other public-receiving buildings can be captured
and re-used to e.g. flush toilets or irrigate nearby green spaces. In Qatar,
this could replace the desalinated water that is presently being used for
these purposes and slow the growth of desalination subsidy costs (Lee
and Lambert, 2018). Separating some of the greywater from blackwater
effluents in selected future public-receiving buildings can also slow the
growth in the overall amount of wastewater being transported and
treated, which will temper the rise in retreatment subsidy costs as well
A number of studies have demonstrated that greywater is an
abundant resource in modern Arab cities and that it requires only
limited treatment before it can be re-used for several purposes (Allen
et al., 2010; Al-Mughalles et al., 2012a; Chowdhury et al., 2015; Oh
et al., 2018). Several studies also highlight that greywater use can
significantly reduce overall freshwater consumption. For example,
Allen et al. (2010) found that 50% to 80% of household wastewater is
greywater, and that widespread use of this resource for non-potable
applications like landscaping and toilet flushing can reduce potable
water consumption by as much as 50%. In addition, this report draws
on results from experiments in Jordan and Canada to show that it is safe
to use lightly treated greywater for irrigation (Allen et al., 2010). In a
Gulf country like Oman, Ahmed et al. (2011) found that the greywater
resource is safe to use after simple treatment, stating that “greywater
can be used to further sustainable development (…) without compro-
mising public health”. On the quantitative side, Ahmed et al. (2011)
highlighted that the amount of greywater in Oman is approximately
equal to 80% of all household water usage in the country. This amount
seems to decrease in less affluent societies however. Two 2012 studies
from the National University of Malaysia estimated the amount of
greywater in (pre-war) Yemen to be equal to 55% of total household
usage. The researchers concluded that this relatively low figure is due
to the fact that Yemen has low per capita water consumption, and that
high greywater generation rates are associated with higher per-capita
water consumption (Al-Mughalles et al., 2012a, 2012b). This implies on
the other hand that Qatar, with one of the highest per-capita water
consumption levels in the world, should have abundant greywater at its
disposal. This conclusion is supported by a 2015 study which de-
termined that the amount of greywater generated in Al Ain, UAE
(which has a high per capita water consumption rate) is equal to 69% of
total water consumed in the Emirate, and is sufficient to fill all non-
potable water demand in houses (Chowdhury et al., 2015; Abu Dhabi
Statistics Center, 2015).
Elsewhere in the UAE federation, authorities are taking advantage
of this greywater resource. The Premier Inn Hotel in Abu Dhabi was the
first entity in the emirate to receive permission to install a greywater
recycling system. By January 2016 the hotel reported saving 24% of its
water each month. The system collects greywater from wash basins,
baths, and showers, and uses it for all toilet flushing and some land-
scaping after light treatment, reportedly saving a total of 735,000 liters
of water every month (Waterworld, 2016). According to a report in The
National (2012), greywater recycling in neighboring Dubai has the
potential to provide equally promising results, such as reducing the
emirate’s per capita water consumption by 30% if greywater is used for
toilet flushing (Underwood, 2012). Yet, as concluded in Al-Jasser’s
(2011) study of greywater in Saudi Arabia, public acceptance of grey-
water use is a necessary prerequisite to realizing the national potential
of this resource.
3. Methodology
This research was made of three sources of information: the existing
academic and grey literatures on greywater in Qatar and the region,
face to face interviews with thirteen informants from the water sector in
L.A. Lambert, J. Lee
Qatar to learn as much as possible about the economic, legal and po-
litical aspects of this issue and, last but not least, a national phone
survey with a nationally representative sample of Qatar’s citizens and
white-collar expatriates to produce the framing experimentation. The
Social & Economic Survey Research Institute (SESRI) of Qatar
University performed this national survey in both English and Arabic
(depending on the preference of the interviewee).
