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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?
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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.
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.
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.
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?