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We need to start drinking recycled wastewater
- xylon 11y agolovely
- theseatoms 11y agoI genuinely do not understand the aversion to drinking recycled water. It's all recycled water!
- Xophmeister 11y agoTell that to the homoeopaths /s
- adrianN 11y agoIf drinking waste water makes you sick, drinking highly diluted waste water will cure you.
- avita1 11y agoThe article mentions mass desalination, but it doesn't actually go into how impractical it is compared to recycling wastewater. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/world/asia/11water.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/world/asia/11water.html
- zenir 11y agoMost tap water in Germany is "recycled" water. I think this goes for most of Europe? Drinking tap water and adding your on carbonate is even a thing here (German use the word as synonym for carbonated water). "If anything, recycled wastewater is relatively sweet" - Said no tap water drinker ever There are still worlds between the US and Europe..
- anotheryou 11y agoI think this is not true. Usually the recycled waste-water is send in to the rivers. The fresh water usually comes from dams, ground water or river bank filtration (you don't suck out of the river, but from a well right next to it, so it get's filtered by the ground in between). The water from the dams tastes really really good. The one from the big river (at least in my town) is very rich in minerals, not exactly the tastiest, but perfectly fine to drink too. The minerals build up in water cattle though and are annoying to clean off. German tap-water is usually cleaner than german bottled water I think. In the warmer parts of europe water is often is chlorinated I think, wouldn't want to drink it. I didn't read the article, but I'd be afraid of purely recycled water. I know the fish have problems because of contraceptives, which are hard to filter out and in Great Britain there are traces of ataractics even in the ground water.
- djrogers 11y agoNot true - ground water accounts for 80% of Germany's drinking water, with reservoirs accounting for the rest. Germany has a very strong set of waste water treatment laws, but that treated water is either used commercially, for irrigation, or dumped into rivers and lakes, just like it is here in the US. Before you get all high and mighty with your anti-americanism, check your facts.
- _Codemonkeyism 11y agoNot sure what -he- meant with "There are still worlds between the US and Europe", but there are worlds between Germany and the parts of the US (large cities West and East coast) where I've been. A lot of water has such a heavy chlorine smell and taste, I can't drink it - same goes for US soft drinks that are created with tap water, can't drink. There is practically no smell or taste in German tap water [0]. [0] I might be biased and not taste it any longer because of growing up here
- legulere 11y agoIs it? I think most water here in Germany comes from a long-distance water supply that is filled with water from aquifers (which regenerate fast enough though). Sure, the wastewater gets treated to be extremely clean, but I think it just gets pumped into rivers.
- noir_lord 11y ago> 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 with grey water recovery systems, every drop of water I've ever drank has been through at least a few fish in it's time.
- jbob2000 11y agoThe 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". I don't think this has to do with the education system. My friend's father has a terminal illness, and in his attempt to understand and rationalize it, he thought that he did it to himself by leading an "unnatural" lifestyle. The man has a masters in mathematics and owned a software company, he's quite intelligent. I think people just try to rationalize their situation, sometimes they rest on the idea that natural is better.
- 15charlimit 11y agoOne of the issues with GMO foods is that we don't actually know for a fact exactly how the changes we make in them work, or what effect they may have in the human body over long periods of time. We just don't know.
- jbob2000 11y agoThere are a lot of things we don't know. How do we know that non-GMO foods are good? Just because that's what we've done for thousands of years doesn't mean it's "right". Should we let people starve and die because "we don't know"? It's just intellectually dishonest to not use GMO foods because "we don't know". How will we ever know if we don't try them?
- stcredzero 11y ago
- jbob2000 11y agoSounds like this needs a brand change. "Recycled" kind of implies that there is still something "left behind". Why not call it BluWater or something simple and marketing-like? Follow up with some blah text like "BluWater is the freshest and cleanest water humanity has ever drank! You can get it straight from the taps!"
- maaarghk 11y agoDisturbingly, your extremely condescending idea is probably exactly the kind of thing that would actually work.
- SubZero 11y agoA condescending idea would have been to call it Brawndo. "It has electrolytes..."
- Skunkleton 11y agoHey! That's got what I crave!
- maxsilver 11y ago"StarWater - Water purified by the sun. So pure that even astronauts drink it!"
- zenir 11y agoNormally it is called sanitized, but that doesn't make a good headline
- ethbro 11y ago"Gently used" water
- anon4 11y ago"Purified Beer"
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- seivan 11y agoSingapore has invested a lot of tech into this as the Malaysia keeps fucking with their water supply. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEWater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEWater
- SubZero 11y agoWouldn'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 went back to the water treatment facility not too far away where it found its way back into homes.
