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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."
"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
Not to mention fish cum.
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
Yeah, that's why I only drink bottled cometary water. Artisanal too, I don't support the big comet water industries.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
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
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.
But that's the best part of the fish:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milt
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.
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.
With democracy and a basically stupid and anti-science population, this type of leadership is not possible anymore. Politicians have to pander to the lowest common denominator in order to get elected.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Good leaders get kick out of office.
Why?
They try to force change, people don't like change.
They will bend the rules to get their way, this can cross the line into corruption.
They will step on their opponents, this will toughen the resolve of their opponents so they will be stronger next time around.
The realize the popular opinion, is based on assumptions made by a population with partial insight into the issue, and that 50% of the population has below average intelligence to really fully understand it.
Bad leaders stay in.
Why?
They are the nice guy you want to have a beer with.
They try to keep things as they are.
They flow with public opinion.
They try to make you feel good about yourself.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The ocean is 98% fish pee.
And the remaining 2% is recycled pirate corpses.
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.
If California bottled it and called it "Astronaut Water" poeple would pay a premium for it.
Ohh FFS -- Astronaut Water? That would sell about as good as Astronaut Ice Cream -- remember that crap? Who buys that anymore? Whens the last time you saw anything "astronaut" related being "cool" or trendy?
Nrg2O, PowerWater, UltraDrizzle -- those are the names todays market requires -- names that evoke health, fitness and POWER, names that will get your average fat-fuck moron to scoot on over to their nearest Walmart and buy a case.
>> democracy and a basically stupid and anti-science population
I agree, but if you ever try to advocate for democracy participation qualifiers to weed out the stupid (e.g., high school graduate, X years of work experience, at least XX years old, living independently, having your own ID, passing some kind of literacy test) and all you'll hear is "racist", "elitist" and stories about poll taxes.
here's the problem with targeting the 70+% users. did you know that only 20% of water in CA goes to residential, commercial and industrial sources? 80% of water is used by agriculture, who has powerful lobbies and locks on several state senators and assemblymen. Did you know that in CA some farmers grow rice? Some grow parsley, which is almost as water intensive as rice and is bundled up as hay and sent off to china to feed Chinese cows? And despite this, farmers are a third rail of water politics, and instead people are putting flyers on MY door encouraging me to "minimize toilet flushing" and now to drink pee water. No thanks.
"Water? You mean like from the toilet?"
The one nasty trick, even with residential effluent; but especially if commercial/industrial gets mixed in thanks to antiquated, defective, or illicit sewer piping; is that sewage is only mostly dangerous because of the bacteria.
Drugs of various sorts show up in residential sewage all the time, and have widely varying resistance to breakdown by low cost measures(if you throw enough resources at a chemist just about anything can be separated out, right down to isotopes; but if you can't biodegrade it, destroy it with UV exposure of modest intensity and duration, settle it out with flocculants, or similar cheap bulk methods, the cost will be high enough to be dubiously relevant to water treatment even in the first world); heavy metals show up from time to time and don't do much degrading at all, nasty persistent organic compounds are always a possibility. People just dump all kinds of ghastly stuff down the drain.
There is a certain...history... associated with people trying to dispose of the byproducts of sewage treatment, where most of these goodies end up, by means cheaper than landfilling. The current strategy involves re-branding them as 'biosolids', composting them long enough that the bacterial pathogens are (mostly) weeded out, and then trying to find suckers willing to use them as fertilizer.
It's too bad, really. If it were just shit, moderately competent composting practices would turn it quite readily into a safe, useful, soil additive. Dealing with the modest; but very much nonzero, levels of heavy metals and persistent organic compounds has proven to be really hairy.
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.
What would you consider proof?
I'm always baffled by people that ask for proof on things without bothering to state what they would consider valid evidence. I'm sure I could get you a report from some scientists and engineers that said it was safe. But I'm rather certain you wouldn't accept that as evidence.
Which means I'm somewhat at a loss as to what you even mean when you ask for proof? Theoretically, what could I possibly say or post or provide that you would accept and then say "okay, I accept it is safe"?
