Sludge Watch ==> Recycling sewage effluent into drinking water - public reluctant

[maureen.reilly at sympatico.ca]

Sludgewatch Admin

Few people spend much time contemplating their drinking water and even fewer 
think much about sewers and sewage treatment.

It shows.

Even though clean water is critical to our health and our existance on this 
lovely planet, we have relagated most of the policy to a very small group of 
experts.  When North America was newly inhabited by Europeans the abundance 
of water in the eastern states allowed for an exploitation of fresh water 
that was then fueled by all the engineering dams and pumps American Know-How 
could muster.

And that same enterprising spirit (and huge public expenditures) brought 
water from mountain snowcaps hundreds of miles south to create desert cities 
like Los Angeles and Phoenix.  Rivers were impounded behind dams, canals 
bring water across deserts, and groundwater is relentlessly and 
irreplaceably pumped to water surplus crops like cotton in the desert.

As these cities (indeed all cities) expand, the use of water is priced not 
on the cost but to please the public.  There is little relationship between 
the price and cost of water, and virtually no thought of protecting 
groundwater supplies for future generations.

Our way of providing water to cities is hugely wasteful. We use clean 
drinking water to flush our toilets.  We use the water as a matrix to move 
waste through the sewer pipes.  We mix the toilet waste with industrial 
effluents.  This make it hard to recover all three...hard to recycle the 
human 'manure' due to industrial contamination, hard to recover the 
industrial waste since they are locked in the organic fecal matrix, and hard 
to get that lovely water clean again.

Most of you readers already know that while sewage treatment plants are 
designed to clean up water...there are some things that are hard to 
remove...surfactants, drugs, hormones.  Some of our cleaning agents, like 
chlorine, combine with organic matter to make trihalomethane...thought to be 
the primary cause of colon cancer in some cities.

What to do?

In North America the talk comes around again and again to recycling sewage 
effluent into drinking water.  Small wonder the cursed bottled water is 
everywhere.  People look at the their taps with suspicion...and are keen to 
think themselves precious and prestigious enough to be seen drinking some 
more expensive H2O.  So we have the hideous reality of trillions of little 
plastic bottles (and glass) at the dump while people buy tap water that has 
been filtered and ozonated into these bottles.

But injecting water into deep wells and then pumping it later for drinking 
water? My understanding was that the groundwater got clean by having to move 
slowly through all those sunny streams and rivers and then down through 
layers of soil and dirt and shale and sand..nature's filtration system.  If 
we take our best efforts at reclaimed water with all the drugs and residuals 
and put them far from sunlight, sand, and soil how is it supposed to get 
clean down there?

Nature's benediction is real.  Soil, sand, sunlight do wonders for cleaning 
the water we abuse with such abandon.  But we need to step back from our 
thoughtless use of water and ask whether we can continue on this water 
squandering path.  Does it not make more sense to stop using one big pipe 
for all our liquid wastes?

We should protect our groundwater sources and be more sparing in our use of 
water. It is more precious than oil.  And while we have alternative energy 
sources than oil, we have no altenative to water.

We source separate our trash these days.  We need come around to find ways 
to do that with our liquid waste as well.

Readings:
Cadillac Desert
The Humanure Handbook




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http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-recycle7may07,0,4831275.story?coll=l

>From the Los Angeles Times

Doubts Still Swirl to Surface
Recycled wastewater's `yuck!' factor slows push to recharge aquifers for 
drinking supplies.

By Bettina Boxall
Times Staff Writer

May 7, 2006

The talk was of psychology, dead cockroaches and disgust.

A small gathering of water managers and consultants met in the South Bay for 
an unusual session a couple of years ago. They were seeking insight into the 
resounding public "yuck!" that has thwarted efforts to turn the steady 
stream from Californians' toilets, showers and kitchen sinks into drinking 
water.

In a semi-arid region such as Southern California, where most of the water 
is piped in from far-flung rivers, recycled water — a.k.a. treated sewage — 
is in many ways a utility's dream.

It's locally produced. As long as people keep flushing and bathing, it will 
keep flowing. Agencies would like to use more reclaimed water, not just on 
freeway landscaping and golf courses but for drinking supplies, by pumping 
it into groundwater basins and surface reservoirs.

Parts of Southern California have been doing that, without controversy, for 
a long time. Some 5 million people drink from regional aquifers partly 
recharged with treated wastewater. But over the last decade, similar 
projects in the San Fernando Valley, San Diego and Northern California have 
triggered a collective gag reflex from the public.

In early 2004, the research arm of the nonprofit WateReuse Assn., a national 
group that promotes water reclamation and desalination, convened a panel of 
psychologists at a South Bay water agency to understand why.

One of the speakers, Paul Rozin, a University of Pennsylvania psychology 
professor and expert on contagion, related an experiment he has conducted 
numerous times.

In front of a group of students, he briefly dips a dead cockroach into a 
glass of juice. Then he offers the students a sip. Everyone refuses. He 
tells them the bug has been sterilized with the same kind of equipment 
hospitals use to clean surgical tools. Still no drinkers.

"They say it's because they think cockroaches are vectors of disease, but of 
course since it's sterilized, that can't be," Rozin recalled. "It's the idea 
that a cockroach was in there. That sense does not go away with time."

Recycled water can't escape its past, despite stringent state regulation and 
assurances by officials that today's sophisticated treatment technology can 
scrub sewage to better-than-drinking-water standards.

