Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [85]
Just one day after the Santa Clara Valley water district, which serves San Jose, announced that it too would explore water reclamation, the district announced it would halt purchases of bottled water with public money. “We want to help educate the public that tap water is not only healthy and safe for them, but good for the environment,” said the vice chair of the district’s board. Communities in South Florida and Texas are also giving potable recycled wastewater serious consideration.
San Diego, which in the fall of 2007 tightened its already strict water-conservation measures, has been proposing and rejecting toilet-to-tap schemes for fifteen years. Among the more vocal opponents is a grassroots group called the Revolting Grandmas, who in their campaign against water reuse cite risks from endocrine disrupters, which end up in sewage when people either dump unused pharmaceuticals down the toilet or ingest and then excrete them.
There are good reasons to favor water reclamation (also called repurified water by those paid to promote it). It reduces pressure on freshwater supplies for nonpotable uses, such as watering golf courses and crops, and it enforces extreme cleanups of an end product that is otherwise dumped, significantly dirtier, into waterways that others drink from (or surf in, in the case of the Surfrider Foundation, part of the coalition that supports water recycling in San Diego). But reclamation systems are hugely expensive to build and run; they take many years to plan and construct; and some scientists doubt they can remove all pharmaceuticals and chemicals and neutralize the deadly 0157:H7. The National Research Council, in a 1998 report, concluded that reclaimed wastewater can be used to supplement drinking-water sources, but “only as a last resort and after a thorough health and safety evaluation.” Dr. Steven Oppenheimer, director of the Center for Cancer and Developmental Biology at California State University, Northridge, likens drinking recycled water to playing Russian roulette with human life.
As bad as toilet-to-tap sounds, I have to remind myself: all water is recycled. The same droplets that misted early angiosperms and slaked the thirst of archaeopteryx are still around today. In nature, sunlight, soil, microbes, and the passage of time purify water. But when engineers discharge treated sewage into reservoirs, instead of letting it percolate slowly through the earth, soil scientist Frank Pecarich says, the process is short-circuited. “When you replace Mother Nature’s system with tertiary treatment, you’re leaving out the tremendous bacteria-cleansing mechanism of the soil it must go through before it reaches the aquifer. There has been great success in getting recycled water to flow through bogs, marshes, and particularly sand to get fairly clean water, in effect letting the whole world of biology go to work for you.” But that’s not the system being considered by some cities, and that’s why Pecarich predicts toilet to tap will make people sick.
Honestly, the toilet-to-tap scenario—the one without massive dilution and a suitable lag between effluent and influent—frightens me. There’s too much room for human error: nonpotable recycled drinking water has accidentally made it into drinking water in at least four cities within a decade. Recently, a cross-connection in Chula Vista, California, was found to have been delivering treated sewage to taps in a business park for two years. Then there are mechanical snafus (just pronouncing the words membrane rupture makes me shudder), and bud get cuts, and system owners looking to turn a buck by looking the other way. Toilet to tap seems to be giving up, admitting we’re out of options.
But that is hardly true. Water experts believe there is enough freshwater on the planet for everyone: it just isn’t in the right place at the right time. So what can we do? Besides reclaiming polluted water with massive reverse osmosis machines, there are other so-called hard options, such as building storage dams and