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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.
No, they filter the shit out. The water doesn't remember shit.
This really isn't much different than what nature would have ultimately done with the water right? Just accelerated mechanically. Not much different than what we would have to do for long duration space travel or colonization either.
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.
Since you need to treat sewage before putting it in the ground, and ground water before putting it in the water supply, what is new about connecting those two points? Do people think the sewage magically stops being sewage once it leaves the system?
The wild animals don't tend to piss and shit birth control hormones and other still quite bioactive medications.
I just know there's a homeopathy joke in there somewhere...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If anything it's shocking the process isn't used more. I know in my hometown of Fairbanks, Alaska, reverse-osmosis waste water filtering was used at least as early as the 1980s, perhaps even the 70s. I'm trying to find a reference for proof, but haven't come up with one in a couple of minutes of Googling.
The Wikipedia article on RO, by the way, is in pretty shabby shape if anyone gets a rise out of improving such things.
believers in homeopathy must love living there...
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.
You may be surprised sir. Florida native here, Tampa / St. Pete born and raised. I had the good fortune to be able to do the beginning section of the PCT (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_crest_trail). I tasted the water in San Diego, Escondido, Ramona, and many MUCH MUCH more rural spots. The water is awful and sometimes tastes like odd chemicals or minerals when it's from wells fairly consistently. Municipal water is better but not better than FL water. It's generally well known by the locals that the water out west in rural areas in terrible. Florida well water is not the best, but its great by comparison to some of the nasty water I was drinking on the trail in the desert. "Hey, its keeping me alive", I'd think as a strange tingle and off taste lingered on my palate after drinking from a concrete bowl designed for horse consumption only. Water is quite scarce in the border region I was in. I've had NYC tap through clean pipes and it was the best I've had so far. Florida's aquifers will still be kicking when it starts to *really* dry up out west too.
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.
I just know there's a homeopathy joke in there somewhere...
Yeah, a crappy one.
A homeopath might tell you so, but there isn't really.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Or just plain ol activated charcoal. My sailboat has an RO system with a charcoal canister that I replace twice a year. Bigger systems have more complex pre filters. I'm sure that the system in TFA is at least cleaner than any river water or shallow well system. Possibly not as pure as a deep artesian system but if it passes EPA criteria, it's going to be pretty clean.
Really Slashdot, RO systems are old hat. You can buy them on Ebay. Soon they'll be in breakfast cereal.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Soon they'll be in breakfast cereal.
A cereal RO system to remove antibiotics and steroids from cow milk? Oh, my.
"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.
The drugs are often exotic molecules we've cooked up for the purpose; but hormonal birth control exploits the same hormones that would naturally show up, since those are the ones that there are receptors for and that cause the desired changes. The quantity that a dense human population will put out is something quite different; but the chemistry won't be markedly different between humans and other placental mammals.
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.
A glass of the finished product, sampled at a downtown restaurant, tasted about average for West Texas.
So the water tastes like shit. Good to know.
Finding God in a Dog
Except they mix it with lake water *after* filtering it, so you've got different shit in it now.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
My wife has multiple certifications in water and wastewater treatment, and she claims that it is only impractical from a P.R. standpoint; in most places, people would raise bloody hell if you told them that they were drinking water straight from the wastewater treatment facility, but it really is no different than drinking water from a municipal watershed. As she puts it, we are all drinking dinosaur pee anyway :)
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.
This process is called "toilet to tap" and is perfectly safe. I would guess that any first world location that doesn't have easy access to ground water will be completely doing this in the next twenty years; it's that damn useful.
Probably the worst part about reverse osmosis is that it eliminates the water "taste" that people are used to because it gets rid of minerals as well. That's why they usually mix it with some other source like lake or ground water before it gets piped out to homes. Unfortunately the secondary source also adds in the usual pollutants as well as minerals.
For people who get the "ew yuck" factor, there's always bottled water, but just don't tell them that it comes from the same source.
False. Water memory, a form of homeopathy, has been around since 1796, long pre-dating understanding of molecules. The idea of water memory comes from people who start with a conclusion, and grab random scientific jargon to supply "evidence". It's like science, but backwards and nonsensical. The specific "facts" people use to sell their fake cureall potions change over the years depending on what scientific buzzwords are popular at the time.
Whoever came up with this osmosis thing must have been...
*puts on sunglasses*
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
My Australian education would recall that water structure is constantly changing, and that no "memory" lasts more than a few nanoseconds. No structure has been observed in any form for a longer period than this, or any kind of cyclical/regenerative states based on non-reacting impurities or solutes in the water.
