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Drought-Stricken Texas Town Taps Urine For Water
An anonymous reader writes "Texas is in the midst of a drought so severe that local water management teams have decided to distribute reclaimed wastewater (aka urine). The Colorado River Municipal Water District in West Texas has broken ground on a $13 million plant that will capture treated wastewater and ready it for redistribution. After being run through microfilters and undergoing reverse osmosis, slimy sewage is cleansed with peroxide and ultraviolet light. This intense process ensures that any pharmaceuticals and carcinogens are removed, and that the H2O stands up to drinking water regulations."
About bloody time that some city in the US starts doing this. Did you know that the outflow from the Los Angeles sewage treatment plant is actually cleaner than the water that they pump (at ridiculous cost) over the mountains to the potable water intake?
The capital of Botswana has been doing this since the 1960s. Nice to know that Texas is finally catching up to sub-Saharan Africa.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
They should bottle and market it. First we had astronaut ice cream. Now we have astronaut water!
It's amazing to me that this type of thing only gets implemented due to a crisis when it should be obvious from the get go that developing and improving the methods of recycling and reclamation should always be part of the way we do anything.
Not everywhere...
I'm currently sitting less than a mile upwind of one of the great lakes... The energy requirement for this sewage filtration process has a far larger environmental impact than just regular sewage treatment combined with pumping a bit more water out of the lake. We could probably reduce out draw out of the lake 50% with this technology, at the mere cost of kilotons of extra fly ash and mercury dumped into the lake from our coalburners ... the same lake we're getting our drinking water out of...
California / desert SW solutions are not appropriate everywhere. If anything, on average, east of the mississippi river, we have way too much fresh water and need to focus tech on dealing with floods caused by rain. Much like fixing failing school systems or sick care systems, just dumping more money on the problem doesn't seem to help.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
And in Portland, they drain an entire reservoir after one guy takes a leak
http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2011/06/16/Reservoir-drained-due-to-urine/UPI-10781308249177/
Have a Day!
South Africa, being a dry country, has been doing this for years. All sewage gets sent to treatment farms, where it is cleaned, and the water from it are then placed back in the river systems from where it is used for irrigation, drinking water and everything else - just like rain water.
South Africa also boasts that the water from the treatment plants are cleaner than rain water. My father is an electrical engineer and helped design one of the plants (the electrical systems obviously). The process is quite spectacular - and moreso than what is described here. For starters the first phase includes the sewage being cleaned by specially cultured bacteria to break it down, before chemical cleaning, filtering etc. step by step turns it back into pure H20.
The two main waste products from the process is methane and solid waste. The solid waste is used to create fertilizers. The methane is burned off (being a clean-burning gas) but quite a few people here have converted their cars to run on methane (any gasoline car can be converted) and fill up there - for the moment at least (since the demand is pretty low and they have massive amounts they need to get rid off) the sewage treatment farms don't even charge them. Fill up the car, no cost.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Chanute, KS was the first in the US, from October 14th 1956 to March 14th, 1957. The water met microbial standards of the time, but was discontinued as soon as possible due to public acceptance.
Windhoek, the capital of the Republic of Namibia (Sahara desert) recycles about 30% of their water to supply a population of 300,000 residents. They started in 1968.
Not common, but far from a new idea.
What I find even more amusing are the people who are all "eww yuck" over stories about recycling urine for drinking, and then go on to consume an alcoholic beverage (aka, yeast urine).
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
Does it the water burn when it gets out the tap?
Only if your faucet has Gonorrhea. ;-)
People would probably be rather suspicious of the sudden increase of its quality.