The survey included questions on respondents’ willingness to use
greywater under different framings, in order to investigate how to best
present new greywater policies and projects in order to generate the
highest levels of public acceptation. The survey consisted of a telephone
interview and had a sample size of 1489 respondents (746 Qataris and
743 white-collar expatriates). The interviewers gave the following
statement about greywater to all respondents:
“In particular we’re interested in public opinion about the reuse of
some water that has been previously used for washing dishes or
vegetables in the sink, or for ritual ablutions. This is sometimes
referred to as grey water and it is always completely separate from
the toilet or wastewater. So it is much less polluted but needs some
retreatment before reuse”
After being given this definition of greywater, the group of re-
spondents was split into 3 even groups in order to process the following
survey experiment. In addition to measuring general popular accep-
tance of greywater use, the survey also aimed to determine how deeply
the specific rationale given to each group for using greywater impacts
the respondents’ likelihood of accepting it. Therefore, after being given
the definition of greywater stated above, the respondents (who were
randomly assigned to the three groups) were exposed to three different
potential motivations for using greywater. Gaines et al. (2006, p.1)
summarized the added value and relevance of this kind of experi-
mentation survey in the following words:
“Scholars (…) increasingly embed experimental designs in opinion
surveys by randomly assigning respondents alternative versions of
questionnaire items. Such experiments have major advantages: they
are simple to implement and they dodge some of the difficulties of
making inferences from conventional survey data”.
In our investigation, version 1 presented an economic rationale for
reusing greywater, with the interviewer saying that “the cost of re-
treated greywater to the government can be several times lower than
that of desalinated water”.
Version 2 presented an environmental rationale for using greywater,
with the interviewer saying “reusing greywater, for instance in parks, is
much better for the environment than using desalinated water”.
Finally, version 3 presented a conservation rationale for reusing
greywater, with the interviewer saying “currently in Qatar, more than
three-quarters of all greywater is wasted and never reused”. After
hearing one of these statements from the interviewer, the respondent
was asked whether they would accept the use of greywater instead of
desalinated water for landscaping in their city, and then if they would
use greywater for a variety of purposes in their home.
These different framings focus on the positive features of greywater
use and do not highlight the potential drawbacks, such as bad odors and
maintenance of treatment units (Oh et al., 2018), because the survey
experiment was designed to determine which positive aspects would
generate the highest level of acceptance among respondents. But in
order to avoid skewing the perception of greywater, the initial defini-
tion of the resource given to respondents was carefully designed to give
a frank description of what greywater is and why it is useful, and not
emphasize either its positive or negative aspects. Also, the potential for
individual household savings associated with greywater use was
omitted from the survey not because the individual savings are likely to
be small (Ferguson, 2014), but rather because the land ownership and
utility payment system in Qatar does not incentivize water efficiency
improvements even if they generate significant savings, as described in
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Environmental Science and Policy 89 (2018) 93–99
Section II of this paper. Instead, it is the government’s savings that are
mentioned, which reflects the authors’ belief that a greywater recycling
program in Qatar should be government-driven, because it is the gov-
ernment that would receive the most significant savings.
3.1. Survey mode
The indepth interviews with the thirteen water professionals had to
be performed face-to-face in order to collect as much information as
possible while always adapting the questions to the interviewee, who
was interviewed at his work (e.g. at the wheel of a sewage truck, at a
retreatment plant, or in an office in the Public Works Authority). The
national survey however, was focusing on the matter of interviewers
scrupulously following the survey text given to them, because the
precision of the framing used is of critical importance to compare be-
tween and among the attitudes generated by different framings. This is
generally more controllable in a call center wherein each interviewer
reads a prompt without seeing the interviewee and where the call
center management staff listens to the interviewers precisely for quality
control purposes (Dialsingh, 2011).
4. Nudging the acceptabilities of greywater: survey results
Overall (i.e. irrespective of the framing), a high proportion of re-
spondents said that they would accept the use of greywater instead of
desalinated water for landscaping in their city, specifically 82% of
Qataris and 91% of expatriates. The results may have been different if
one of the framings introduced above had highlighted the costs asso-
ciated with the seperation of grey- and black-water. However, this
would have not been particularly relevant in the case of Qatar and other
small Gulf states, where most residents do not own their houses and will
thus not pay for any specific retrofitting works. In most cases, the
government is the stakeholder with the greater interest in introducing
water efficiency measures.
Following this initial question, respondents were asked if they
would use greywater for a variety of purposes in their home, such as
garden irrigation, toilet flushing, or car washing. A high level of overall
acceptance persisted for nearly all uses, with the notable exception of
“drinking after full treatment”. Garden irrigation was the most widely
accepted end-use, though the survey revealed that respondents are also
very willing to use greywater for a variety of other purposes, particu-
larly fire protection and toilet flushing, and car washing to a lesser
extent. Fig. 1 shows the proportions of Qataris and white-collar ex-
patriates that are willing to use greywater for six different purposes
asked about in the survey.
