Recycling Water for Drinking
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 11.28.07
This Orange County, Calif., Water District plant will purify sewer water to feed drinking water supplies, but not directly to the tap. Images by Axel Koester for The New York Times
They have a water problem in Orange County, California, and have built the world's largest sewage treatment plant that takes water from "toilet to tap" -after a hard scrubbing with filters, screens, reverse osmosis, hydrogen peroxide and ultraviolet light. One could drink it right out of the outlet but they don't. Even though manager Michael Markus says it is “is as pure as distilled water”, they pump it back into the aquifer, where it helps hold off seawater from entering the aquifer and slowly moves through the aquifer, the best filter there is.
One would think that the southwest would jump at such technology; after all, much of North America gets its water from the Great Lakes or the Colorado and Mississippi rivers, where municipalities dump treated water in and others take it out and treat it to make drinking water. And their sewage treatment plants don't do as good a job as this one.
But no, according to the New York Times, the projects are costly and often face health concerns from opponents:
Such was the case on Nov. 6 in Tucson, where a wide-ranging ballot measure that would have barred the city from using purified water in drinking water supplies failed overwhelmingly. The water department there said it had no such plans but the idea has been discussed in the past.
John Kromko, a former Arizona state legislator who advocated for the prohibition, said he was skeptical about claims that the recycling process cleanses all contaminants from the water and he suggested that Tucson limit growth rather than find new ways to feed it.
“We really don’t know how safe it is,” he said. “And if we controlled growth we would never have to worry about drinking it.” ::New York Times
An experiment: Take a bucket of farm-grown worms around town. Earthworms, the squirmy slimy kind. Now tell random people that at the bottom of the bucket is a box containing $20 - they can have it, but they have to put their hand in to get it out. Reassure them that the worms are perfectly clean and safe.
$20, free, for no more than a few seconds work and no risk. All they have to do is put their hands in a bucket full of squirming, wriggling, slimy worms. Logic tells them to get the money. But the ick factor tells them that their hands arn't going anywhere near that bucket, and the ick factor overrides logic.
Anonymous, I'd do that for twenty bucks! But I'm a hippy.
i'd do it for 20 bucks. u shouldve used a grosser example, maybe sewage. that's more relevant to this article lol...
i went to west coast green in san francisco and there was a company from australia advertising their graywater filtration system- all your water waste can be filtered into basically pure water... i asked if you can use it to drink, but they said people don't do that just cuz theyre grossed out. they use the filter to make water for plants in the yard, sometimes people even use it for their laundry...
if they can get it clean enough that it's basically distilled water... then i suppose it's only a matter of getting past the gross factor... or just not telling people lol... it doesn't matter if they're getting pure h2o right? lol...
i'd do it for 20 bucks. u shouldve used a grosser example, maybe sewage. that's more relevant to this article lol...
i went to west coast green in san francisco and there was a company from australia advertising their graywater filtration system- all your water waste can be filtered into basically pure water... i asked if you can use it to drink, but they said people don't do that just cuz theyre grossed out. they use the filter to make water for plants in the yard, sometimes people even use it for their laundry...
if they can get it clean enough that it's basically distilled water... then i suppose it's only a matter of getting past the gross factor... or just not telling people lol... it doesn't matter if they're getting pure h2o right? lol...
The real question to ask in Southern California and Arizona is, why are people still peeing and crapping into drinkable water?
You have this enormous and inefficient system to bring water into the area so you can pee into it?
Point being, there is probably no lack of potable water available, just a lot of waste.