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California Gets Past the Yuck Factor With "Toilet To Tap" Water Recycling
HughPickens.com writes: From a marketing point of view, using treated sewage to create drinking water is a proposition that has proved difficult to sell to customers. Now John Schwartz writes in the NYT that as California scrambles for ways to cope with its crippling drought and the mandatory water restrictions imposed last month by Gov. Jerry Brown, enticing people to drink recycled water is requiring California residents to get past what experts call the "yuck" factor. Efforts in the 1990s to develop water reuse in San Diego and Los Angeles were beaten back by activists who denounced what they called, devastatingly, "toilet to tap." Orange County swung people to the idea of drinking recycled water with a special purification plant which has been operating since 2008 avoiding a backlash with a massive public relations campaign that involved more than 2,000 community presentations. The county does not run its purified water directly into drinking water treatment plants; instead, it sends the water underground to replenish the area's aquifers and to be diluted by the natural water supply. This environmental buffer seems to provide an emotional buffer for consumers as well.
In 2000, Los Angeles actually completed a sewage reclamation plant capable of providing water to 120,000 homes — the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys.The plan was abandoned after public outrage. Angelenos, it seemed, were too good to drink perfectly safe recycled water — dismissed as "toilet to tap." But Los Angeles is ready to try again, with plans to provide a quarter of the city's needs by 2024 with recycled water and captured storm water routed through aquifers. "The difference between this and 2000 is everyone wants this to happen," says Marty Adams. The inevitable squeamishness over drinking water that was once waste ignores a fundamental fact, says George Tchobanoglous: "When it comes down to it, water is water. Everyone who lives downstream on a river is drinking recycled water."
In 2000, Los Angeles actually completed a sewage reclamation plant capable of providing water to 120,000 homes — the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys.The plan was abandoned after public outrage. Angelenos, it seemed, were too good to drink perfectly safe recycled water — dismissed as "toilet to tap." But Los Angeles is ready to try again, with plans to provide a quarter of the city's needs by 2024 with recycled water and captured storm water routed through aquifers. "The difference between this and 2000 is everyone wants this to happen," says Marty Adams. The inevitable squeamishness over drinking water that was once waste ignores a fundamental fact, says George Tchobanoglous: "When it comes down to it, water is water. Everyone who lives downstream on a river is drinking recycled water."
And it's got dinosaur shit in it
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
God damned pussies.
Leaders are -- occasionally -- supposed to actually lead. And that means pushing through unpopular items that are actually good for the citizenry.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
"Hm that's a good point, let me think for a bit
Oh wait, my mistake, it's absolute bullshit.
Science adjusts it's beliefs based on what's observed
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved.
If you show me
That, say, homeopathy works,
Then I will change my mind
I'll spin on a fucking dime
I'll be embarrassed as hell,
But I will run through the streets yelling
It's a miracle! Take physics and bin it!
Water has memory!
And while it's memory of a long lost drop of onion juice is Infinite
It somehow forgets all the poo it's had in it!" --Tim Minchin
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
NASA has been doing this for a while... I remember when they announced it as "yesterday's coffee is now today's coffee"... everybody thought it was witty and cool. I guess Californians don't make good astronauts.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
My experience in living in places with "bad water"(wells with ultra high mineral content) and visiting people who live in those types of places(Phoenix...) has shown me that people will either buy five gallon plastic jugs of water at the grocery store or get their drinking water delivered somehow from a "reputable source".
Of course there will also be those who invest in high end in-place water filtering systems.
Human behavior dictates that no one with the financial ability will knowingly drink recycled sewage. I see a boom market for water distributors of all flavors.
With that being said I applaud the efforts in So-Cal to be better users of their precious little water.
Let us raise our glass and give a cheer!
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Why would anyone pooh-pooh the idea?
Just another day in Paradise
Soon they will be using fertiliser on crops to grow food.
Viri: good luck removing it.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
I thought recycling sewage into drinking water was the status quo and norm. I thought that was the whole point of sewage treatment plants -- to take the toilet water and turn it back around into the potable water system.
If that's not what is typically happening, what is? What are sewage treatment plants for then? Where is potable water coming from if not from treated sewage water?
