“Toilet To Tap” Drinking Water Coming To Southern California
So, you want that neat? Or on the rocks?
FOUNTAIN VALLEY, Calif. — It used to be so final: flush the toilet, and waste be gone.
But on Nov. 30, for millions of people here in Orange County, pulling the lever will be the start of a long, intense process to purify the sewage into drinking water — after a hard scrubbing with filters, screens, chemicals and ultraviolet light and the passage of time underground.
On that Friday, the Orange County Water District will turn on what industry experts say is the world’s largest plant devoted to purifying sewer water to increase drinking water supplies. They and others hope it serves as a model for authorities worldwide facing persistent drought, predicted water shortages and projected growth.
The process, called by proponents “indirect potable water reuse” and “toilet to tap” by the wary, is getting a close look in several cities.
The San Diego City Council approved a pilot plan in October to bolster a drinking water reservoir with recycled sewer water. The mayor vetoed the proposal as costly and unlikely to win public acceptance, but the Council will consider overriding it in early December.
Water officials in the San Jose area announced a study of the issue in September, water managers in South Florida approved a plan in November calling for abundant use of recycled wastewater in the coming years in part to help restock drinking water supplies, and planners in Texas are giving it serious consideration.
“These types of projects you will see springing up all over the place where there are severe water shortages,” said Michael R. Markus, the general manager of the Orange County district, whose plant, which will process 70 million gallons a day, has already been visited by water managers from across the globe.
Full NYT article by Randall C. Archibold here.
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oh waiter, there’s a turd in my soup!
November 27th, 2007 at 10:34 ama whisky on chlore
oh wait, I’ll prefer your wine 
November 27th, 2007 at 10:53 amWell, nature does it anyway; this just speeds up the process somewhat. “Spaceship Earth”, anyone?
November 27th, 2007 at 12:33 pmKind of redundant for Californians (Hollywood-ites in particular) don’t you think?
I mean, they’ve been swallowing their own shit for decades …
November 27th, 2007 at 4:28 pmI saw how this is done during “Green Week” on the History Channel. Very clever technology. And the experimental station manager was saying that this method of distilling drinking water is very inexpensive compared with more traditional methods of obtaining potable water.
The waste water goes through many processes to filter out all the impurities. When finished, the water that is produced is crystal clear.
If we can produce potable water from raw sewage water, imagine what we could do, if we made getting off of Arab oil a national priority?
This is Yankee ingenuity at it’s finest. Hollywood is lucky that it doesn’t have to eat its own shit. But it might be drinking it real soon…at least a distilled version…
November 27th, 2007 at 6:07 pmIt is about time they were focredt o drink the crap they have been pushing off on the rest of US!
November 28th, 2007 at 8:01 amI’m no “green freak” by any means, but we should be trying hard to use technology for environmental hygiene.
Scrub the hell out of it, though.
November 29th, 2007 at 12:56 pm