New SANS 241 raises the bar for drinking water safety

South Africa’s national drinking water standard has just undergone its biggest overhaul in a decade and the South African National Bottled Water Association (SANBWA) says every water provider, municipality, borehole operator and refill station in the country needs to understand what has changed.

The revised SANS 241:2025 replaces the old checklist approach to water testing with an integrated, risk-based system that requires water providers to understand, monitor and actively manage water quality from catchment to consumer. Compliance is no longer a once-off lab result; it is an ongoing process that must be proven.

Charlotte Metcalf, CEO of SANBWA, says: “This is the most significant shift in how drinking water safety is defined and demonstrated in South Africa since the standard was first introduced. It raises the bar considerably, but a standard is only as strong as its enforcement. Our concern is what happens between a document that says water must be safe, and the reality of whether it actually is.”

What has changed

• One integrated framework: SANS 241:2025 links limits, risk assessments, monitoring, verification and corrective action into a single system
• Emerging contaminants are no longer ignored, but they’re not fully regulated either. Substances such as PFAS, pharmaceutical residues and certain disinfection by-products have been added to an annex as ‘parameters of concern’, rather than built into the core numerical limits. This is a pragmatic step given our limited testing capacity for these compounds, but it means these risks are flagged for attention rather than mandatorily tested and enforced
• Boreholes and alternative sources are explicitly brought into scope. Anyone supplying water to a community or the public, whether from a borehole, a tanker, or a treated municipal source, is now recognised as a water provider and is expected to test and manage that water to the same standard as piped tap water and
• Insufficient monitoring data is now treated as non-compliance in its own right. A provider that cannot show adequate, ongoing testing data is no longer able to claim compliance by default.

The implementation gap

A stronger standard on paper does not automatically mean safer water at the tap. Implementation sits with over 140 water services authorities across the country, many of which are already under severe strain.

“The standard now demands system-wide risk assessment, continuous monitoring and skilled interpretation of results. That requires trained personnel, functioning laboratories and sustained budget. Many municipalities are struggling to deliver on the current standard, let alone a more demanding one.”

Enforcement remains a persistent weak point. Recent Green Drop and No Drop reports point to continued deterioration in wastewater treatment and rising water losses, and Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS)’s own reporting shows that corrective action plans and non-compliance notices are frequently ignored or delayed for years before further action follows.

Why this matters for refill water and alternative supply

SANBWA is particularly focused on a category the revised standard makes newly explicit: anyone supplying water to communities or the public from boreholes, tankers or refill stations is a water provider under SANS 241:2025 and is expected to test and manage that water accordingly.

In practice, this is far from the reality on the ground. Refill stations largely operate in a regulatory grey area, often drawing from municipal supply or unprotected boreholes, with little to no regular testing of the final product once municipal chlorine has been stripped out. Water trucked in by tanker faces similar gaps in source testing and traceability.

“The new standard is clear that if you are putting water in someone’s hands to drink, you are a water provider and you carry that responsibility, regardless of whether you’re a municipality, a borehole operator or a refill station. The question now is whether that responsibility will actually be checked and enforced at the point where consumers are most exposed,” says Metcalf.

SANBWA continues to call for formal enforcement of testing and traceability requirements at refill and alternative water supply points, alongside its ongoing work with the Department of Health, environmental health practitioners and academic partners to close this gap.

SANBWA’s position

SANBWA welcomes the shift to risk-based management in SANS 241:2025 as a necessary and overdue modernisation of South Africa’s drinking water framework. The association is calling on government to match the ambition of the new standard with the budget, staffing and enforcement capacity needed to implement it across municipalities, water boards, and the growing informal market of boreholes, tankers and refill stations supplying communities.

Our member bottlers already go well beyond SANS 241, testing for a far broader range of parameters under the SANBWA standard and Packaged Water specific food legislation, with independent audits, full traceability and food-safety controls applied from source to shelf.

For a full breakdown of what has changed under SANS 241:2025 and what it means in practice, watch this tutorial from Watercan:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L91h3blV7VI