Would you pay $49 a month to drink recycled wastewater?
Would you pay $49 a month to drink recycled wastewater?
One day, you鈥檒l appreciate drinking recycled toilet water.
Urban populations are growing as water supplies are dwindling, often due to worsening droughts. In response, some communities are treating wastewater, rendering it perfectly safe for consumption. It is so pure, in fact, that if a treatment facility doesn鈥檛 add enough of the minerals the filtering process strips out, it could . And , too.
Cities throughout the American West are already recycling water, easing pressures on dwindling supplies, reports. Now here鈥檚 a thought experiment: How much would you pay on your utility bill for the privilege of reused water, if it meant avoiding shortages and rationing in the future? A recent survey offers one answer. Residents of small communities of fewer than 10,000 people said they鈥檇 be willing to drop an average of $49 to do so. That money would underwrite water reuse programs, including rain capture systems. 鈥淚 do think it is a bipartisan issue,鈥 said Todd Guilfoos, an economist at the University of Rhode Island and co-author of the . 鈥淚t鈥檚 often just cheaper than some of the other available solutions.鈥
Wastewater recycling is not some far-out, prohibitively complicated technology. Western states are already doing a lot of it: A study found that Nevada reuses 85% of its water, and Arizona 52%. Water agencies do this with reverse osmosis, passing the liquid through fine membranes to filter out solids before blasting it with UV light, which destroys any microbes. On a smaller scale, apartment buildings can house their own treatment infrastructure, , like flushing toilets.
On the municipal level, though, it鈥檚 expensive to build such facilities and run them continuously 鈥 it takes a lot of energy, for instance, to force water through those membranes. For a small community, charging each household $49 per month wouldn鈥檛 be quite enough to get a system up and running. 鈥淲hile that might be enough for operating, that doesn鈥檛 include what it would cost to actually build whatever water reuse infrastructure that you would need,鈥 Guilfoos said. That鈥檚 when a town can turn to federal or state grants, or maybe utilize municipal bonds, to break ground. 鈥淚 think communities need a little bit of a bump, actually, to get there,鈥 Guilfoos added. 鈥淚 think usually it鈥檚 in the face of some crises that these things end up getting built.鈥
Those crises are piling up across the U.S. Droughts are forcing some rural areas to pump more and more H2O from aquifers, depleting them. Tapped unsustainably, these underground supplies , making the land above sink, a phenomenon known as subsidence. This is a particularly pernicious problem in agricultural regions 鈥 California鈥檚 San Joaquin Valley has sunk in recent decades, to offer just one example.
If supplies dwindle, a small community would have no choice but to ration water. Getting more efficient about using what we have can help, like encouraging the adoption of thriftier toilets and spraying less on lawns, . (Those thirsty patches of green are, in general, , beyond their use of water.) But to truly get more sustainable, a community will have to recycle the H2O it has no choice but to use.
What鈥檚 interesting about this study, says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, is the apparent overcoming of the 鈥測uck factor.鈥 鈥淭here鈥檚 a visceral reaction to drinking reused water, particularly reused wastewater, that鈥檚 totally understandable,鈥 said Kiparsky, who wasn鈥檛 involved in the research. 鈥淏ut over time, that has faded as the notion of reusing water to augment water supplies, including for drinking water, has become increasingly legitimized.鈥
At the same time, simple infrastructural improvements can capture heaps of another supply that鈥檚 readily wasted: rain. That $49 a month could fund bioswales, for instance 鈥 that not only collect stormwater, but provide habitat for native plants and pollinators. Cities like Los Angeles are making themselves more 鈥渟pongy鈥 in this way, with roadside plots of land . Elsewhere, architects are building 鈥渁grihoods鈥 around working farms that .
In the American West, farmers are also having to contend with water whiplash, meaning years of plenty followed by years of desiccation. Generally speaking, rain is falling more heavily because , increasing the bounty. But so too does climate change exacerbate droughts, making wastewater reuse especially welcome on farms. 鈥淎ll of this makes the water supply less certain in any given year, and more volatile from year to year,鈥 said Tom Corringham, a research economist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who wasn鈥檛 involved in the new paper. 鈥淪o any strategies that we can find that can smooth out the water cycle are beneficial.鈥
In addition to recycling wastewater, farmers are : When rains fall heavily, and there鈥檚 a surplus of water, channels divert fluid into 鈥渟preading grounds鈥 鈥 basically big dirt bowls built into the landscape. That allows precipitation to percolate back into the ground, reducing loss from evaporation, replacing what鈥檚 been drawn out, and helping avoid land subsidence. Then, when needed, a farm can pump the water back out of the ground, in which case it doesn鈥檛 need to draw from, say, a dam, leaving more water for others to use.
Together with wastewater reuse, aquifer recharge can help bolster the water system for the climatically perilous years ahead. As metropolises like and run the risk of running out of water, drinking recycled wastewater will be a whole lot more appealing than losing hydration entirely.
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