Like birth control and other meds we are finding in the natural water supply? Wouldn't it end up at the taps too? I personally wouldn't trust it.
Authorities can't even keep chemicals out of the regular drinking water, yet we are supposed to believe they will be able to provide clean water from sewage?
I predict all the diseases of Africa will soon be common in California.
Yes, because that will make a difference.
Every water molecule is the same.
So what you are then saying is the water coming out the plant isn't absolutely scrubbed of shit, piss and whatever else was in the sewage system water, in essence.
Nice one.
Fucking Calitards.
I kind of just always assumed that treated water was put back in the reservoirs anyway. I mean, it has been TREATED right? Wouldn't that make it cleaner than most lake water anyway?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Water. Like out the toilet?
Pardon my ignorance but I thought this was happening since forever. I mean doesn't conservation of matter pretty much guarantee everything is just recycled?
In the Midwest it's common for a city or town to draw from the nearby major rivers like the Mississippi, Missouri, Illinois, Des Moines, and Ohio then treat that water for the tap. Then they take the sewage, separate out the solids, treat the liquids, and release that downstream.
I'm not sure I'd bitch so much about drinking what my own city or county was purifying on both ends. In the Midwest people are drinking what's been treated for drinking by their city, town, county, or water district but which was treated as wastewater by whoever was upstream. In the spring, sometimes the sewage treatment plants upstream flood. (A few cities and towns even continue to get fines from the EPA for their stormwater and sewage drains combined, so that flash flooding brings sewage up into their own streets.)
It's worked for decades elsewhere to re-treat wastewater as drinking water. California's supposed to be the progressive leader on this sort of thing. It's time they caught up.
The yuck factor is childishness. If the water is safe then the water is safe.
One of the things I've been looking at are things like pee-ponics and similar very short cycle waste processing systems. It sounds gross, but most of the grossness is just a bacteria issue. I saw someone pushing a solar toliet that subjects the poop to a couple thousand degrees of temperature and basically kicks out desiccated charcoal. That charcoal could be ground up and added to fertilizer. No poop smell because the bacteria are dead and in any case that temperature causes the poop to change chemically into something else. As to pee, you can filter the urine through bacterial cultures that will convert the the urine quite quickly into liquid fertilizer.
I think NASA said that it takes about six liters of algae to produce enough oxygen for one person? I don't know if that is six liters compressed and in a much larger volume of water or not. I assume so. But you could build personal biodomes for people that recycle all the biological waste from the house on a daily basis. Mix some worms in to chew up the kitchen scraps and maybe some eddible mushrooms to break down wood.
All these systems tend to need is sunlight enough sense to understand you don't mix certain things together, and a bit of patience.
I'm currently building a climate control system that manages all sorts of environmental factors in my house using some ardinios and a pi. Just for fun. And I think this could just be expanded out to manage a much more dramatic life support system.
People should also give a look at the Earth Ships which have a similar quality in that they're capable of keeping people alive for years without outside support... providing their own power, recycling water about 4 times in the house before replacing it, and fully able to generate enough food to feed the residents. And all that while being in the otherwise inhospitable locations like the middle of the desert or something.
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"...using treated sewage to create drinking water is a proposition that has proved difficult for customers to swallow."
For years there have been reports of trace amounts of drugs in treated wastewater that could be harming wildlife and "no one seems to know which compounds need to be removed or how to remove them from the water safely", so are they filtering out these drugs before reusing the water for drinking water?
http://www.scientificamerican....
Aga said even without knowing exact impacts, consistently seeing antibiotics show up in effluent is concerning.
“Even at low levels you don’t want to have people ingest antibiotics regularly because it will promote resistance,” she said.
http://www.newrepublic.com/art...
It looked at samples from 50 large-size wastewater treatment plants nationwide and tested for 56 drugs including oxycodone, high-blood pressure medications, and over-the-counter drugs like Tylenol and ibuprofen. More than half the samples tested positive for at least 25 of the drugs monitored, the study said. High blood pressure medications appeared in the highest concentrations and most frequently.
Desalination is still expensive and thirst can be very, very, motivational. That, and thanks to their totally fucked water rights distribution, California will probably still be exporting alfalfa and bottled water as they are installing deathstills to reclaim the body's water of the dead.