As to proving safety versus inferring it... that is a good point, however, I'll point out that if they're wrong millions of people are going to get very sick very quickly.
So I frankly doubt they're cutting too many corners with the safety because if they do... politicians might literally go to jail. Which is normally almost impossible.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
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!
I only drink artisinal, free range, organic, fair trade, GMO-free, small batch, craft water.
Oh wait, that's beer. I drink liquid water.
I draw the line at River Ankh "water", which you can slice up and chew (Terry Pratchett, RIP, Soul Music)
In some places in the US, this is the case with water rights, but not in any place I know of in the Bay Area. Berkeley and Oakland actively support the installation of rainwater recapture systems.
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.
doesn't conservation of matter pretty much guarantee everything is just recycled?
* 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.
so even if no water has been recycled, there are a billion trillion liters of water in the oceans that have never been drunk by humans.
Yes, we have to take the clean water from the waste treatment plant, dechlorinate it, return it to nature, then retrieve most of it from nature, clean it again to get all the nature out, and then chlorinate it again to kill off any nature we missed.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Liar.
http://www.news10.net/story/we...
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
I don't know the details of proposed and actual treatment mechanisms for non-pathogen problems (though here is an outline of the regulations surrounding levels of arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, selenium, and zinc permitted in the US. Regulation of organic pollutants and hydrocarbon levels were considered; but dropped and don't currently apply); but my understanding is that 'composting' on a wastewater treatment scale is not much like what people do in their back gardens, and is generally done in relatively vast hardware far from the neighbors. If anything, doing it properly probably scales up better than it scales down(amateur composters frequently fail to achieve optimal temperatures, moisture, etc. That's merely inefficient if you are dealing with grass clippings; but potentially fatal if dealing with intestinal pathogens; professionals can afford expertise, instruments, and process control, if they care).
Unfortunately, once you get past metals and pathogens(metals are at least measured, pathogens are acknowledged as a threat), you get a whole lot of 'more research needed'(the usual answer on endocrine disruptors and pharmaceutical persistence); or 'ooh, it's just a teensy bit, and we aren't required to model bioaccumulation from populations exposed to higher levels of contaminants in food producing biosolids higher in contaminants, which produce more contaminated food, and so forth..'(this is why dioxins, dibenzofurans, and similar known-nasty carbon/chlorine creations aren't covered by final regulations).
In the long run, we've obviously survived exposure to this planet, trace metals and all; and more than a few unpleasant chemicals, so I'd hope that the problems can be worked out; but the financial pressure from people who just don't want to deal with the cost of incineration or landfilling has led to some rather questionable decisions. You tell someone that if they spread the stuff over a large enough area, they get to call it 'soil treatment'; but if they bury it all in one place they need to abide by standards for non-permeable landfill construction to keep the contaminants from leaching out, you create a deeply perverse incentive.
Better separation of industrial sources is an obvious first step(it's always more expensive to un-mix things after the fact than it is to keep them separate); but I get a lot of 'more research needed' when it comes to household disposal and drug excretion.
On the bright side, we don't use pig toilets anymore! So there is that.
Actually, my response would be that drinking large quantities of perfectly pure water is not very good for you and can even be dangerous. It strips away essential minerals from your body.
nah. here's your breakdown.
* "1/3" goes back into the groundwater." [citation needed]. I don't think it's self evident that just cuz some water soaks into crops and isn't used by the plants it goes back to the groundwater.
* "1/3 goes into rain and falls on the foothills." or it falls in Arizona, or Kansas, or the pacific ocean. There's no reason to think that evaporation stays in-state.
* "1/3 goes into my belly". Or into your belly, or Chinese belly, or shucked and thrown away. We're exporting water out of the state.
I will "minimize my toilet flushing" when the state enacts commonsense crop rationing methods that emphasize water-efficient crops over water-wasting crops.
