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

Coming to grips with new tech.

[mt-biker]

"even cleaner than that made from nearby creek water." I think that says more about the creek than it does the waste.

A typical knee-jerk reaction that nearly all of us have, myself included. But perhaps quite an unfair one.

This is going to seem a little off-topic. Bear with me!

We seem to be quite often short of water these days, and since we don't have a lot of new water catchment possibilities, it would seem that it can only get worse as the population increases.

Saving water seems to be the key here. Not only through more efficient appliances, but also through multiple uses of our water. How much sense does it make to be flushing our toilets with drinking water?

Some houses already capture "grey water" and use it for tasks where drinking water is not required. Obviously there's some filtering required. I've heard of other projects which are completely water self-sufficient. Yes, you end up boiling your potatoes in recycled piss!

Pretty revulsive to us today, but who knows? Maybe our grandkids will find it completely normal.

Re:You drink waste water anyway..

[Jugalator]

Avogadro, urine and eternal recycling

A calculation of what would happen if we'd dilute all the urine from one days urination of the world population into all the 1.4 billion trillions litres water on earth. Yes, thank god for the internet putting questions like these into rest. :-)

I thought the same thing of NASA

[AssFace]

Back in the early 90's my dad was on some summer program where professors would go and do work for NASA and then during the year be the regular profs that they were.

He was an analytical chemistry professor and then for NASA worked on the water filtration system for the Space Station.
The basic concept being that water is heavy at 8lbs/gal and so if they can limit how much they take up, they can use that saved weight towards carrying something else.
So they wanted to bring up a small fixed amount and then recycle out the waste - so when you took a leak, it would recover that and clean it out (with very similar methods to this article interestingly enough), and then... according to my dad - was usually cleaner than the water they brought on.

I was always puzzled at why they didn't just bring on cleaner water - but I suppose he was also hinting at the astronauts bringing some inside themselves as well... don't know.