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From a marketing point of view, using treated sewage to create drinking water is a proposition that has proved difficult to sell to customers. Now John Schwartz writes in the NYT that as California scrambles for ways to cope with its crippling drought and the mandatory water restrictions imposed last month by Gov. Jerry Brown, enticing people to drink recycled water is requiring California residents to get past what experts call the “yuck” factor.
Efforts in the 1990s to develop water reuse in San Diego and Los Angeles were beaten back by activists who denounced what they called, devastatingly, “toilet to tap.” Orange County swung people to the idea of drinking recycled water with a special purification plant which has been operating since 2008 avoiding a backlash with a massive public relations campaign that involved more than 2,000 community presentations. The county does not run its purified water directly into drinking water treatment plants; instead, it sends the water underground to replenish the area’s aquifers and to be diluted by the natural water supply. This environmental buffer seems to provide an emotional buffer for consumers as well.
In 2000, Los Angeles actually completed a sewage reclamation plant capable of providing water to 120,000 homes — the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys. The plan was abandoned after public outrage. Angelenos, it seemed, were too good to drink perfectly safe recycled water — dismissed as “toilet to tap.” But Los Angeles is ready to try again, with plans to provide a quarter of the city’s needs by 2024 with recycled water and captured storm water routed through aquifers. ”The difference between this and 2000 is everyone wants this to happen,” says Marty Adams. The inevitable squeamishness over drinking water that was once waste ignores a fundamental fact, says George Tchobanoglous: “When it comes down to it, water is water. Everyone who lives downstream on a river is drinking recycled water.”
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday May 13 2015, @12:33AM
... would make a lot more water available for drinking, as most residential water goes down the porcelain throne.
I once toured the Integral Urban House in Berkeley, more or less a bunch of hippies worked really hard to build a home that is in balance with the environment. They had a no-water toilet that they imported from Sweden - whose name I don't recall - you'd go #2 into it, then toss in a handful of chopped up straw (they didn't mention what they did with the toilet paper). Over the course of a couple of years your dookies traveled on a serpentine route until the fully composted, uh "product" could be shoveled out through a hatch on the floor below.
Our tour guide warned us he would be opening the hatch, we all held out breaths then... - it looked and smelled just like topsoil.
For pee-pee, they used a grey water system to water their flowers. They watered their vegetable garden with the city water supply, so as not to risk disease by getting human waste into their food supply.
These days, someone is selling a no-flush urinal. There is a Starbucks in Portland that has one, just across Couch Street from Powells City of Books. However, when I was a teenager, my father plumbed a motor oil funnel into a drainpipe in our garage, so he and I didn't have to go inside when we were covered with grease from working on the car.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 13 2015, @02:14AM
Brilliant things. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [alternet.org]
(Flush toilets consume 40 percent of a typical home's water.)
...then combine it with a digester [sswm.info] to reclaim the biogas and use that.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 13 2015, @08:42AM
Didn't you notice three sea shells besides the toilet?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 13 2015, @03:32PM
Changing all the toilets to flushless would at most do about as much as improving water use in agriculture by 1%.
Agricultural use of water in California dwarfs domestic use:
http://www.water.ca.gov/wateruseefficiency/agricultural/ [ca.gov]
In average year California agriculture irrigates 9.6 million acres using roughly 34 million acre-feet of water of the 43 million acre-feet diverted from surface waters or pumped from groundwater.
http://www.ppic.org/main/publication_show.asp?i=1108 [ppic.org]
Approximately nine million acres of farmland in California are irrigated, representing roughly 80% of all human water use
See also: http://www.ppic.org/content/images/wateruse2-full.png [ppic.org]
Applies to the USA on average: http://water.usgs.gov/edu/qa-usage-freshwater.html [usgs.gov]
note that "urban" use includes _industrial_ use as well which can be quite high.
Assuming all 40 million Californians flush 6 litre toilets 5 times a day= 30 litres * 40 million per day = 356,065 acre feet per year. That's only a bit over 1% of 34 million acre feet per year.