Well i isn't just poo and pee in there, there's a lot of chemicals as well.
Would the purification process remove everything? That sounds very very expensive.
And if it wouldn't remove everything then you will get exposure to SSRI's, antibiotics, and whatever else spawns up in that chemical soup.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Wrap it up in Patriotism. Wrap up anything in the American flag, and Americans will line up claiming to be the first to drink their neighbors piss before anyone else did.
You can wrap up s**t sandwhiches in an American Flag printed taco, and people will be clamoring to be the first ones to eat it.
They worry about indisputably harmless stuff like this when the real threat is actually more likely to be other idiots who think it's a good idea to flush prescription drugs (or other controlled substances) down the toilet. Not to mention used antifreeze or even motor oil.
and to be diluted by the natural water supply
You have that backwards. What they pump in the ground is more pure than what's already there. It's reverse osmosis water, and far, far cleaner than what comes out of the tap. (And the plant is a technological marvel.)
Apparently there is no water filtration plant in the US that can get rid of the hormones from birth control pills. So in heavily populated areas, enjoy your lady hormones, guys.
This works so well on cruise ships as hardly anyone ever gets sick on those. A tiny hole in a filter membrane is huge to bactera and viruses.
Lots of people are worried about bacteria but 99% of the bacteria on the planet doesn't like humans and is safe to consume. The bacteria that lives with humans or comes out of humans is what will kill people.
Then there are prions which will pass through these filters which is why the systems that don't concentrate diseases always have a large natural buffer that is full of creatures that mess with whatever manages to get pass the sewage treatment systems. The places that are talking about bypassing a large natural reserve is asking for trouble. A large lake or a river have plenty of life that will kill off most of the nasty things but if that cycle is short circuted, there are plenty of things that survie in fairly pure water for days or weeks.
With the cost of deslinating water, it makes more sense to use ocean water than water with too high of human waste and the health risks are far lower as well.
... which is mostly what you get on the Caribbean islands. In fact I prefer distilled after I have been soaking in salt water in my wetsuit for five or six hours per day. So the question is, How purified is "recycled"? If someone can make the seawater off Grand Cayman drinkable . . .
At least for me, the poop isn't what I would be worried about. It would be all the prescription drugs in the recycled water.
"Water? You mean like from the toilet?"
Proponents claim that recycled water has better quality than EPA standards. Such argument means little because many substances found in water are not regulated since they do not occur (in non recycled water) in significant quantities or toxicity is unknown or debated (as in Arsenic).
Another item not being discussed is amount of drugs in recycled water.
California, your fucked up agricultural water rights system is making you drink your own pee. Enjoy.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Yeah, the water in our reservoirs is pretty skanky, filled with algae, fish pee, and critters, yet the water coming out of my tap is perfectly clear and safe. I find it hard to believe treated sewage water is dirtier than lake and river water.
Somehow river water supplies get rotavirus in it, and the treatments in use don't seem to remove it completely.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
Excerpt from that article:
"Rotaviruses are stable in the environment and have been found in estuary samples at levels up to 1â"5 infectious particles per US gallon, the viruses survive between 9 and 19 days.[23] Sanitary measures adequate for eliminating bacteria and parasites seem to be ineffective in control of rotavirus, as the incidence of rotavirus infection in countries with high and low health standards is similar.[1]"
So in fact, it seems that "recycled" water is NOT *completely* safe.
That said, it's better to drink recycled water than to die of thirst, or drink untreated water directly from the environment.
--PeterM
Sorry, but why do you shit in drinking water to begin with? Just use a compost toilet. The composting process kills almost every known disease, and if it is your own toilet, you know what diseases went in, so you know what can come out (it probably won't, and if it does, your body has learned to cope with it). It's literally dirt cheap, low-tech, and can be implemented almost anywhere. And you get better compost as well. See the Humanure Handbook for all the details.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
and humans drink recycled sewage water.
Stop big Ag subsidies and archaic water rights.
Use the greywater for farm irrigation. This is what they do in the Middle East. The farms can consume all the water you could ever treat and more. We already know they're using more water than the settlements, so this will always be true. Once this is done there will be no need to conserve domestic water in the cities except for the capacity of the treatment plant. There will only be a need to conserve irrigation water in the cities because that water doesn't end up in the sewer.
