The Fremen Didn't Need a Water PR Team. The UK Does

Fremen: Masters of Water Reuse 

The trailer of Dune: Part Three just dropped! We just need to hang tight until December…

There are so many captivating elements in the movies and the book, but I find this bit particularly interesting: Paul Atreides, coming from a lush and green planet, had to adapt to Fremen’s culture shaped by water scarcity.

In Fremen society, water is the ultimate currency. No drop is wasted. 

One great example is the stillsuit. Very cool, very Rick Owens, 100% functional. It’s a full-body recycling system that captures sweat, breath, even urine, and turns it back into drinking water. And when a Fremen dies or an enemy is killed, their body moisture is retrieved and redistributed to the tribe. 

Check out this video about the design and science of the stillsuit. Source: Warner Bros

Every drop reclaimed feeds into something bigger. Just like the US, the Fremen have their own MAGA campaign, Make Arrakis Green Again. It’s a 300-year terraforming plan held together by shared belief and a secret water reservoir. They're reusing water to build their generational dream. 

I was super excited to bring this up to my friends, whose reactions were: eww, I don't want to drink my own pee.

Do We Need to Appreciate Water in the UK?

Fair enough. We don’t live in the desert like the Fremen. Why the fuss?

By 2050, Arrakis might feel closer than we think. The UK is on track to run short of nearly 5 billion litres of water every day. Communities in Sussex, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Norfolk are already feeling the squeeze on business growth. Just in housing, undelivered projects due to water scarcity could cost the economy £25 billion over the next five years.

The quintessential UK weather is going through a ‘rebrand’. Source: Water Magazine

Water scarcity is already at our door step, just less cinematic. Reuse is one part of the answer. But how do you get people on board when their gut reaction is eww? Well, one country already cracked it.

Singapore’s Playbook on Overcoming the Ick Factor

I learnt about NEWater from my Singaporean friend, Shil, who spoke of it with a great sense of pride. That pride is the story.

Singapore and the UK are roughly on par for daily water consumption per person. But in Singapore, wastewater reuse already meets 40% of daily water demand, with a goal of 55% by 2060. In England, that number is 0.09%. 

Singapore is heavily dependent on water imported from Malaysia. To improve water security, they built state-of-the-art facilities to treat wastewater to drinking standards. That's half the battle. The other half was getting people to actually want to drink it.

In 2002, the campaign was launched during the country’s 37th National Day. It was a celebration, with more than 60,000 Singaporeans coming together for a toast with Singapore's very own brand of recycled water: NEWater.

They also wielded the power of language. Sewage became 'used water'. Sewage plants were renamed 'water reclamation plants'.

Top officials, such as then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, were photographed drinking NEWater in public. Water treatment plants built visitor centres, welcoming anyone curious enough to come and learn. There are even mascots Water Wally and Sally, two cheerful water droplets to bring the message to kids.

Then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong is showing the media that he is drinking and endorsing NEWater after a game of tennis at the Istana. Source: National Archives Singapore.

Today, NEWater primarily supplies sectors requiring ultra-pure water, and tops up reservoirs for drinking water. 

The Missing Skills That Nobody Talks About

So how did Singapore pull it off? NEWater works because it combined two things: world-class engineering and a cultural campaign that made an entire nation feel good about drinking recycled water. One without the other doesn't get you to 40% wastewater reuse.

Here in the UK, water has a storytelling problem. Reuse is one. But there's also public resistance to new reservoirs, widespread confusion about why bills are rising, and a general sense that water only matters when sewage dumping or hose ban breaks the news. 

Getting people to change behaviour - accepting reclaimed water, using less, supporting infrastructure in their backyard - requires communicators, designers, campaign strategists, community organisers. People who know how to make something feel relevant to someone who has never had to think about it.

Using recycled water to flush toilets is the easy win - most people don't ask where it came from. Telling them it was treated toilet water first? Suddenly a harder sell. Source: Enabling Water Smart Communities

I'm talking about the campaign strategist who spent five years on public health messaging and is ready for a bigger canvas. The UX designer who made educational games that kids absolutely love. The community organiser who knows how to bring together people of all walks. The illustrator who made memes that captured attention with humour and provoked meaningful conversations.

Water companies, regulators, consultancies, sector bodies all need this capability. What's largely missing is someone making that connection out loud. The sector talks a lot about the silver tsunami: an ageing workforce, unfilled roles, an engineer exodus. Always about attracting more technical talent.

The irony is, the talent problem is itself partly a perception problem. Low public awareness of water challenges feeds directly into low awareness of water careers. We need people telling positive stories about working in water. And the people best placed to do the engineering often aren't trained to translate it for a general audience. It's a different skill set entirely.

One more thing worth saying directly: you don't need to be a water engineer to work in water. Singapore's campaign wasn't run by people who could explain the technical specification of membrane filtration. It was run by people who understood how to make a nation feel proud of something seemingly eww. That's a transferable skill if ever there was one.

So if that's the gap you want to help close, whether you're coming from communications, design, behaviour change, or creative industries, this is a sector worth a look. The door is more open than it looks.

More importantly, if you are in the position to drive the conversations on water skills gap in water, give some airtime to the soft skills. They're not soft at all. They do the heavy lifting on shifting perception and culture for water. 

Final Random Bits

I wrote this post on World Water Day. This year's theme is water and gender. It's a cause worth amplifying. 

But most of the awareness I see stays at the level of a moment: a post, a fundraiser, a statistic about women in the developing world, followed by a scroll. It doesn’t last because caring about water is not built into our culture. 

What we actually need is a culture that thinks about water before the tap runs dry. Here at home, not just somewhere far away. 

Singapore didn't wait for the public to come around. They threw a party and handed everyone a bottle. Somewhere in the UK, that campaign is waiting to be made.

Singaporeans drinking NEWater at the National Day Parade (NDP) 2005. Source: PUB.