We need to start drinking recycled wastewater

"Think of H2Flow as an app for your teeth. The more Flow you take in, the more Sparkle Points you get! Get enough Sparkle Points and you're on your way to your first Aqua Badge..."

(Parks and Rec)

Weird article.

It talks about why toilet-to-tap is technically feasible, but not (specifically) why we "need" to adopt it, let alone whether it's inevitable. In Perth, or anywhere else. (Yes, it mentions general factors. But at no point does it make a logical case to support what it says in its headline).

BTW, a prediction: in the same way that corporations have strenuously (and in some cases, successfully) lobbied for prohibitions on labeling GMO-derived foods as such, or rGBH-derived milk as such -- one day we'll equal if not more energy put into efforts against against labeling toilet-derived drinking water as... exactly what it is.

And I'm sure one day, these efforts will ultimately succeed, also.

I was fine until I read this:

"If anything, recycled wastewater is relatively sweet,"

"The same effect is noticed with GMO foods. They're better in all regards, yet there are people who are afraid of them because "not natural"."

No. People are afraid about GMO because they expect private companies incentives not being healthy food but economic benefits (for them).

That means for example, that if they could flood our food plants with "Roundup" because the plants are resistant to it, and the pesticide ends in our food, and we start getting cancers 10 years from now they don't care at all if they can profit now from it.

"sometimes they rest on the idea that natural is better."

Well, natural is usually better because nature had millions of years of adaptation to the environment. You can protect yourself against natural sunlight or natural nuclear radiation because nature created mechanisms against their bad effects, but you can't protect against manmade Pultonium or xrays or cosmic radiation not protected by Ozone.

Day after pill for example contaminates water with estrogens that are not easy(cheap) to filter.

> They have a built-in, knee-jerk revulsion to drinking anything that came from sewage. That might not be rational or useful in 2016, but it has been tremendously useful over the past hundred thousand years of human social evolution.

That's not necessarily true. First-world capitalist society focused on intellectual labor does a great job of mentally dividing the world into 'clean' and 'unclean', where everything unclean moves invisibly through a series of subterranean pipes.

If you go to any farm, this division is much more vague. Farmers dump horse manure onto soil, from which your vegetables grow. Bruised and almost-rotting apples are picked, crushed, and pressed to create apple cider. Milk comes from the teats of a cow into a tin pail that might have some bits of hay that are later strained out.

The notion that humans have "built-in, knee-jerk revulsion" to sewage is a trained behavior arising from an ignorance or a visceral distance from production processes.

Many humans also probably have "built-in, knee-jerk revulsion" to the sight of animals being slaughtered, with their blood draining into a pool, yet will happily devour a plate of barbecue. Why would we consider that recycled water from sewage would be any different?