Stop calling it recycled sewage. It's recycled water. And everyone drinks it.
As this page eloquently explains (or you can go to the Wikipedia page to get a lot more details), the wastewater that flows out of your house goes to a water treatment plant where it goes through four stages:
1) Pre-Treatment - large objects (tampons, leaves, wet wipes, etc.) are removed
2) Primary Treatment - fat & grease is removed; organic solids are removed
3) Secondary Treatment - remaining organic matter is broken down and removed; soaps & detergents and other contaminants are removed
4) Tertiary Treatment - nitrogen & phosphorous compounds are removed & oxygen levels are balanced; further processing & cleaning (depending on state laws)
What remains is dumped back into a river, which, surprise, gets pumped out to supply water to the next urban community downstream!
Again, it's recycled water. Whether it's pumped out of the river for tap, or whether it's pumped, filtered, bottled, and sold at your supermarket, it's recycled water.
You're assuming that rotavirus is immortal or something. If the existing practices for water sanitation are insufficient to kill it, then clearly those need to be looked at so it is killed.
We already put a certain amount of chlorine in our water. Does your water recycling concept take that into consideration? There are other things... a fine filter would remove the virus. Those are expensive but maybe that's just a requirement?
Also you can look at UV treatment... that works sometimes... I'd say boil it, but if you're doing that you might as well just use sea water.
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When I grew up in Colorado Alamosa disposed of treated sewage into the Arkansas River. Pueblo used Arkansas River water, treated it, and sent it right back into the river. La Junta took its water from the Arkansas, treated it and used it. It then treated the sewage and put it back into the river. Everyone seemed aware and untroubled by this simple fact: Everyone downstream from at least Alamosa was drinking some treated sewage and nobody bought bottled water.
Standard bathroom graffiti in Alamosa read "Flush twice! Pueblo needs the water!!!". In Pueblo you saw the same thing with La Junta substituted for Pueblo.
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
So you want to spray sewage over the almond trees instead ?
I'm always fascinated and amazed by the lengths Californicators will go to continue living in a place that isn't conducive to natural mass populations. Go ahead. Drink your shit.
Most waste water discharge is not dirtier than reservoir water. It is cleaner.
- I thought lots of municipalities already did this stuff. For ages. Bunch of physical, chemical, mechanical filters/treatments. We simply avoid thinking about it, like with many things we do/ingest. Including the affluents. "Everyone poops."
- Poop ain't shit. It's an infectious slurry at first, but the components under that aren't particularly important. Bunch of carbon. Fibers, fats. Carbon, hydrogen. Organic material - as in, what you eat. The point (as seen above repeatedly) is we should be far more concerned about chemicals that get dumped (flushed) into the water. And I even reckon one guy flushing a pill or two will be diluted to homeopathic (lol) tier - it's an office or factory dumping a bottle of something every week, all year round, that I'd be nervous about.
> beaten back by entitled, squeamish whiners who denounced
- FTFY. See above point. Sell them bottled water at gouge rates. We've already observed that (1) people don't know or care about what it actually is so long as it has a picture of mountains or fields or glaciers on the tin (must not have a bear next to a river); and (2) they can't judge which contents matter anyway.
The technology already exists. Motion-sensing faucets. Motion-sensing hand dryers. Motion-sensing towel dispensers. Press a button and you get 30 seconds of shower water. You shampoo and scrub without wasting water. When you're ready to rinse, you press the button again. At the end of your shower, you've used two or three minutes of water, instead of wasting 10 or 15 minutes. Combine this with flash-heating technology, and you could save another 30 seconds from being wasted while waiting for the water to warm up.
The interesting thing is that here on Slashdot an idiot who whines about almonds/rice/alfalfa actually gets modded up. How many makers read Slashdot? If you want to save water, then STFU and do it. Better get busy, or the finger-wagging Nazis will have us all eating Soylent.
Why can't we recycle the shower water into toilet water? Some RVs do this to save water, why don't homes?
It's not so much the pooh factor, it's all the chemicals we pour down the drain.