4.1. Influences of the framing
The survey results also reveal that the manner in which the issue of
greywater recycling is introduced to respondents has a significant im-
pact on acceptability. For Qatari citizens, acceptance of greywater use
for landscaping is not impacted by the framing of the question. As
shown in Fig. 2, none of the framing devices caused any statistically
significant change (p > 0.05) in willingness to use greywater for land-
scaping (including the “water conservation” framing). What’s more, the
different framing techniques did not significantly impact Qatari citi-
zens’ willingness to use greywater for any of the six purposes included
in the survey. However, the different framing techniques did have a
significant impact on the willingness of white-collar expatriates to use
greywater. Specifically, expatriates to whom the question of greywater
use was posed as a cost saving or water conservation measure were
more likely (p < 0.05) to be willing to use greywater for landscaping
than expatriates who received the environmental protection formula-
tion. More significantly, this pattern of the cost saving and water con-
servation frameworks generating more willingness to use greywater
among expatriates persists for all uses included in the survey except for
L.A. Lambert, J. Lee
Fig. 1. Percentage of Qatari Citizens and White-Collar Expatriates Willing to
Use Greywater for Various Purposes.
A majority of both Qataris and white-collar expatriates are willing to use
greywater for a variety of purposes, except for “drinking after full treatment”.
Fig. 2. Acceptance of Greywater Use for Landscaping, by Framing Treatment.
For Qatari citizens, acceptance of greywater use for landscaping is not sig-
nificantly impacted (p > 0.05) by the framing of the question. For white-collar
expatriates, the cost saving and water conservation framing techniques gener-
ated more willingness to use greywater by a statistically significant (p < 0.05)
margin.
“drinking after full treatment”.
Among the minority of respondents who said they would not be
willing to use greywater for landscaping, “health concerns” was the
most often-cited reason for not using the resource. This is not sur-
prising, given most people’s total unfamiliarity with the resource.
However, as mentioned in section II, there is no evidence connecting
greywater use in irrigation to public health problems. Therefore, pro-
grams to encourage greywater reuse for landscaping should emphasize
the safety of the resource, as well as the cost saving potential and the
significant amount of water that will be conserved, rather than the
environmental benefits (Fig. 3).
In addition to popular acceptance of greywater use, an accom-
modating legal and regulatory environment is essential for the im-
plementation of a greywater recycling program. In particular, laws re-
garding minimum greywater quality, acceptable uses of the resource,
and plumbing alterations to capture and separate greywater from more
heavily polluted blackwater, are critical (Sharvelle, 2016). While
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Environmental Science and Policy 89 (2018) 93–99
Qatar’s water legislation does not prohibit greywater reuse, it also does
not touch on these key topics, and is generally minimal and very
fragmented. For instance, there are at least five separate institutions
responsible for different parts of the country’s water infrastructure
(FAO, 2008), and there is little specific instruction regarding how water
resources should be exploited.
However, authority is much more centralized for certain tasks that
are most closely related to greywater reuse. For example, one of the
challenges of on-site greywater recycling is ensuring that the greywater
is of sufficiently high quality (Sharvelle, 2016). In Qatar, Kahramaa is
the only institution responsible for overseeing the country’s water dis-
tribution system and potable water quality (Ashghal Media Hub, 2011).
Because Kahramaa has the ability to enforce potable water quality
standards across the country, it is reasonable to assume that the cor-
poration could do the same for greywater once the appropriate treat-
ment method is specified. Therefore, although laws explicitly sup-
porting greywater recycling are still absent in Qatar, the institutional
framework does exist.