Settling tanks, sand filtration, chemical disinfection and naturally 
occurring bacteria are conventionally used to clean wastewater. Those 
methods do not remove all traces of the pharmaceutical products that 
researchers are finding in sewage. But studies indicate that more advanced 
treatment, consisting of reverse osmosis — pushing the water through 
ultra-thin membranes — and disinfection with ultraviolet light and peroxide 
can reduce such contaminants to undetectable levels.

Even then, it's against state policy to send reclaimed water directly to 
household taps. It must make an intermediate stop in a reservoir or aquifer, 
where it is mixed with other water sources.

But that's still not enough to counter the bathroom imagery.

"I just look at what goes down my toilet," said Mary Quartiano, spokeswoman 
for the Revolting Grandmas, a San Diego civic organization that opposed a 
late 1990s proposal to pump purified wastewater into a city reservoir. A 
local advisory group has tentatively revived the idea, but if the city 
pursues it, Quartiano predicted, "it will get shot down again."

Said Rozin: "People say they're worried about the safety of recycled water. 
But a good part of it is not the safety, it's the idea — like the 
cockroach."

He and several other researchers led by Brent Haddad, an associate professor 
of environmental studies at UC Santa Cruz, are embarking on a project, 
commissioned by the WateReuse organization, to study ways of making 
reclaimed water more palatable to the public.

"In a sense it's a battle for minds," Rozin said. "How do you change the way 
people think?"

Along with Texas, Florida and Arizona, California is a national leader in 
using reclaimed water. Still, less than 2% of the state's urban and 
agricultural water is recycled. And most of that is used to irrigate 
farmland and landscaping. A 2003 task force concluded that if California 
quadrupled its reclaimed use over the next 30 years, the water saved would 
amount to as much as half the supplies needed to satisfy the demands of 
projected population growth during that period.

"The potential for reusing water in California is enormous," said Peter 
Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, an Oakland-based think tank. "We 
spend billions capturing water we've used for some purpose, treating it to a 
very high standard and then throwing it away. We can no longer afford to do 
that."

The most economical way to use large amounts of recycled water is to "put it 
into a groundwater basin," said Virginia Grebbien, general manager of the 
Orange County Water District.

Her agency began using reclaimed water in the 1970s to recharge a coastal 
basin threatened by seawater intrusion. In a major expansion of that 
project, the district plans by the end of next year to send 70 million 
gallons a day of cleansed sewage into an aquifer used by more than 2 million 
people in north-central Orange County.

There has been no significant opposition, thanks in part, backers say, to an 
exhaustive outreach program. The district's staff made 120 presentations a 
year for seven years, to a wide range of groups in Orange County, including 
the Daffodil Society, Kiwanis clubs and PTAs.

"This is the future. More will follow," district communications director Ron 
Wildermuth said of the recharge project.

Actually, the future began in 1962 in southeast Los Angeles County, when 
sanitation districts started to use treated wastewater to partly replenish 
an aquifer that provides drinking water to 3 million people.

That program, too, has been largely free of controversy, though more than a 
decade ago Miller Brewing Co. sued, with partial success, to block an 
expansion that the company claimed would have tainted the underground water 
source for its Irwindale plant.

Water reclamation was discussed as early as 1948, when local officials 
started talking about "mining the sewers," said Earle Hartling, water reuse 
coordinator of the County Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County.

"All the water we have is all the water we've ever had or ever will have," 
Hartling mused as he dipped a glass flask into a treatment tank at a 
reclamation plant near Whittier that sends releases downstream to aquifer 
spreading grounds. "This is from Napoleon's last bath."

Still, the public seems to prefer that nature do the recycling.

When local opposition killed a plan by the Dublin-San Ramon Services 
District to inject a relatively small amount of treated wastewater into a 
drinking water aquifer in the Bay Area in the late 1990s, general manager 
Bert Michalczyk puzzled over the reaction.

After all, he pointed out to a friend, a good deal of California's municipal 
water comes from rivers, such as the Sacramento and Colorado, that are at 
the end of the outlet pipe from big-city sewage-treatment plants.

"It's OK if Mother Nature has touched it," his friend explained. "But going 
right from your treatment plant, Mother Nature has not touched that and 
blessed it."

Indeed, Haddad says a way of gaining acceptance may be to use more visible 
natural processes in water reclamation — mimicking, for instance, river 
flows.

He doubts that sanitized phrases like "showers to flowers" will change many 
minds.

Not that language isn't powerful. In Los Angeles, three little words — 
"toilet to tap" — were effectively used by critics who in 2001 helped quash 
a $55-million plan to use treated wastewater to partly recharge an east San 
Fernando Valley aquifer that provides roughly 15% of L.A.'s water.

"Makes me gag," "outrageous," "aesthetically offensive" and "gross" were 
some of the public comments that appeared in newspaper coverage of the 
proposal.

David Spath, who until he retired late last year headed the state health 
department's drinking water and environmental management division, said 
there are legitimate issues associated with supplementing drinking supplies 
with reclaimed water.

Treatment equipment can break down. The proportion of wastewater mixed into 
groundwater basins or reservoirs is often greater than the percentage of 
sewage in big rivers like the Colorado.

Still, Spath concluded, the risks "are essentially — I won't say nonexistent 
— but no greater and probably in some cases better than what people may be 
drinking from river systems around the country …

"[It] continues to be more an emotional/political issue than a technical 
one."


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