Is Drinking from the Toilet Bowl the Best Way to Deal with Water
Shortages?

By Elizabeth Royte, AlterNet. Posted September 20, 2008.

More and more cities are implementing "toilet to tap" programs as the
answer to our water crisis. But is it the best and safest option?

This piece originally appeared in the New York Times Magazine.

Before I left New York for California, where I planned to visit a
water-recycling plant, I mopped my kitchen floor. Afterward, I emptied
the bucket of dirty water into the toilet and watched as the foamy
mess swirled away. This was one of life's more mundane moments, to be
sure. But with water infrastructure on my mind, I took an extra moment
to contemplate my water's journey through city pipes to the
wastewater-treatment plant, which separates solids and dumps the
disinfected liquids into the ocean.

A day after mopping, I gazed balefully at my hotel toilet in Santa
Ana, Calif., and contemplated an entirely new cycle. When you flush in
Santa Ana, the waste makes its way to the sewage-treatment plant
nearby in Fountain Valley, then sluices not to the ocean but to a
plant that superfilters the liquid until it is cleaner than rainwater.
The "new" water is then pumped 13 miles north and discharged into a
small lake, where it percolates into the earth. Local utilities pump
water from this aquifer and deliver it to the sinks and showers of 2.3
million customers. It is now drinking water. If you like the idea, you
call it indirect potable reuse. If the idea revolts you, you call it
toilet to tap.

Opened in January, the Orange County Groundwater Replenishment System
is the largest of its type in the world. It cost $480 million to
build, will cost $29 million a year to run and took more than a decade
to get off the ground. The stumbling block was psychological, not
architectural. An aversion to feces is nearly universal, and as
critics of the process are keen to point out, getting sewage out of
drinking water was one of the most important public health advances of
the last 150 years.

Still, Orange County forged ahead. It didn't appear to have a choice.
Saltwater from the Pacific Ocean was entering the county's water
supply, drawn in by overpumping from the groundwater basin, says Ron
Wildermuth, who at the time we talked was the water district's
spokesman. Moreover, population growth meant more wastewater, which
meant building a second sewage pipe, five miles into the Pacific -- a
$200 million proposition. Recycling the effluent solved the disposal
problem and the saltwater problem in one fell swoop. A portion of the
plant's filtered output is now injected into the ground near the
coast, to act as a pressurized barrier against saltwater from the
ocean.

Factor in Southern California's near chronic drought, the county's
projected growth (another 300,000 to 500,000 thirsty people by 2020)
and the rising cost of importing water from the Colorado River and
from Northern California (the county pays $530 per acre-foot of
imported water, versus $520 per acre-foot of reclaimed water), and
rebranding sewage as a valuable resource became a no-brainer. With the
demand for water growing, some aquifers dropping faster than they're
replenished, snowpacks thinning and climate change predicted to make
dry places even drier, water managers around the country, and the
world, are contemplating similar schemes. Los Angeles and San Diego,
which both rejected potable reuse, have raised the idea once again, as
have, for the first time, DeKalb County, Ga., and Miami-Dade County,
Fla.

While Orange County planned and secured permits, public-relations
experts went into overdrive, distributing slick educational brochures
and videos and giving pizza parties. "If there was a group, we talked
to them," says Wildermuth, who recently left Orange County to help
sell Los Angelenos on drinking purified waste. "Historical societies,
chambers of commerce, flower committees."

The central message was health and safety, but the persuaders didn't
skimp on buzz phrases like "local control" and "independence from
imported water." Last winter, the valve between the sewage plant and
the drinking-water plant whooshed open, and a new era in California's
water history began.

When I visited the plant, a sprawl of modern buildings behind a
concrete wall, in March, Wildermuth, in a blue sport coat and bright
tie, acted as my guide. "Quick!" he shouted at one point, mounting a
ledge and clinging to the rail over a microfiltration bay. "Over
here!" I clambered up just as its contents finished draining from the
scum-crusted tank. The sudsy water, direct from the sewage-treatment
plant, was the color of Guinness. "This is the most exciting thing
you'll see here, and I didn't want you to miss it," he said.

