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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
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
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.
The ocean is 98% fish pee.
And the remaining 2% is recycled pirate corpses.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!