Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [84]
The most responsible thing I can drink, I realize, is none of the above. It is something plentiful and superclean. It makes use of existing infrastructure, which is owned and operated by the people, is delivered by pipe instead of truck, and stresses neither aquifers nor the creatures that rely upon them. The answer, it seems, is reclaimed water. Or, in less euphemistic terms, toilet to tap.
NASA, which pays five grand to transport every kilogram of water into outer space, is all over the idea, with plans to outfit the International Space Station with a super-high-tech recycling system that purifies urine (and cooking and wash water and sweat) into pristine drinking water. Singapore overcame the yuck factor with NEWater, the stuff I’d sampled with Mascha. The Goreangab Reclamation Plant, in Windhoek, Namibia (the most arid of all the sub-Saharan countries), blends reservoir water with treated effluent to make up between 10 and 35 percent of the city’s supply. Payson, Arizona, “recharges” its aquifer with treated sewage, which works its way through soil layers and eventually enters streams and then city reservoirs. The Upper Occoquan Sewage Authority, in Fairfax County, Virginia, has discharged recycled water to its reservoir for twenty-five years. Come to think of it, I was already getting a taste of toilet to tap: more than a hundred wastewater treatment plants discharge into New York City reservoirs. Our Department of Environmental Protection doesn’t advertise the fact, but it’s hardly a secret.
Tap-water drinkers in West Palm Beach haven’t been so lucky, in terms of transparency. As reported in the Palm Beach Post, during a drought emergency in May of 2007, the city’s utility briefly served its nearly 150,000 customers reclaimed sewage without even notifying them. Ordinarily, “reuse water”—which has been filtered, disinfected, and exposed to ultraviolet radiation—percolates through a grassy marsh for two years before it goes onto a well field, gets pumped into a canal that feeds reservoirs, and is piped into homes. In May, however, effluent was put directly onto the well field after being blended with water from old quarry pits. Because the city’s drinking water met or exceeded federal standards, city officials decided there was no need to notify customers.
It could have been worse: for a brief, panicky moment engineers considered putting treated effluent directly into the water supply. The Florida Department of Health nixed the idea, reminding them that the water treatment plant wasn’t equipped to remove sodium, nitrates, or chemical microconstituents such as hormones, antidepressants, or various “other unknowns.” And then there were the psychological issues.
Residents of West Palm have come to accept recycled water only because—after all that filtering and percolating—it has lost its identity as sewage. Images of a grassy marsh are a big help: they transform something tainted by man into something found in nature. Brown becomes green becomes blue. Eliminate those intermediate steps, a spokesman from the department of environmental protection warned, “and public concern may surface.”
The most important element in any toilet-to-tap scheme, of course, isn’t stringent rules and rigorous enforcement but a massive public-relations campaign. Guided by the industry’s best, officials in Orange County, California, held nine years’ worth of pizza parties, water-treatment-plant tours, and public meetings to explain how sewer water could be purified and then added to underground water supplies for drinking. The $481