As 'Yuck Factor' Subsides, Treated Wastewater Flows From Taps
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SAN DIEGO -- Almost hidden in the northern hills, the pilot water treatment plant here does not seem a harbinger of revolution. It cost $13 million, uses long-established technologies and produces a million gallons a day.
But the plant's very existence is a triumph over one of the most stubborn problems facing the nation's water managers: if they make clean drinking water from wastewater, will the yuck factor keep people from accepting it?
With climate change threatening to diminish water supplies in the fast-growing Southwest, more cities are considering the potential of reclaimed water. A new report from the National Academy of Sciences said that if coastal communities used advanced treatment procedures on the effluent that is now sent out to sea, it could increase the amount of municipal water available by as much as 27 percent.
San Diego's success, 12 years after its City Council recoiled from the toilet-to-tap concept, offers a blueprint for other districts considering wastewater reuse.
For most of the four decades beginning in 1970, the arid West was the fastest-growing region in the country; the population of Nevada quintupled in that period while Arizona's nearly quadrupled. Continued population growth, unmatched by growth in water storage capacity, makes this a "new era in water management in the United States," the science group's report said.
"The pressures on water supplies are changing virtually every aspect of municipal, industrial, and agricultural water practice," it said.
Back in 1998, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Research Council, issued a study finding that supplementing stream flows or reservoirs with this water, a process called indirect potable reuse, was acceptable, although only as a last resort. Now, acceptance of reclaimed water for drinking is spreading, if slowly.
Funneling reclaimed water into water supplies is being considered in a variety of communities like Miami and Denver (which has experimented with the technology), as well as in drought-ravaged municipalities in Texas like Big Spring. The tiny mountain resort town of Cloudcroft, N.M., mingles reclaimed water with local well water. In Northern Virginia, reclaimed water has flowed into the Occoquan Reservoir for three decades.
First Published February 10, 2012 12:00 am
