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Texas Town Turns To Treated Sewage For Drinking Water
Scientific American reports that Wichita Falls, Texas has taken an unusual step, precipitated by the years-long drought that Texas has faced: it's using treated sewage for drinking water. From the article:
To launch what it calls its "Direct Potable Reuse Project," the city pipes water 12 miles from its wastewater treatment plant to this treatment facility where it goes through microfiltration. A pump pulls water through a module filled with fibers that removes most of the impurities. Then it is forced through a semi-permeable membrane that can remove dissolved salts and other contaminants. The process, called reverse osmosis, is used by the U.S. military, in ships and in the manufacture of silicon chips. The water then gets blended with lake water before going through the regular water treatment system. ... At 60 cents per 1,000 gallons, it's far cheaper than any other source of water, [Wichita Falls' public works director Russell] Schreiber said. ... He said there have been few complaints so far. A glass of the finished product, sampled at a downtown restaurant, tasted about average for West Texas.
not like the wild animals and fish don't piss and shit into our water
The concern is not piss and shit --- it's synthetic chemicals, such as rubbing alcohol, medications, petrol/motor oil, ethylene glycol; pesticides, fertilizer, and materials containing heavy metals or other toxins, that folks sometimes flush down the drain.
Some of these chemicals may be non-particulant, solvate in water, and have similar physical properties that water has.
Assuming the process is something akin to the Groundwater Replenishment System in Orange County, CA, those shouldn't be a major problem. I'm too lazy to look up the treatment plant in this story, but I'd guess that the article leaves out a few steps in the treatment process, including some sort of advanced oxidation process. At the GWRS in CA, that would be a hydrogen peroxide / UV step that oxidizes the crap out of anything that might make its way through the RO process -- which isn't much, except for possibly neutrally charged, small molecules. Further, it if it's a well run wastewater collection system, there should be source control measures in place to minimize a lot of nasty stuff, like heavy metals and toxins, as that throws off advanced wastewater treatment processes as well.
Don't know about memory but reverse osmosis water certainly does contain some of the pharmaceuticals you crapped out. To completely remove them is prohibitively expensive per gallon, and I'd be willing to wager they aren't doing that in Texas.
On the bright side, it should save on the cost of your prescription meds if you just can drink them in your water....
The US, and particularly Texas, is an amazingly dumb place. If Texas hadn't squandered all of it's water over the last hundred years to tycoon zillionaires it wouldn't be in as extreme of a pinch. And if federal policies didn't let corporations glut on, and then crap out, our natural resources without any regard for public good... Then maybe the fumes whouldn't have killed off so many brain-cells and people would be better armed to think straight.
Privatize profit, socialize loss. Start investing in bottled water dummies, access to clean, healthy and good tasting water has been privatized. Destroying municipal suplies was step one, just ask Nestle.
Because all the fish, crustaceans, sea mammals and every damn thing else in the oceans, rivers, lakes, and reservoirs of the world climb out to take a leak or a dump.
Start thinking. You've been drinking recycled shit and piss since the day you were born.
"Don't know about memory but reverse osmosis water certainly does contain some of the pharmaceuticals you crapped out."
Uh, considering the membrane has pores small enough to remove a sodium ion, and pretty much every pharmaceutical made is much larger than a single sodium ion, good luck getting through the filter.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
not like the wild animals and fish don't piss and shit into our water
The concern is not piss and shit --- it's synthetic chemicals, such as rubbing alcohol, medications, petrol/motor oil, ethylene glycol; pesticides, fertilizer, and materials containing heavy metals or other toxins, that folks sometimes flush down the drain.
Some of these chemicals may be non-particulant, solvate in water, and have similar physical properties that water has.
My local water company sends out an annual quality report and I'm pretty sure that the stats they report include information on levels of most of these. And we're getting ours mostly from a deep aquifer.
I'm a resident of WF (and had to dig up a years-old account to login although I do read frequently but never comment much, so apologies for the cheap-shot url username).. The new water is supposedly on, but I can't tell a difference.
It's strange to me that there is all that much of a fuss with the locals, considering the fact that the process prior to this required treatment of said wastewater and greywater that was eventually let back out into the ordinary water table, became grimy with exposed air and otherwise ground contaminants, and was just filtered back to the city again through the lakes all over again anyway.
When suggested that there was no telling how many people had drowned in the lakes, how many cars had been run off the road into them and rusted over and still leaking gasoline and oil, and not to mention how many dead animals and super-toxic algae were present in the lake in the first place that we were "drinking" before this new filtered idea came about, they tend to clam up (perhaps from being grossed out by my description).
The city put out a lovely and sciencey YouTube video (which is now a year old), interviewing local chemists and otherwise credible local water experts who examined the setup and offered their input on it, here, for those interested in some of the more technical aspects. I've tried to link to it in most discussions I find online, but even still there are only 2790 views currently, out of a city of 100k+ pop, which is perhaps indicative of how terrible of a PR team our city does genuinely have. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MKrU1yi5Yc
Possibly the biggest local water controversy aside from the "poo-water" issue is how our city operates a water park, of all things. Supposedly it creates more profit that investment and is using outside, trucked-in water that is filtered and recirculated within its own closed system, but that doesn't stop torrents of naysayers leaping at every opportunity to inject it as shitstorm material, instantly derailing any city-admin discussion.