Wildermuth went on to explain what we were looking at: inside each of
16 concrete bays hangs a rack of vertical tubes stuffed with 15,000
polypropylene fibers the thickness of dental floss. The fibers are
stippled with holes 1/300th the size of a human hair. Pumps pull water
into the fibers, leaving behind anything larger than 0.2 microns,
stuff like bacteria, protozoa and the dread "suspended solids."

The excitement and the bubbles were backwash: every 21 minutes, air is
injected into the microfibers to blast them clean. The schmutz goes
back to the sewage-treatment plant, and the cleaner water, now the
color of chamomile tea, is pumped toward reverse-osmosis filters in
another building. Before we saw that process, Wildermuth led me
underground to inspect several enormous pumps and pipes large enough
to crawl through.

I noted that everything was clearly labeled and scrupulously clean.
Then it dawned on me: reassurance was the reason we'd taken the
detour. We followed the pipes up to a sunlit, metal-clad building
where the water, now dosed with an antiscalant and sulfuric acid to
lower its pH, was forced at high pressure through hundreds of white
tubes filled with tightly spiraled sheets of plastic membranes.
Reverse osmosis, Wildermuth says, stops cold almost all nonwater
molecules (things like salts, viruses and pharmaceuticals). The stuff
that's removed is washed back to a pipe that discharges into the
ocean. The filtered water, now known as permeate, moves one building
over, where it's spiked with hydrogen peroxide, a disinfectant, and
then circulated past 144 lamps emitting ultraviolet light.

"Destruction of compounds through photolysis," Wildermuth said,
nodding. Anything that's alive in this water can no longer reproduce.
Strolling back through the campus, Wildermuth took me to a three-part
demonstration sink with faucets streaming. The basin on the right
contained reverse-osmosis backwash: it was molasses black, topped with
a rainbow slick of oil. "Don't touch," Wildermuth warned as I leaned
in for a better look at the ocean-bound rejectamenta.

The middle basin contained the chamomile water from microfiltration.
And on the left was the stuff Orange County would eventually drink. It
was clear and had no smell. But even this suctioned, sieved and
irradiated water wasn't quite set for sipping; it still needed to be
decarbonized and dosed with lime, to raise its pH.

Finally it would enter a massive purple pipe, which dives into the
ground inside a nearby pump house and reappears 13 miles to the north,
in Anaheim. There, the water would pour into Kraemer Basin, a man-made
reservoir, where it would mix with the lake water and filter for six
months through layers of sand and gravel hundreds of feet deep before
utilities throughout the county pumped it into taps.

The reservoir is a prosaic ending for a substance that's been through
the glitziest of technological wringers, transformed from sewage to
drinking water only to be humbly redeposited into the earth. This
final filtering step isn't necessary, strictly speaking, but our
psyches seem to demand it.

To understand the basics of contemporary water infrastructure is to
acknowledge that most American tap water has had some contact with
treated sewage. Our wastewater-treatment plants discharge into streams
that feed rivers from which other cities suck water for drinking. By
the time New Orleans residents drink the Mississippi, the water has
been in and out of more than a dozen cities; more than 200
communities, including Las Vegas, discharge treated wastewater into
the Colorado River.

That's the good news. After heavy rains, many cities discharge
untreated sewage directly into waterways -- more than 860 billion
gallons of it a year, according to the Environmental Protection
Agency.

However -- and this is where we can take solace -- the sewage is
massively diluted, time and sunlight help to break down its components
and drinking-water plants filter and disinfect the water before it
reaches our taps. The E.P.A. requires utilities to monitor pathogens,
and there hasn't been a major waterborne-disease outbreak in this
country since 1993. (Though there have been 85 smaller outbreaks
between 2001 and 2006.)

