'Nor Any Drop to Drink'.(Singapore )(Brief Article)

Ever since Singapore was founded in 1965, it has used its role as a center of commerce to compensate for its dearth of natural resources. But one resource has been especially troublesome: water. Singapore, an island nation, has none of its own and imports most of its drinking water by pipeline from neighboring Malaysia. Water has been a matter of national security. Founding father Lee Kuan Yew says in his memoirs that he once told the prime minister of Malaysia that if the water supply were cut off in a random act of madness, "we would have to go in, forcibly if need be," to restore the flow.

Now Singapore is turning to technology to alleviate its water shortage. The government plans to spend millions on an array of water-purifying technologies over the next decade, including several plants to take the salt out of seawater and filter sewage water, as well as structures to collect rainwater and direct it to reservoirs. As the population grows, the new water will be all the more crucial. "Usually, armies are the way to solve water conflicts," says Leon Awerbuch, former president of the International Desalination Association. "But Singapore is finding alternatives."

The jewel of this new campaign is the Newater factory, a pilot plant that demonstrates partly homegrown technology for filtering sewage (engineers plan to use a version of the same technology for desalinating seawater). The plant is on the banks of a pond where signs warn against swimming and fishing and rows of towers hold raw sewage. Harry Seah, the plant manager, is not put off by the stench. "You get used to it," he says. Newater incorporates the cutting edge of filtering technology. Sludge comes in and passes through thousands of white plastic spaghetti-like tubes. Since the pores along the sides of the tubes are only as wide as 60 water molecules, water is squeezed out easily but solid particles are not. "The trade secret," says Dee Dee Ng, an executive of Hyflux, one of the Singapore companies that make these tubes, "is how you get the holes so small." The filtrated water is then forced through a membrane with even smaller pores, removing anything that would have made it this far. And just for good measure, the water is irradiated with intense ultraviolet light.

With all that purifying, you would think that Singapore would have no trouble convincing its citizens that the filtered water is safe for everyday use. "In Singapore, people generally trust the government," says ...