Of course, this is all in relation to room- or body-temperature water, which is quite energetic and liquid. Environmental effects are a bit different. Closer to freezing everything slows down and the molecules start to line up in preparation of forming ice crystals. Usually, I'd hope this doesn't happen in a purification plant in-pipe or a human body. Either scenario is unpleasant.
I like that you are omitting any comment on what the life span of water-water interactions in liquid form is. Because it's on the order femtoseconds or shorter.
And it is transient to the existence of an actual solute or surface to create any statistically significant effects - i.e. anti-fouling coatings achieve part of there action by changing the water-packing order near the surface. But that doesn't persist once the surface is removed.
Also frankly, your entire comment sounds like a bait and switch on homeopathy in the making. Surface scientists and molecular biologists care about the structure of water over nanometer scale distances but generally no larger. That you feel it's important in a discussion of bulk filtration is...odd.
Uh maybe you should re-read his post; he's not disputing that water forms long chains, he's just saying the idea of water memory (which he clearly doesn't buy) was around before we knew about said long chains.
The only brain membrane that is of concern is the one that let's out greed driven bad ideas. The biggest risk with attempting to recycle storm water and sewerage as drinking water are right wing thinkers and cost saving or profit gaining short cuts. By far the majority of places when they attempt this do not do it as drinking water only as irrigation water, reason why, risk. The risk is enormous, you just have to keep in mind some extremely dangerous water borne diseases and just one system failure and now that whole town ends up with that disease, town goes bankrupt as a result of civil suit. I will be interested to see if they can get insurance coverage for this idea and how much it will cost. Personally based upon Texan ideal for taking money saving or profit gaining ring wing short cuts I'd be moving out rather than taking that chance.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Liquid water does not form permanent chains of that sort. If its doing that, its called ice, and has transitioned to a solid form.
If you're convinced that I require education, you could perhaps link to an educational source mentioning something about this. When I google "water dipolar chain", however, I get nothing but articles on other substances forming chains, and nothing whatsoever on these chains.
You're telling me to google; I did that before posting, and I've done it again, and found absolutely nothing of the sort. What terms should I be searching for?
For all practical purposes and time scales it doesn't.
Just let it flow.
Popular Science just ran an article about Pharma in the drinking water, with a nice chart about how much water you would need to drink to get *one* pill worth of X drug. As it turns out, it takes years of drinking nothing but tap water to get a single dose of any of the detectable pharmaceuticals that make it through into tap water.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Here's the joke: Homeopathy.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I don't think you fully comprehend my point. I'm only saying RO will easily remove the pharmaceuticals. You might still get other elements present besides oxygen and hydrogen, but you're not getting any molecular structure much larger than a water molecule through those pores, which would incidentally include pretty much every pharmaceutical ever made.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Whereas it is true that for a very very short time water can retain the form of a cage of a molecule it had in this is not in any way what water memory as pushed by homeoscammer is
1) life time of those is negligible on our level, on the order of magnitude of microsecond or lower, needless to say 1 second after dilution it is long gone.
2) most homeopathetic (pun intended) stuff is sold on [u]lactose or alcohol[/u] for which such a things is not even demonstrated to exists
3) even if it stayed longer than 1 second, one would have to demonstrate that the negative cage form has any effect near the normal molecule (remember the molecule was removed so all you have is an empty hole the very ROUGH form of the molecule) which elad me to
4) the effect of molecule is not the frigging form but their component. H2S and H2O will have the rough same form (angle ~105 degree instead of ~95 degreee , bond length 130 pm and 110 pm) but i hope everybody will accept they have far different effect on your body.
5) well any way homepathy as a whole when properly tested has practically no difference to the placebo comparison. Well done double blind at least. Because there is a lot of crapola passing of as "research" with bad protocoles in homeopathetic journals.
Hoemopathy is worthless. But it looks like magic to people and people like magic.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
My state of Oregon is fully in drought. California is in extreme drought. Pretty much all the west has been in drought in a more general way for over a century.
Now in California if you have 100 year water rights then you might own water you can sell privately. Since the public sources are no longer there for many uses then buying on the spot market might make sense. The spot hit $2200 acre foot recently. You can play with this and see that this might be 250 1000 gallon units untreated. So i guess this Texas town is maybe paying $200 for an acre foot and this treated. These numbers are pretty much just in my head approximations and you can recalculate as needed.
California if this this goes on will be in a humanitarian crisis in 18 months. If so, you may be affected. You might want to support what this Texas city did after making the scat jokes. Or maybe shut down high water use export industries. When we ship a pound of beef out of country, how much water is effectively being shipped with it?