Except that there's about a million other things they can use the processed toilet water for... Use the water from the aquifers for drinking, and use the processed water for irrigation, cooling, etc. The amount of water they are going to save by doing this still doesn't get them anywhere near being neutral. This is a silly thing to do.
X
Most people don't know what that but you are 100% correct.
I do 2 things to earn a living. I'm an IT Consultant and I operate a maple farm. We use Reverse Osmosis to separate most of the water from the maple sugar crystals. For me, pure water is the waste and the rest is my base product that I boil later.
My small RO machine can produce around 800 gallons of pure water in an hour depending on the pressure I apply on the membrane. With a properly maintained membrane, only H2O is produced, no viruses, no bacteria and no antibiotics can get beyond the membrane.. So yes, it is purer than well or tap water even the natural minerals are removed (they need to be re-added later). The pure water then created will often get polluted by the distribution pipes themselves however.
I would have no problem at all drinking waste water from Reverse Osmosis Filtrate.
Sometimes having enough or too much water leads to problems as well.
Being from Iowa it's hard for me to comprehend this huge use of water for agriculture. I have lived across 3/4 of the state now, work at an Ag company, and I rarely ever see any sort of irrigation system in place to water the crops- that is, corn and beans. Have seen a few systems setup for creating sod. When we experience drought the crops don't do so well- irrigation systems are just too expensive to implement for most farmers. Conversely we tile all of our fields and created a network (districts) of drainage ditches. This provides a nice path for all that agricultural waste to flow right into the rivers, which is where all that tiling and drainage ditches lead to- ultimately to either the Missouri and Mississippi.
Unfortunately for all of the states below along the Missouri and Mississippi our abundance of water provides them with all of our nitrates (http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/agriculture/2015/04/11/data-shows-nitrates-higher-improving-iowa-rivers/25606321/), our hog waste (http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/03/hog-wild-factory-farms-are-poisoning-iowas-drinking-water) and the Mississippi delta gets a ton of nice pfisteria from that hog waste to kill off all those pesky fisheries.
Sigh.
Do you not realize that:
(1) Municipal sewerage systems are *not* allowed to dump "black water" into rivers & lakes? Los Angeles is no different.
(2) Municipal water supplies all across the country have been processing nasty river water for 100 years?
(We live at the mouth of the Mississippi River, and get our drinking water from there. What comes out of the tap is... clean.)
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
in norcal it's illegal to capture the rain that falls on your property due to water rights regulations that go back 150 years
WHAT? Surely you jest. Please cite your source.
Personally, the idea of drinking toilet water doesn't bother me so much because of the e.coli or whatever but rather because of the residues of birth control pills, antidepressants, painkillers, etc. that are already found in our waterways. One can only imagine that recycling wastewater will result in higher concentrations of these substances that cannot be filtered out. I'm imagining some kind of mad-cow-type disease except that instead of working on individual cells in your brain, it works on the individuals in your society, causing weird, unpredictable changes in social behavior.
ok, take it down a notch maybe. doing more research, it was illegal a couple years ago when I lived in SF, but they changed the law in 2012.
http://www.jdsupra.com/legalne...
"Prior to enactment of the Act, the [State Water Control Resources Board] required all would-be appropriators to apply for and obtain a permit to appropriate water from any source, including water falling in the form of precipitation. Under the Act, however, the use of rainwater - defined as "precipitation on any public or private parcel that has not entered an offsite storm drain system or channel, a flood channel, or any other stream channel, and has not been previously been put to beneficial use" - is not subject to the California Water Code's SWRCB permit requirement [California Water Code 1200 et seq.] Relief from the permit requirement enables residents, private businesses, and public agencies to create new on-site water supplies to meet landscaping needs, thus decreasing the use of potable water to meet those needs."
but it's been through so many kidneys it _has_ to be pure!
First off, all water in earth was, at one time, "pee water" just as most nitrogen you breath in has, at one time, been flatulence. So this is only an emotional, but not a practical concern.
Secondly, there are other states to live in if you are strongly against your current state's path and feel that you cannot influence any change. Most other states have more water and less people as well.
*fewer