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Vast amounts of valuable energy, agricultural nutrients, and water could potentially be recovered from the world's fast-rising volume of municipal wastewater, according to a new study by UN University's Canadian-based Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH).
[...]Today, the volume of wastewater roughly equals the annual discharge from the Ganges River in India. By the mid-2030s, it will roughly equal the annual volume flowing through the St. Lawrence River, which drains North America's five Great Lakes.
Among major nutrients, 16.6 million metric tonnes of nitrogen are embedded in wastewater produced worldwide annually, together with 3 million metric tonnes of phosphorus and 6.3 million metric tonnes of potassium. Theoretically, full recovery of these nutrients from wastewater could offset 13.4% of global agricultural demand for them.
Beyond the economic gains of recovering these nutrients are critical environmental benefits such as minimizing eutrophication—the phenomenon of excess nutrients in a body of water causing dense plant growth and aquatic animal deaths due to lack of oxygen.
The energy embedded in wastewater, meanwhile, could provide electricity to 158 million households—roughly the number of households in the USA and Mexico combined.
Journal Reference:
Manzoor Qadir et al. Global and regional potential of wastewater as a water, nutrient and energy source$. 27 January 2020, Natural Resources Forum. DOI: 10.1111/1477-8947.12187
The aquatic plants that depend on the effluent could not be reached for comment.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Tuesday February 04 2020, @02:28AM (15 children)
So start with new homes and make it semi-closed- if you put shit in your grey water, you'll wreck your filters and your shower won't be as... cleansing.
Nothing vs perfect is not the arguement.
Centralised systems are great, but start with one at a time a work up [tandfonline.com]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Tuesday February 04 2020, @03:54AM (13 children)
You haven't given enough thought to the problem domain. Individual homes aren't a problem - the grey water can be used for lawns, gardens, or just drained into a septic field, or even a dry well filled with gravel.
Can't do that with multiple unit dwellings so the water has to be piped away. And that represents a major infrastructure program.
Grey water use in the home doesn't mean filtering it to the point where you're drinking it again, but finding uses that can tolerate water that isn't drinkable, like flushing toilets or watering lawns. Returning it to a drinkable state is too complicated a process to be done in individual homes, considering the risks a screwup can have on people.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Tuesday February 04 2020, @04:22AM (12 children)
Oh, wow! Such a major technological challenge!
Whatever happen with the spirit of "... in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."?
(large grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 04 2020, @06:18AM (1 child)
Babs is a Canadian. They play hockey instead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 04 2020, @07:33AM
Fair enough. Hockey being a shittier game, I guess the challenge is higher.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by barbara hudson on Tuesday February 04 2020, @01:30PM (4 children)
Simply put, it costs too much.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday February 04 2020, @10:45PM (3 children)
very much alive in my neighborhood [soylentnews.org]
Which shows that is possible and the costs are affordable even at middle-class levels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Tuesday February 04 2020, @11:44PM (2 children)
Or did you not understand the issues involved in discussion?
Grey water can't stand on pipes for as long as potable water before it stinks.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday February 05 2020, @09:41AM (1 child)
Try again. You don't need to distribute gray water when you can distribute recycled water - sterilize it and it's gonna stay like this quite long even when it's not proper for drinking. Besides, it's not gonna stagnate for long when you have consumers for it.
Not like every problem has only one solution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday February 05 2020, @04:03PM
Try again - even sterilized, it's still not potable water - and one of the two plants your link points to doesn't greate potable water out of grey water. If it's not drinkable, it's still grey water, and still uses a separate set of pipes for redistribution after treatment.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 04 2020, @01:36PM (4 children)
And everything is cheap if someone else pays for it.
If the "technological challenges" of this nature got financed from the same finite pool as eco-propaganda, the tune would change overnight.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday February 04 2020, @11:07PM (3 children)
I didn't realize I'm living in a eco-propagandist populated neighborhood [soylentnews.org] and not actually paying my bills from my software engineering wage.
Let me mod your comment accordingly, it was an eye opener.
Shit, my water service is must be an eco-mobster [recycledwater.com.au]!!1oneone!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Tuesday February 04 2020, @11:51PM (2 children)
So you live near a plant so it isn't expensive to hook you up. Same as someone living near a plant that generates lots of heat can tap into the waste heat in the winter. That's how they heat cities in Russia and it's incredibly in dependable and wasteful. Is not like you can leave grey water standing in pipes on dead end streets. The pipes would have to be flushed a lot more often than potable water.
This isn't a solution for places that don't have permanent water shortages.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday February 05 2020, @12:07AM (1 child)
...
This isn't a solution for places that don't have permanent water shortages.
(like, I don't know, California?)
So, apart from showing you that is not quite dead, Jim, do I need to mention the "Nirvana fallacy" for you?
---
(maybe you should do something to keep in check that depression of yours, it seems that's spilling out in everything you say. The problems will arise when it will start spilling in what you do too; it will block your willingness to do anything, because "Why does it matter, the world is shit anyway")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday February 05 2020, @04:31PM
People with depression have continually been shown to be able to make more realistic evaluations of situations because they don't get caught up in "irrational exuberance", "blue-sky thinking", and other stupidities. They also are less likely to get caught by scammers and cat-fishers. Reality IS depressing, or haven't you noticed? Skepticism and cynicism are necessary tools of modern life.
California can solve its problems by not exporting water in agricultural products like almonds. Stop growing almonds, build better storage for the huge floods they get, water crisis solved. Almonds are very environmentally destructive.
Nevada is another story entirely - building a city like Las Vegas in a desert was a dumb move, and it will eventually have to be abandoned if common sense prevails. The longer they put it off, the more it's going to hurt.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 04 2020, @04:42PM
Grey water shouldn't be for showers. But for watering lawns, washing cars, flushing toilets, watering plants, etc.
I remember a cable tv program long ago showing somewhere in the Las Vegas or nearby Arizona area that could treat effluent into grey water suitable for lawns, flushing, etc.
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