Greywater can also be used for artificial aquifer recharge
(Madungwe and Sakuringwa, 2007), although this practice faces
greater legal barriers in Qatar because the few laws governing it tend to
be very restrictive (Law No. 30, 2002). However, a government study
carried out between 1992 and 1994 had revealed that artificial aquifer
recharge has considerable potential to ease pressure on the country’s
water resources, and had reflected the government’s willingness to
explore the idea (FAO, 2008). It has been practiced since with a share of
TSEs produced by Doha’s retreatment plants, but only for waters re-
treated at tertiary level, for safety reasons. This excludes thus grey-
water. But in the face of the acute water stress, tapping this non con-
ventional resource could fit well with Qatar’s strategic framework, as
both Qatar National Vision 2030 and the National Development
Strategy 2017–2022 place emphasis on sustainable use of food, water
and energy resources. Last but not least, as Qatar is presently facing a
new water-food security challenge following the start of a food
blockade imposed by neighboring countries since June 2017, the gov-
ernment might be particularly open to the idea of revisiting its legis-
lation and putting it on par with that of Australia or Spain for that
matter.
5. Conclusion
This paper investigated how the government of a very dry country
featuring a Muslim majority population like the Arabian Gulf states
could positively influence popular attitudes towards the reuse of grey-
water. In the state of Qatar, it appears that a strong majority of the two
surveyed populations (Qatari Nationals and expatriates) accept grey-
water being reused for several purposes with the proposed framings. It
is worth noting however, that the degree of acceptability of greywater
reuse varies with the framing used and even more so according to the
proposed reuse.
The study found that the framings of greywater reuse as either a cost
saving measure or as a water conservation measure generate the highest
acceptance among both Qatari nationals and expatriates.
Environmental conservation generates much less acceptability for
greywater reuse. The acceptability tends to noticeably decrease also
when greywater is reused indoors, instead of outdoors. Overall, there is
less acceptability of greywater if it is for reuse close to the individual:
from very little objection to greywater reuse for landscaping purposes,
to a significantly lower acceptation for in-home reuses (e.g. for AC units
or toilet flushing) - though a majority of respondents still support them -
up to a clear majority rejecting retreated greywater for drinking pur-
poses, irrespective of the framing used to introduce it.
In future works, the national survey should be expanded and also
investigate blue-collar workers’ attitudes towards greywater and its
different potential reuses, as they make up a substantial portion of the
Gulf population and this could increase the pool of buildings wherein
L.A. Lambert, J. Lee
Fig. 3. Respondents’ Reasons for Opposing Greywater Use.
Among the minority of respondents who said they would not use greywater, “health concerns” was by far the most common reason for doing so.
greywater can be reused without any popular discontentment.
As greywater is a byproduct of most water uses, greywater reuse in
public-receiving buildings generally does not impose any major addi-
tional costs to the government and end-users, as mentioned in the lit-
erature review. If the greywater from a large public building is used for
landscaping purposes nearby, the processing cost could be kept to a
minimum. Further retreatment however, may entail a more significant
cost. The authors do not call for, and even argue against, attempting to
capture all the greywater of a building, or for indiscriminately retro-
fitting all buildings with greywater recycling systems, as these ap-
proaches would probably not be economically sound in many cases.
This is something that future research will have to determine with
precision. Greywater should be reused where there are large quantities
of the resource and minimal technical costs are required, such as in
large or new public-receiving buildings featuring for instance green
areas directly nearby. But already the prospects of greywater reuse
seem very promising in terms of both water resources and cost savings
for the region’s governments.
Greywater from ablutions in a mosque for instance, can be reused
around the building for landscaping (a reuse highly accepted in the
surveys, irrespective of the framing or the population) and thus replace
the desalinated water that is currently used for this purpose. Qatar hosts
over 2000 mosques (The Peninsula Qatar, 2017) and keeps building
additional ones, while Iran and Saudi Arabia host around 58,000 and
94,000 mosques respectively (Al-Khotani, 2016; France24, 2016). So
the greywater resource potential in this single niche is significant across
the region. Meanwhile, large hotels and other commercial entities are
also looking forward to decreasing their environmental footprint and
operating costs. When considering other large buildings that could ea-
sily provide greywater in large quantities (colleges, military barracks,
swimming pools and sport facilities, inter alia), the amount of grey-
water that could be recovered becomes very substantial. One could
speak of virtual rivers across the Gulf region, which are presently lar-
gely ignored and unused in several countries, despite high acceptability
levels for several reuses and even very high levels of acceptability if the
new reuse policy is introduced with the most relevant framing.
Declaration of interest
None.
98
Environmental Science and Policy 89 (2018) 93–99
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