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."

Comments

Re:This is a good idea.

[swb]

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.

Re:Creek?

[wicked_little_critta]

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.

Re:What would you consider "clean" ?

[tada_mac]

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.

Re:Creek?

[Sethb]

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.