- djrogers 11y agoVery 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...
- s_q_b 11y agoMy 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.
- JBReefer 11y agoDon't you risk building up pharmaceuticals in the soil around the forest pipes? What a weird world.
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- twothamendment 11y agoAll 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.
- jkot 11y agoHm, how about reversing "toilet-to-tap" into "tap-to-toilet"? I guess its too complicated to flush toilet with water from shower or dishes.
- mastahype 11y agoThose "Tiny" houses do it already. We have the technology.
- jkot 11y agoIt 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.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- gherkin0 11y agoWhen I visited Japan, I saw many toilets that had a little faucet/sink built into the toilet lid, so you could wash your hands with it before it was used to fill the tank. However, I'm not sure how practical that kind of thing would be to do at house-scale. You'd need to have extra set of plumbing, plus storage tanks for the greywater (and probably pumps to get it there), among other extra things.
- tokenadult 11y agoI 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-stations-toilet-shaped-problem http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150527-solving-a-space-sta...
- Cyph0n 11y agoWhat do rocket scientists have to do with designing water purification systems?
- tokenadult 11y agoWhat do rocket scientists have to do with designing water purification systems? On the assumption that you may not be a native speaker of English, I'll mention that here in the United States, at least, the term "rocket scientist" (which some people who work on the International Space Station project literally are) is a synonym for "very smart person." In other words, my statement is that even though the International Space Station presumably has enough prestige and budget as a project to hire very capable engineers, those engineers have not found it easy to design a toilet-to-tap water treatment system (as the linked article in my first comment reports). Yes, designing a system to work in free fall while confined to the space station is itself a difficult engineering problem, but even here on earth in normal-g conditions, it looks like there is a lot of engineering work still to do on the problem of potable water recycling.
- Cyph0n 11y agoAh, I misread the context. Thanks for the clarification.
- ryan606 11y agoThere would be no shortage of water if it was priced correctly. Instead, nonsensical "water rights" contribute to less-than-optimal uses (like growing rice in the California desert, or water-hogging almond trees) and shortages for those who need it.
- PretzelPirate 11y agoLets not forget the huge amount of water wasted on growing feed for livestock. Its ridiculous how much less water farmers would need if they grew crops from human consumption rather than cows (and yes, some cows craze on open land for food, but that has plenty of other issues associated with it).
- funkysquid 11y agoWell cities have a somewhat captive market - if they pump it to your house, you'll either use it or pay extra for bottles, and at the least you won't shower or flush your toilet with bottled water.
- cameroncf 11y agoEveryone who lives downstream of a water treatment plant is already drinking (diluted) recycled wastewater. Most of the liquid water on the planet has already passed through a human body countless times. It's all recycled. This is not news.
- kpil 11y agoIn a way I do. I drink water that comes from a lake that about 1 million people poops into... On the other hand, it's a big lake. I'm lucky in one way to live in Sweden where there is virtually unlimited fresh water (except in a few places). On the other hand, it doesn't stop people from trying to save water, for no particular reason at all, other than some general climate angst. Water is really cheap - somwhere around 1 EUR per m3, and there are no big lawns that needs water. (And if they do, and it's large, you probably have a lake or a stream within pumping distance nearby.) It's a bit counterproductive. Old sewer pipes are clogging up because of modern toilets that use very little water, and dishwashers and washing machines should probably be set up to use ten times more water in cold pre-cycles and while rinsing, to be able to save a bit on the warm cycles. I can add that we probably have one of the best waste treatment facilities in world, so the total volume through the system is more or less irrelevant, except some marginal costs for chemicals and pumping. But no. EU mandates that saving water is important... The utility companies are now forced to increase the water rates- typically the fixed component, since the total used volume- and their budget- is shrinking.
- kafkaesq 11y agoWeird 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.
- pcurve 11y agoI was fine until I read this: "If anything, recycled wastewater is relatively sweet,"
- DrScump 11y agoWell, diabetes is becoming more prevalent.
- Joof 11y agoI'll be honest; I always assumed this was already standard practice in places where it made sense. Is this untrue?
- justnot4me 11y agoIt is pouring with rain outside; as it often does in every part of the UK where the BBC are based. It may be that in some parts of the world people do need to start drinking each others urine; but unless the climate changes here; I think we can probably stick with the stuff that falls out of the sky.