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> Highly treated wastewater ... is injected into nearby groundwater, to be pumped up and treated to drinking-water standards by local utilities. This seems con
by abeppu 3y ago
> Highly treated wastewater ... is injected into nearby groundwater, to be pumped up and treated to drinking-water standards by local utilities.
This seems convoluted; if it's clean enough to go in the ground, and ground-water is clean enough to treat and then add to the drinking-water supply, is it really just optics to use the local aquifer as a buffer, or is there some actual benefit from traveling through the ground (maybe different dissolved minerals?).
- astrodust 3y agoIt's just perception. People don't like drinking processed piss.
- Eisenstein 3y agoAll water was once dinosaur piss.
- hanniabu 3y agoI don't care about human waste, that's easily taken care of. I'm concerned with all the chemicals and toxic materials that get dumped down the drain.
- sp332 3y agoSoil is a great filter. There are some contaminants that will get through, but the downstream treatment systems can focus on those. Here is a recent paper showing that just letting runoff filter through a 45cm-thick "rain garden" reduces a certain toxic chemical (6PPD-Quinone) by 90%. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.3c00203 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.3c00203
- abeppu 3y agoThanks for sharing, that's really interesting -- but do those contaminants remain in the soil? It seems like one of the following should be true: - the treated wastewater being pumped into the ground has been so successfully treated that it doesn't contain more harmful contaminants than ground water, and so it could be just piped through to the same treatment as ground water, saving a pump-into-ground + pump-out-of-ground cycle - the treated wastewater being pumped into the ground contains harmful contaminants at a greater concentration than existing ground water, which the soil may mediate before being pumped back up for further treatment -- but the concentration of these contaminants in the soil will increase as a result