AlterNet: Is Drinking from the Toilet Bowl the Best Way to Deal with Water Shortages?

[marmar]

Is Drinking from the Toilet Bowl the Best Way to Deal with Water Shortages?

By Elizabeth Royte, AlterNet. Posted September 20, 2008.

More and more cities are implementing "toilet to tap" programs as the answer to our water crisis. But is it the best and safest option?



This piece originally appeared in the New York Times Magazine.

Before I left New York for California, where I planned to visit a water-recycling plant, I mopped my kitchen floor. Afterward, I emptied the bucket of dirty water into the toilet and watched as the foamy mess swirled away. This was one of life's more mundane moments, to be sure. But with water infrastructure on my mind, I took an extra moment to contemplate my water's journey through city pipes to the wastewater-treatment plant, which separates solids and dumps the disinfected liquids into the ocean.

A day after mopping, I gazed balefully at my hotel toilet in Santa Ana, Calif., and contemplated an entirely new cycle. When you flush in Santa Ana, the waste makes its way to the sewage-treatment plant nearby in Fountain Valley, then sluices not to the ocean but to a plant that superfilters the liquid until it is cleaner than rainwater. The "new" water is then pumped 13 miles north and discharged into a small lake, where it percolates into the earth. Local utilities pump water from this aquifer and deliver it to the sinks and showers of 2.3 million customers. It is now drinking water. If you like the idea, you call it indirect potable reuse. If the idea revolts you, you call it toilet to tap.

Opened in January, the Orange County Groundwater Replenishment System is the largest of its type in the world. It cost $480 million to build, will cost $29 million a year to run and took more than a decade to get off the ground. The stumbling block was psychological, not architectural. An aversion to feces is nearly universal, and as critics of the process are keen to point out, getting sewage out of drinking water was one of the most important public health advances of the last 150 years.

Still, Orange County forged ahead. It didn't appear to have a choice. Saltwater from the Pacific Ocean was entering the county's water supply, drawn in by overpumping from the groundwater basin, says Ron Wildermuth, who at the time we talked was the water district's spokesman. Moreover, population growth meant more wastewater, which meant building a second sewage pipe, five miles into the Pacific -- a $200 million proposition. Recycling the effluent solved the disposal problem and the saltwater problem in one fell swoop. A portion of the plant's filtered output is now injected into the ground near the coast, to act as a pressurized barrier against saltwater from the ocean. ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/water/99552/is_drinking_from_the_toilet_bowl_the_best_way_to_deal_with_water_shortages/

[lynnertic]

1. "this water tastes like crap"

so would everything you cook...

[kestrel91316]

7. Nonsense. Utter BS. People have been completely brainwashed by

the bottled water and germ phobic crowd.

[NNadir]

2. From my perspective, having spent some time considering the issue, I think water

recovery from sewage is an extremely good idea, the best approach possible. It is cheaper and cleaner than desalination, by far.

In fact much of the world's drinking water supply is already recycled in this way, since many cities discharge effluent - usually but not always treated - into rivers upstream from the intake pipes of other cities.

Other important considerations include things like the recovery of phosphate - which is a serious issue to which too little attention is paid.

People may not realize this too, but efforts like ozonolysis in the purification step and UV irradiation as described in the article help destroy persistent pollutants like halogenated organics which are now found everywhere on earth.

Some of the places that I have written touching on some of these issues are on another website in these diaries:


http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/10/9/22291/9097">Another Happy Story About Agricultural Resource Depletion: Phosphate, Nauru, and Your Toilet.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/11/3/111833/691">The Wonderful World of Circular Reasoning: Using Hydropower to Desalinate Water.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/1/22/18510/1895">Constructed Wetlands in Norway: Greenhouse Gas Implications.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/1/27/162624/003/115/444308">A Brief Overview Of Persistent Halogenated Pollutants: The Case For Solvated Electrons.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/2/27/214717/388">Pimples, and Persistent Pentachlorophenols and Pharmaceutical Poisons

[Berry Cool]

3. It's easy to just look at this superficially and say "Ewwwwww"

but really, if the superfiltering and aquifer process affects this water such that it's just as pure and clean as if it never saw the inside of a toilet or touched a piece of you-know-what, I'm not sure how bad an idea it is. It might be a very good idea.

I mean, let's say you have a china plate that someone accidentally left food on for a long time and it got moldy and horrible-looking. You find it and get rid of the moldy food. What are you going to do with the plate? Throw it away too, the way you might a plastic container? Or wash it very well in soap and hot water and return it to the stack? After you wash it thoroughly, who cares whether it once had moldy food on it? How will you be able to tell it from any other plate in the cupboard?

If the system works well and is foolproof in terms of making the water E.coli free and safe to drink, I'm not sure it's a big deal.

[The Croquist]

5. "Ewwwwww" was my first thought

but of course you are right. None of the water most of us drink is pure. It is all recycled from somewhere. It usually comes from a lake or river that has fish crapping, pissing (do fish piss?), dieing and rotting in it. Then there are the boaters putting gas exhaust into as well as "recycling" the beer they drank back into the lake.

The key is that is not only safe but perceived as safe.

[kestrel91316]

8. The percolating part makes this water MORE PURE than your standard

surface water, like what we get here from the Colorado and California Aqueducts, which has got all sort of DEAD THINGS and animal waste and genuine crap in it, and yet people think it's pure as distilled.

Ignorance is bliss.

[NNadir]

4. To the point of this thread there is this news item in Environ. Sci. Tech.

http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/sample.cgi/esthag/asap/html/es8024885.html">Fresh produce from wastewater

[kestrel91316]

6. Ignorant nonsense. I don't know why people think the water that already

comes from their taps is pure as the driven fucking snow, because IT'S NOT. It's heavily contaminated in most cases and has to be heavily treated before we get to drink it.

Water reclamation is the ONLY thing that makes any sense. We cannot afford to throw our wastewater AWAY, because there is no such thing as "away" when it comes to waste.

If people can't handle heavily treated water that is trickle-filtered through hundreds of feet of sand/soil and then treated again, let them BUY their frickin' drinking water at the store. Dumbasses.

And yes, I do have a degree in microbiology.

[Nihil]

10. Hear hear!

> I don't know why people think the water that already comes from
> their taps is pure as the driven fucking snow, because IT'S NOT.
> It's heavily contaminated in most cases and has to be heavily
> treated before we get to drink it.

I learned this years ago (whilst studying earth resource modules
in geology) yet I'm amazed that these "discussions" still crop up.

The water that I drink in the office in London will typically have
been through *seven* people since it landed as rain yet it is pure,
clear, clean & healthy (and nicely chilled too but that's a bonus).

:shrug:

It doesn't have antimony, benzene or any of the other crap that turns
up in bottled water so I think I'll stick to it for now ...

e.g.,
> Plastic bottles continuously leach antimony into drinking water,
> claim geochemists in Germany.
>
> 'My point is not that these bottled waters are contaminated with
> antimony,' he said, 'the point is that antimony is constantly being
> released from the bottle into the water.'
(http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2006/January/19010601.asp)

> Possible problems associated with shop-bought water include excess sodium,
> the leaching of toxins and benzene contamination, according to a report
> published yesterday by the sustainable food and farming group Sustain.
(http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-wellbeing/health-news/health-warning-over-safety-of-bottled-water-430620.html)

[phantom power]

9. My dogs deal with water shortages by drinking from the toilet bowl.

It's their favorite way of saying "Hey, will you please fill our fucking water bowl?"