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Would You Drink This Water?
theodp writes "NEWater looks like any other glacier-clear bottled H20. Except, reports Salon, it gushes from the toilets of Singapore instead of a bubbling spring. NEWater is the product of Singapore's new water-treatment system, and it's wastewater that's been purified through advanced synthetic membranes called ZeeWeed, which could help 20% of the world's population that doesn't have easy access to clean water."
... has been circulating for years and was likely piss at one time or another anyway, who cares what the filtration system is (ZeeWeed or natural aquifer) so long as one verifies the output is clean water.
I think it was Tom Robbins who postulated that life was invented by water as a means of transporting itself from one place to another?
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
if these people don't have access to clean water, i think they'll trust the cleaning method and go for this. the only reason they would have for not accepting it would be if they were rich enough to buy clean water from a more reliable/comforting source (like, one with water that hasn't been in a toilet). either way, people need water right?
I'm against picketing but I don't know how to show it.
That being said, what happens when one process or another fails in this NEWater. Would it be catastrophic, ie Hepatitis or something in bottles? In nature, the process is long enough that a failure or two may not matter. With our potable drinking supply, failure can lead to some bad things - but not on nearly the same level as if it was directly processed wastewater.
I think I'll wait until this has been proven in practice for quite somke time.
Until the bottled water craze really took off a few years ago, what do you think everyone in the USA and Canada (and half of Europe) was drinking? What comes out of your tap is recycled water in most cases-- just like this.
When I had a paper route as a teenager, one of my customers was the local water treatment plant. They gave me a personal, guided tour. It was pretty cool. Up til then I really hadn't thought much about water purification, and afterwards I just didn't worry about it. They did a great job, and everyone was healthy as could be.
I have no problem drinking water like this. I would have a problem paying bottled water prices for it anywhere besides a third world country.
London's rainfall, at around 600mm/year is about half of what Sydney's is, and the same as Melbourne. Don't be fooled by your preconceived ideas (my preconceptions would have picked Melbourne as rainier than Sydney if I hadn't just looked that up).
ah you are obviously unaware that most of the rainfall in the UK is "the wrong sort of rain" and due to a victorian water system with cronic lack of maintenance for years, we frequently have extensive hose pipe bans here too...
Although i will grant you not as bad as the ones down under. They are perhaps a little bit more frustrating considering the relative amounts of rainfall.
The only problem that I can see is that the treatment process is run in a country like Singapore. It is not a Western nation and does not have the same quality standards that exist in the West: Japan, USA, Canada, etc.
Singapore is a Chinese society. I would not consume any food or drink exported from Singapore.
I, however, have no problem with Dasani, manufactured by CocaCola. Dasani is purified water from city sewage.
FYI, this is old news. Started in 2002, and I was given a bottle at the Singapore National Day Parade (2002).
So, it's mega filtered. Yes, the concept is *yech*, but astronauts and others do this type of reuse.
It's a water issue in the area driving it, like it will in other places sooner than later. Malaysia and Singapore don't see eye-to-eye on fresh water rights...
So before you condemn, it's still better than many 'local', rural water sources to the north.
Well, i'm singaporean and i must admit the locals were a tad squirmish with the whole idea when it started. but then again, singapore's a small country, and a step toward self dependence on essentials like water means greater political bargaining power.
Should I remind people that the water they drink is pumped from rivers, lakes, and wells where animals (submarine and above ground) piss in it all the time?
And let's not forget that certain waste byproduct is actually desirable to drink! I'd like to find a lake full of this stuff. Hmmmmmm..... --M
My mom lives in a costal suburb in Florida and her neighborhood gets its water from reverse osmosis, pulled right from the Gulf of Mexico. Clean, tasty and no need to add salt. My skin is never as soft as when I shower at her house. I understand they're building a huge RO plant in Saudi Arabia, and more in California.
Might be a solution for Australia and the southwest U.S.
Since we've treated the Great Lakes as sewers for a hundred years, Chicagoans are essentially doing the same thing. The water treatment plant here is considered one of the best in the world since its completion in the 1970's.
I would imaging that having a water distiller (there are interesting versions requiring little energy) in the home will be increasingly demanded in the future. pumping drinking water thorugh pipes is a bit much.
1. This is biological feedback, connecting human waste to human intake - you'd better be very sure that you are removing pathogens. If you fail to remove sufficient pathogen, ie leaving than the minimum number for infection, you will select those that are more virulent, infect with a lower number of organisms and shed in greater numbers. This undermines all public health policy since John Snow.