X
This is old news for a different part of the country. North Texas has been in drought for several years now, and they put this idea into practice:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/toilet-to-tap-wastewater-recycling-begins-in-wichita-falls-texas/
I'm reminded of nuclear power plants: everything is great when brand-new; everything functions, maintenance is top-notch and top-priority.
But in the fullness of time (and the penny-pinching greed of both privately and publicly-held entities), along with all too human facets of complacency and sloth... that is when the shit comes down. In this case, more than just figuratively.
Over the years there have been articles about what kinds of chemicals they are having difficulty filtering out. Prozac was just one such example.
Even people who approve of this idea are saying toilet-to-tap. You may as well be saying ass-to-mouth.
And you never go ass-to-mouth.
Actually, closer to 100% of water is recycled. Possible exceptions being that underground lake they found in Antarctica (Lake Vostok) that has been sitting there for the past 15-25 million years, and a few places like it.
Still doesn't mean that it's not recycled dinosaur toilet water. There's been a few nights I thought I recycled all the fresh water myself, or that's what my kidneys (and their damned stones) were telling me.
Hell, just about every porn video out these days has "toilet to tap" scenery. Should be easy to get by the "activists" these days.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
...you have been drinking "toilet to tap" your entire lives. You think animal urine doesn't make it into the rivers and groundwater supplies? Where, exactly, do you think all that stuff that goes into septic tanks goes?
Are you serious? How can a human being be so clueless? Do you have any idea of all the various things that are put down the drain? Treatment of waste water is only to the point where biological and chemical oxygen demand is reduced such that wildlife is not immediately killed where the effluent is expelled or some distance from this...maybe. There has to be such a great imaginary construction of physics defying energy consumption and mass transportation (where does all the non water stuff go?) to even begin to imagine that wastewater is anywhere near as clean as collected rain that it is difficult to believe that you are being honest.
using treated sewage to create drinking water is a proposition that has proved difficult to sell to customers
And I thought you people fancied yourselves as green.
Lots of food is bad. Well stocked grocery stores are evil. Now get back to the labor death-camp and starve.
Take the 'recycled' water and use it for agriculture, industry, and landscaping, and leave the 'first use' water for people.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Open the valve between input and output and ...
I thought that the stream from a municipal waste treatment plant includes an unhealthy concentration of un-metabolized pharma.
The way to get rid of these is distillation as in let it evaporate and fall back as rain.
So direct recycling is problematic.
All the water in the world is about a 7C dilution of Adolf Hitler's piss.
Considering how much California seems to be willing to spend on dubious infrastructure such as not so high speed trains, why aren't they building desalinization plants to solve their water shortage?
The length of the path makes a difference. The longer the waste products stay in a lake, river, or in the ground, the bigger the chance that some organism will interact with it, and break it down.
No need for nukes. Pump disinfected seawater (not desalinated) to the homes and businesses. You can bathe/swim/flush to your heart's content. Drinking water can be obtained from table-top desalination appliances, probably no bigger than a coffee maker. Solar powered desalination is another option for those who own a home. Solar or solar-electric hybrid could also supply enough for lawn irrigation. The desalination brine would be diluted by the overwhelming use of ordinary seawater. Plus, the drought will not last forever.
Some adjustments would be necessary. Drinking fountains would need to be retrofitted. Some businesses might be impacted. But the technology already exists, so it's not the end of the world.
Bear Grylls has been doing it for years!
Sell it as lemonade or fudge
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeiSx5MNDvg
Water shortage? The entire freaking ocean is right there. A large slice of California's population lives within a few miles of the coast. In-home desalination can be accomplished by a device no more complicated than a table-top coffee maker. Everyone desalinates exactly what they need, using either solar power or low cost off-peak electricity.
A chemistry book (forgot title, this was 40 years ago I read) when discussing vast amount of water molecules it said a glass of water will contain about 3 of them from the same glass of water that Columbus drank from.
mfwright@batnet.com
Actually, I think the appropriate public health measure vs. rotavirus is already in place. Immunize children against it. It's probably a cheaper intervention than stricter water purification standards.
However, there are other possible risks with recycled water, such as residual drugs from human excretions. These should be studied, weighed, and something sane done about them. If the risk is really small, the sane thing to do is nothing.
