One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Similarly, the water in your toilet bowl could be another person’s drink — after it’s rigorously filtered and becomes so pure that treatment facilities actually need to manually add minerals back into the water so it doesn’t, dare we say, flush important nutrients out of your own system.
Icky as it may sound on paper, recycled sewage or waste water may be the next game changer for water conservation, with many cities across the US already depending on these systems.
And encouragingly, a new study highlighted by Grist shows the public is open to the idea of drinking water recycled from their own sewage. In a survey of small communities of fewer than 10,000 people published in the journal Water Resources Research, residents said they’d be willing to pay an average of $49 per month to have access to reused water. And hey, astronauts do it — so why shouldn’t the rest of us get access as well?
“I do think it is a bipartisan issue,” coauthor Todd Guilfoos, an economist at the University of Rhode Island, told Grist. “It’s often just cheaper than some of the other available solutions.”
In a nutshell, wastewater recycling works by first physically filtering the water, then subjecting it to reverse osmosis, and finally purifying it with ultraviolet light. It’s so effective that Nevada already reuses 85 percent of its water, another recent study cited by Grist found. Many cities already treat their sewage so it can be released into the ocean, but this method goes a step further to ensure the water’s safe for human consumption. That way, what was once your tap water becomes tap water again, instead of permanently becoming lost to the briny depths.
So why aren’t we using this everywhere? For one, the upfront cost of building the treatment facilities is steep. $49 per month might be enough for operating a reuse system, Guilfoos said, but “that doesn’t include what it would cost to actually build whatever water reuse infrastructure that you would need.”
Smaller municipalities would have to turn to state and federal grants to break ground, he suggested. And it’s these smaller communities, especially in agricultural regions, that could massively benefit from wastewater reuse, as they often have no alternatives but to ration water once supplies run low. Soaring temperatures brought by climate change has also exacerbated droughts across the US, forcing rural towns to drain their aquifers, a process that also causes the ground above to sink over time.
But while there’re still material concerns and obstacles in the way, at the very least, it does seem to getting some traction with the American people.
“There’s a visceral reaction to drinking reused water, particularly reused wastewater, that’s totally understandable,” Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley, who wasn’t involved in the research, told Grist. “But over time, that has faded as the notion of reusing water to augment water supplies, including for drinking water, has become increasingly legitimized.”
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