2. State of the art recycling systems have trouble with known pathogens. One is Cryptosporidium which just last year was found to be widespread in US reclaimed water output (Rose et al). Minimum innoculum required is 10 organisms, perhaps as few as 1 organism, especially in immunocompromised subjects. Cryptosporidium was responsible for several deaths in Chicago a few years back.
3. We have no monitoring in place for the health of the general population. Threshold to an epidemic to be recognized is pretty high, people have to start dying in quite significant numbers before the CDC or equivalent takes notice.
4. Historically contamination of the water supply leads to a slow economic decline in a society, not a precipitous crisis. Its so slow you don't even notice. This seems to be how early societies that failed to protect their drinking water disappeared and why wells have walls around them - to prevent runoff contamination from sources of human waste.
We may not get as much rain in the Northwest in some places but we have fog which is another water resource that collects on trees and what not and ends in the watertable. The gaseous form of water deposits 10's of inches of rain here every season.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
It has been calculated that London water has passed through an average of seven sets of kidneys before it is drunk, because of the development of water distribution and sewerage systems on the Thames both in London and upstream of London.
So Singapore isn't first.
Essentially, someone in Reading drinks a glass of water, and processes it naturally. The sewage outfall disperses the (treated) wastewater into the Thames, where it is re-abstracted further downstream (say Maidenhead) and the cycle goes round again. Eventually the water gets to London.
Obviously, not all the glassful will have been through someone elses kidneys, as the Thames isn't dry between water abstraction points and sewage outfalls, but the principle applies.
If you want to drink water that doesn't have at least some quantity that has gone through somebody (or something) else's kidneys, drink melted deep Greenlandic (or Antarctic) glacier ice, or water from (very) old aquifers.
Every breath you take has some air molecules in common with Julius Caesar's last breath (bar pathological exceptions). You probably drink some of his natural liquid output every time you drink as well. Ain't life wonderful!
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I believe I read somewhere that distillers don't really do the trick, because many of the volatiles that you really need to get rid of have roughly the same or lower boiling point than water, which means you aren't really filtering them out by distilling.
Anyone else know the real story on this?
I thought water treatment was standard practice in many places. It is in the US. Even where water isn't necessarily scarce. Really, I thought all "city water" came from a treatment facilities. That is where they add the chlorine and flouride and stuff.
Perhaps this new treatment method makes better water than most facilities, but is it really that unusual to be drinking water that was once flushed down the toilet?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Legend has it that in central London, the water coming out of the taps has on average passed through seven bodies before it reaches you.
I'll go you one better: given that land life has existed on this planet for about 500 million years, all water everywhere on earth has passed through several million generations of bodies before it reaches you!
As a biopharm engineer, I don't trust anything more open than a 200-300 kDa filter (about 10-15 nm) to clear all viruses by size excplusion. [/shameless plug] ;-)
This water can't possibly be worse than the dreck I drink from my kitchen sink in DC every day. I don't know what coliform is, but according to the notice I got last week, there's an unacceptable level of it in my pipes.
If you want to drink water that doesn't have at least some quantity that has gone through somebody (or something) else's kidneys, drink melted deep Greenlandic (or Antarctic) glacier ice...
People have his image of glaciers being clean and pure, but thats just not the case. Glaciers aren't all that clean. They're full of dirt and debris and every once in a while, an eons old corpse comes to the surface.
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
The drinking water treatment plant, located at Andijk, the Netherlands, serves approximately 500,000 people and treats approximately 25 million cubic metres of water per year. It is expected to be the largest installation involving UV technology in Europe and is the first of its kind to treat micropollutants. "Ultraviolet systems have, for some time, been proven as an effective barrier against a wide range of pathogens, including E.coli, Cryptosporidium and Giardia," said Marvin DeVries, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer for Trojan Technologies. "This project will optimize the design of a UV treatment system, using Advanced Oxidation, that will effectively treat a much wider range of contaminants, that, with extended exposure, may be harmful to human health." It is an alternative to Chlorine-desinfection, but better for the environment. They also claim better results than the chlorine-method. If you search the web for 'UV' and 'Andijk' you'll find more about it. I think this method can help any country in the world, even the UK and Australia.
I am concerned about the quality of those recycled water. Sure it should have removed most contagious subtances, but how about heavy metal, toxin and may be human hormones?
American man have mark drop sperm count due to contamination of drink water with female hormone; which originate from birth control pills and get into drinking water via recycling sewage.
Will that ZeeWeed system remove all these contaminants? I really doubt.