--PM
Others have brought up the residual drug issue and that's a very good point. I don't have an answer for that. If they can't sort that out, then you are correct... we can't do this...
A possible solution as unpopular as it is would be to require drugs be biodegradable. That is unlikely to be accepted but absent that... I don't know how you recycle the water...
without... filters? The issue with filters is that they clog up really fast and it is absurdly expensive to replace them. But assuming you had that issue licked... filters.
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Dinosaurs pissed into the water now coming from the tap. Figuratively. Not Literarily.
Rain is recycled water. As such water is recycled since 4 billion years. Get over it.
People are idiots.
I kind of just always assumed that treated water was put back in the reservoirs anyway. I mean, it has been TREATED right? Wouldn't that make it cleaner than most lake water anyway?
Stop it! Logic has no place in politics!
* internet advises people to drink 2-3 L of fluids per day. * 365 days per year, 70 year lifespan -> 70k liters -> 70 m^3 over lifetime. * 7b ppl alive today. Everybody alive today will drink 500 m^3 of fluids. * the handwavey estimate is that half of the people who have ever lived are alive today. if this is true, then the entire human species has drunk 1000 m^3 of water. * the volume of the ocean is 1.3 10^9 km^3 -> 1.3 10^18 m^3.
You say "7b ppl alive today", but then multiply 70m^3 by 7. Either b=1, or your estimate is off by just a smidge, or 9 orders of magnitude.
Either way, most of the water we drink has not been previously drunk by another human. Dinosaurs, on the other hand, are a different story (obligatory xkcd).
So my cousin will finally get his wish to drink Angelina Jolies bathwater?
was indeed a visionary movie...
It's all very fine and scientific to say that H20 is H20 - but I think many distrust that there won't be occasional 'leaks' in the system.
Almond trees, for example, take about 10% of agriculture water, or 8% of all human-used water.
So if you are willing to pay the $ billions to compensate the almond farmers you would bankrupt by stealing their water, you could get about a 40% increase in the 20% share of non-agricultural water, to water your lawn and fill your swimming pool. California has sufficient water to drink and bathe after all - it's the lawns and pools that "suffer" in a drought. So you're really arguing in favor of reducing food production in favor of keeping lawns green and pools filled.
Oh, BTW - agriculture actually gets only about 40% of total human managed water - half of water that could be directed to human use goes to conservation areas. Yep - those water-hogging birds and animals and trees use more water than "big agriculture". Truly shameful of them not to give up some of that to make sure you can go swimming in your home pool, or golfing on soft green grass.
My well and septic system takes our waste, letting the liquid part leach back into the soil. Some distance away, my well sucks water out of the same general aquifer. The wonder of nature keeps the bad stuff far enough away.
Umm, price water the same for everyone. Problem solved.
Drugs delivered via patch directly to the blood stream put a lot less residue into sewage vs. pill form.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Is there any reason that California residents (who live near the ocean and have plentiful sunlight) cannot get their drinking water from a solar still?
http://water.usgs.gov/edu/drinkseawater.html
Is there an actual engineering reason? Because, while I'm not an engineer, it seems to me that the only thing archaic is that some people don't understand that the ocean is a source of water.
http://www.waterscarcitysolutions.org/assets/2030WRG_case_study_hong_kong.pdf
Some people might live in apartments where a solar still would be unworkable. But they could use electric-powered stills. If they were powered during off-peak hours, would this be a burden on the power grid (or the carbon footprint, if you prefer to think that way)?
that's an idea
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Not an original one, or I'd patent it.
Ducking
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
San Jose, CA, already has a dual water system. Reclaimed water is used in city buildings for flushing, and in city parks for irrigation. San Jose is a coastal city and has access to unlimited free ocean water from the Bay of San Francisco.
Most drugs are quite large molecules and not UV resistant. If it becomes a problem then we, in the Netherlands, will start installing UV installations after our sewage treatment plants. For now it is only done in large hospitals because there the medicine concentration is significantly higher. There are monitoring systems in place to test for drugs in the cleaned water after the sewage water treatment but the need to clean them out of there is just not all that big.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.