So confident are engineers of so-called advanced treatment
technologies that several communities have been discharging highly
treated wastewater directly into reservoirs for years. Singapore mixes
1 percent treated wastewater with 99 percent fresh water in its
reservoirs. (In Orange County, the final product will contain 17
percent recycled water.) Residents of Windhoek, Namibia, one of the
driest places on earth, drink 100 percent treated wastewater. For 30
years, the Upper Occoquan Sewage Authority, in Virginia, has been
mixing recycled wastewater with fresh water in a reservoir and serving
it to more than a million people. Still, no system produces as much
recycled water as Orange County (currently 70 million gallons a day,
going up to 85 million by 2011), and none inserts as many physical and
chemical barriers between toilet and tap.

Environmentalists, river advocates and California surfers -- the sort
of people who harbor few illusions about the purity of our rivers and
oceans -- generally favor water recycling. It beats importing water on
both economic and environmental grounds (about a fifth of California's
energy is used to move water from north to south). "The days are over
when we can consider wastewater a liability," says Peter Gleick,
president of the Pacific Institute, an environmental research group in
Oakland. "It's an asset. And that means figuring out how best to use
it."

As we deplete the earth's nonrenewable resources, like oil and metals,
the one-way trip from raw material to disposed and forgotten waste
makes less and less sense. Already we recycle aluminum to avoid
mining, compost organic material to avoid generating methane in
landfills and turn plastic into lumber. As it becomes more valuable,
water will be no different.

"We have to treat all waste as a resource," Conner Everts, executive
director of the Southern California Watershed Alliance, says. "Our
water source, hundreds of miles away, is drying up. If the population
is growing, what are our options?"

Water conservation could take us a long way, as would lower water
subsidies for farmers. But sooner or later, stressed-out utility
managers come back to the same idea: returning wastewater to the tap.
The process isn't risk-free. Some scientists are concerned that
dangerous compounds or undetectable viruses will escape the multiple
physical and chemical filters at the plant. And others suggest that
the potential for human error or mechanical failure -- clogged filters
or torn membranes that let pathogens through, for example -- is too
great to risk something as basic to public health as drinking water.

Recycled water should be used only as nondrinking water, says Philip
Singer, the Daniel Okun Distinguished Professor of Environmental
Engineering at the University of North Carolina. "It may contain trace
amounts of contaminants. Reverse osmosis and UV disinfection are very
good, but there are still uncertainties."

And then there are those whose first, and final, reaction is "yuck."

"Why the hell do we have to drink our own sewage?" asks Muriel Watson,
a retired schoolteacher who sat on a California water-reuse task force
and founded the Revolting Grandmas to fight potable reuse. She toured
the Orange County plant but came away unsatisfied. "It's not the sun
and the sky and a roaring river crashing into rocks" -- nature's way
of purifying water. "It's just equipment."

The Santa Ana River forms in the San Bernardino Mountains and flows
southwest through Riverside and then Orange counties to the sea, the
largest coastal stream in Southern California. But that's not saying
much: in the summer, the Santa Ana's flow is nearly 100 percent
wastewater. The river's base flow -- what enters the channel from
runoff, rain and wastewater-treatment plants -- is increasing.

Not only is more effluent entering the river, a consequence of
population growth, but as the county develops and paves more surfaces,
rainwater runs off the earth faster, sluicing into the river channel
before it can sink into the earth and replenish aquifers. To capture
and clean that water, the Orange County Water District has gone into
hyper-beaver mode on the river. Twenty miles upstream from Anaheim,
the water district has created the Prado Wetlands. It's a lovely
place, lush with willow and mule fat, busy with butterflies and, over
the course of the year, 250 species of birds. Moving through a series
of rectangular ponds, river water filters slowly through thickets of
cattails and bulrushes meant to extract excess nitrate from upstream
dairy farms and sewage-treatment plants.

Returned to the main channel, the water wends around T- and L-shaped
berms that slow the water and maximize its contact with the river
bottom. Gates and sluiceways then shunt the water into nine man-made
ponds and pits. The goal is to get more water into the county's
groundwater basin, a 350-square-mile, 1,500-foot-deep bathtub of sand
and gravel layers, which act as natural scrubbers. The system upriver
-- using gravity and gravel -- and the system in Fountain Valley -- in
tanks and tubes -- both achieve the same goal. Sort of.

