Squeezing more out of taps: How Cape Town cut consumption in half

Each morning, on opposite sides of this city, two women wake up thinking about water. 

For both Helen Moffett and Musa Baba, entire days are choreographed around the vital resource: Where they will get it. How long the line will be. If it will be safe. How little they can manage with and still get by.

Each morning Ms. Baba, a barista, picks her way down a sandy hillside crowded with tin shacks to the communal tap she shares with about 100 of her neighbors. When it’s her turn, she fills a seven-gallon bucket, hoists it onto the top of her head, and carefully walks home, trying not to let too much slosh out into the powdery dust below. That water, after all, has a long day ahead of it. She’ll use it first to wash herself and her kids, then chuck the same water back into a bucket to scrub her floors. Finally, she’ll squeeze out the dregs from the mop, saving them to flush the toilet.

Twenty miles away, Ms. Moffett spends hours each day assembling and maintaining what she calls her “water buffet.” There’s the yellowish water she collects from a