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Don't Eat The White Snow Either
loteck writes "An interesting article about an Australian ski resort that is converting human waste into freshly driven snow. The waste is converted "through a three-step purifying process of UV light filtration, ozonation and ultra-filtration", and they say it's "even cleaner than that made from nearby creek water." I think that says more about the creek than it does the waste."
Try again later!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Many cities sewer systems have overflow mechanisms that allow raw sewage to wind up ultimately in a nearby river. Those same rivers feed water treatment facilities downstream for other cities' drinking water. I realize that this isn't a direct reclaimation, but it is more "direct" then the evaporation/precipitation route.
That's how the water recycling systems on the space station work. Believe it or not, the water is actually more clean and pure than most tap and bottled water. Such systems are also planned for use on flights to Mars.
I remember reading that all the water you drink has been through at least 6 people before you get it.
I lay awake last night wondering where the sun had gone, then it dawned on me.
There's oceans full of it just wating to be desalinized. If they can find a economical process for desalinization, then most water problems could be solved.
I think that's the crux of the problem. IANAWaterExpert but I think I've read the freshwater problem is basically that we're converting to saltwater the existing supply of non-saline water faster than the natural processes (evaporation, precipitation, ground filtration) can re-create it.
I think from an energy perspective its far cheaper to convert dirty freshwater into potable water than it is to convert saline water into freshwater, and even non-human drinkable freshwater is used for much more than drinking and bathing.
First of all, the filtration process they just described in the most effective, most "high tech" filtration process used to process water. See, it works this way - OZONE is the MOST poisonous substance known to man. It's also one of the easiest to deal with. When that 03 hits the fecal coliform bacteria in the sewage (which has already had all solid matter removed from it in settling basins) they basically get oxidized to nothingness.
Most cities do less treating worse water which you drink, every day. Drink soda? You're drinking city water mixed with syrup and bottled. Drink Sparklets/bottled water? They have even more lax rules when it comes to water quality. Most cities use a sand filter/chlorination deal to treat your water. While this does a good job on fecal bacteria, it won't even irritate cryptosporidia, which can cause all sorts of nice diseases.
So don't just start saying "EW EW! Nasty!" Next to using electrolysis (which is a really sub-optimal solution on the cost angle) this is the cleanest water you'd be able to find.
PAWS, Inc. (the office of Jim Davis, the Garfield guy) has a 'solar aquatic system' in Indiana that processes all the waste water from their complex in a greenhouse, using plants and small critters in series of tanks and pools. Without using any chemicals or electricity (beyond pumping and some supplementary heat for the greenhouse in extreme cold), the system outputs water cleaner than what you used to make your morning coffee.
No you are wrong. any town with decent treatment, (known as primary treatment) removes all solid waste before dumping the water. What they are doing is in addition to secondary and tertiary treatment. The Lake Tahoe area has had to do teriary treatment for more than thirty years to protect the lake as it is such a closed system. the treated water goes in to the Truckee river. The new lodge at the Columbia Icefields Center in the Canadian Rockies reuses grey water (from showers in the hotel and kitchen waste) after it is filtered for toilet flushing. This vastly reduces the total amount of water used, and the total amount of water to be released into the river. Amsterdam gets its water from the Rhine. The process for snowmaking actually works to make the water "cleaner", blowing it up into the air and mixing it with compressed air to make snow kills bacteria, as does exposure to ultraviolet light as it falls othe slopes. So makes for cleaner water in the river in the spring, and it also stores the water for the spring when it is needed more.
San Diego, CA has a big project doing just this, but currently they use the water only for irrigation (i.e., city facility lawns and golf courses).
People have hangups about this, yet many, if not all, of the complainers will regularly buy water in clear plastic bottles because they think it's "cleaner" and "healthier" than the water from the tap, from the regular water supply, or they buy their own water treatment facilities (aka water softeners, Reverse Osmosis filtration, etc., which are even more wasteful of water).
When I lived there, we had a softener, and a RO system for the kitchen sink. San Diego water is pretty hard... It wasn't because of any fear of chemicals, it was so it would taste like...water.
SoCal water though, generally does suck in general.
My dad works at the waste treatment plant in Las Vegas, and he's told me many times that the water that comes out of the plant is acutally clean enough that it could be used for consumption, but they dump it back into Lake Mead, dirty it up with the lake's normal filth, then pull it back out, process it, and send it to your faucet.
He told me the only reason they don't just pipe it directly from the plant back into the drinking water system is that people would cringe at the thought of drinking it, even though it's much cleaner than what they're pulling out of the lake now.
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
In traditional plants solids are filtered and processed as sludge. With the process I described the solids are scraped and treated before the water ever gets treated. It is an Electro-magnetic process that breaks the sludge down. In the end the sludge is a dark, odorless, harmless fiber. When dried it makes a good burning fuel. It burns cleaner the petroleum products and there is a never-ending supply of it basically, unless the population somehow stops taking a dump.