It's one of the many pardoxes of indirect potable reuse that the water
leaving the plant in Fountain Valley is far cleaner than the water
that it mingles with. Yes, the water entering the sewage-treatment
plant in Fountain Valley is 100 percent wastewater and has a T.D.S. --
a measure of water purity, T.D.S. stands for total dissolved solids
and refers to the amount of trace elements in the water -- of 1,000
parts per million. But after microfiltration and reverse osmosis, the
T.D.S. is down to 30. (Poland Spring water has a T.D.S. of between 35
and 46.) By contrast, the "raw" water in the Anaheim basins has a
T.D.S. of 600.

If everything in the Fountain Valley plant is in perfect working
order, its finished water will contain no detectable levels of
bacteria, pharmaceuticals or agricultural and industrial chemicals.
The same can be said of very few water sources in this country.

But once the Fountain Valley water mingles with the county's other
sources, its purity goes downhill. Filtering it through sand and
gravel removes some contaminants, but it also adds bacteria (not
necessarily harmful, and local utilities will eventually knock them
out them with chlorine) and possibly pharmaceuticals.

In other words, nature messes up the expensively reclaimed water. So
why stick it back into the ground?

"We do it for psychological reasons," says Adam Hutchinson, director
of recharge operations for the water district. "In the future, people
will laugh at us for putting it back in, instead of just drinking it."

Psychologists and marketers have spent a lot of time trying to figure
out what makes a product, or a process, seem natural. Obviously,
framing the issue properly is the key to acceptance. "If people
connect the history of their water to contamination, you'll get a
disgust response no matter how you treat that water in between," says
Brent Haddad, an associate professor of environmental studies at the
University of California at Santa Cruz.

"But if you enable people to frame out that history by telling them,
for example, that 'the clean water has been separated from the
polluted water,' they no longer make that connection." We abridge
history all the time, Haddad adds. "Think of the restaurant fork that
was in the mouth of someone with a contagious disease, the pillow that
was underneath people doing private adult things in a hotel bedroom.
If you think of it that way, the intermediate steps, like washing with
hot water, don't matter."

All water on earth is recycled: the same drops that misted Devonian
ferns and dripped from the fur of woolly mammoths are watering us
today. From evaporation to condensation and precipitation, the cycle
goes on and on. But in the planet's drier regions, where the
population continues to rise, we can expect the time between use and
reuse to grow ever shorter, with purification, pipes and pumps
standing in for natural processes. Instead of sand and gravel
filtering our drinking water, microfibers and membranes will do the
job; instead of sunlight knocking out parasites, we'll plug in the UV
lamps.

You could argue that in coming to terms with wastewater as a resource,
we'll take better care of our water. At long last, the "everything is
connected" message, the bedrock of the environmental movement, will
hit home. In this view, once a community is forced to process and
drink its toilet water, those who must drink it will rise up and
change their ways.

Floor moppers will switch to biodegradable cleaning products. Industry
will use nontoxic material. Factory farms will cut their use of
antibiotics. Maybe we'll even stop building homes in the desert.

But these situations are not very likely. No one wants to think too
hard about where our water comes from. It's more likely that the
virtuosity of water technology will let polluters off the hook: why
bother to reduce noxious discharges if the treatment plant can remove
just about anything? The technology, far from making us aware of the
consequences of our behavior, may give us license to continue doing
what we've always done.

The recycled water coming out of the sink at the Fountain Valley plant
looked good enough to drink. Wildermuth didn't press me to taste it,
but I was eager for a sample -- to satisfy my curiosity, and to be
polite. I filled a plastic cup and took a sip. The water tasted fine,
if a little dry; I'm used to something with more minerals. It did
cross my mind that any potential health issues from drinking so-far
undetectable levels of contaminants would be cumulative and take
decades to manifest.

Then I reminded myself: no naturally occurring water on earth is
absolutely pure. And most everything that's in Orange County's
reclaimed water is in most cities' drinking water anyway.

It was hot, my throat was parched, and I asked for a refill.

See more stories tagged with: water, drinking water, recycled water,
reclaimed water

Elizabeth Royte is the author of Bottlemania: How Water Went On Sale
and Why We Bought It and Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash.