All of my drinking water is recycled. Pull it out of the well, put it back in the septic system in the ground where it came from.
We need to start drinking recycled wastewater
21–30 of 84 posts
Re: We need to start drinking recycled wastewater
#22Wouldn't most tap water in the US fit under this definition? My father used to work at a waste water treatment facility. At one end of the plant was all of the raw sewage that came in from the city, at the other end, it had been cleaned and purified to the point you could swim in it and probably be OK drinking from it. I know that from there they didn't just dump the water back into the local rivers and ponds, it wen…
Very few cities don't 'just dump the water back' - that's actually the way it works outside of a very very small handful of places. The reason for these treatment plants is so that the water that gets dumped into the environment is clean. Well, pretty clean - there are still things that aren't removed today with even the most advanced treatments, such as hormones/contraceptives...
Re: We need to start drinking recycled wastewater
#23> finding that while 49% were willing to try recycled wastewater, 13% refused, and the rest weren't sure. This is the end result of an education system that has not prepared people for the modern world, if we engineer a solution that produces water of a purity greater than water from a reservoir and and half of people are still not sure it is safe to drink then we have a massive problem. For the record: I've no issue…
> This is the end result of an education system that has not prepared people for the modern world
Not quite.
> if we engineer a solution that produces water of a purity greater than water from a reservoir
This statement hinges on our ability to accurately measure the purity. This is far from settled and I can understand the hesitation.
Personally, I would take a look at the methods of purification. If they're using tons of chemicals, and most purification processes do, then I would pass.
I would prefer they use osmosis and then dump the contents out where they can filter down to natural aquifers, allowing natural filtration to take place. Then you pump it back up using the infrastructure we already have in place and put it through the regular process.
Re: We need to start drinking recycled wastewater
#24Wouldn't most tap water in the US fit under this definition? My father used to work at a waste water treatment facility. At one end of the plant was all of the raw sewage that came in from the city, at the other end, it had been cleaned and purified to the point you could swim in it and probably be OK drinking from it. I know that from there they didn't just dump the water back into the local rivers and ponds, it wen…
Very few cities don't 'just dump the water back' - that's actually the way it works outside of a very very small handful of places. The reason for these treatment plants is so that the water that gets dumped into the environment is clean. Well, pretty clean - there are still things that aren't removed today with even the most advanced treatments, such as hormones/contraceptives...
My family owns a civil engineering company that deals with wastewater management.
A lot of it is treated with bacterial vats, chemicals, and UV, and then run back into local tributaries, because while it's safe for the environment, it isn't quite safe for human consumption.
A glass or two won't hurt you, but I wouldn't want to drink it regularly, mostly due to the cocktail of pharmaceuticals that can't be filtered.
A lot of that water is also used to irrigate large tracks of land not used for food. Many golf courses use this method, and sometime big pipes just run through forests spraying treated water onto drought-prone areas.
Once you get past the "ick" factor, waste water management is actually pretty cool.
Re: We need to start drinking recycled wastewater
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very few cities don't 'just dump the water back' - that's actually the way it works outside of a very very small handful of places. The reason for these treatment plants is so that the water that gets dumped into the environment is clean. Well, pretty clean - there are still things that aren't removed today with even the most advanced treatments, such as hormones/contraceptives...
My family owns a civil engineering company that deals with wastewater management. A lot of it is treated with bacterial vats, chemicals, and UV, and then run back into local tributaries, because while it's safe for the environment, it isn't quite safe for human consumption. A glass or two won't hurt you, but I wouldn't want to drink it regularly, mostly due to the cocktail of pharmaceuticals that can't be filtered. A…
Don't you risk building up pharmaceuticals in the soil around the forest pipes?
What a weird world.
Re: We need to start drinking recycled wastewater
#26Hm, how about reversing "toilet-to-tap" into "tap-to-toilet"? I guess its too complicated to flush toilet with water from shower or dishes.
Re: We need to start drinking recycled wastewater
#27Hm, how about reversing "toilet-to-tap" into "tap-to-toilet"? I guess its too complicated to flush toilet with water from shower or dishes.
Those "Tiny" houses do it already. We have the technology.
Re: We need to start drinking recycled wastewater
#28I went to the BBC story kindly submitted here to read it. At the BBC story that opens this thread, I see a linked BBC story "Solving a Space Station's Toilet-Shaped Problem"[1] describing how difficult it has been to do water recycling on the International Space Station, where the extreme cost of transporting more water up into near earth orbit would provide a powerful incentive to develop technology to recycle water. Being in free fall in the limited space (and isolation from earth's ecosystem) of the space station provides its own tough engineering challenges, but evidently even rocket scientists haven't completely figured out how to do toilet-to-tap water recycling in all needed cases.
[1] http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150527-solving-a-space-sta...
Re: We need to start drinking recycled wastewater
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
My family owns a civil engineering company that deals with wastewater management. A lot of it is treated with bacterial vats, chemicals, and UV, and then run back into local tributaries, because while it's safe for the environment, it isn't quite safe for human consumption. A glass or two won't hurt you, but I wouldn't want to drink it regularly, mostly due to the cocktail of pharmaceuticals that can't be filtered. A…
Don't you risk building up pharmaceuticals in the soil around the forest pipes? What a weird world.
I'd imagine (guessing) most pharmaceuticals are fairly short-lived vs biological processes? Otherwise, you'd either only need one pill or it would build up in your body.
I suppose it's possible that they're only broken down by human biological processes, but that seems unlikely given the diversity of microbial life in the environment (and inside us!).
Re: We need to start drinking recycled wastewater
#30Hm, how about reversing "toilet-to-tap" into "tap-to-toilet"? I guess its too complicated to flush toilet with water from shower or dishes.
Those "Tiny" houses do it already. We have the technology.
It was pretty common in soviet Czechoslovakia. Another "high tech" communist trick is to put flush reservoir to ceiling, higher pressure requires about 30% less water.