"[I]f you have people imagine the water going into an underground aquifer, for example, and then sitting there for 10 years, the water becomes much more palatable to the public. It budges even those most unwilling to drink the water. ... 'When you do introduce a river or even groundwater ... you run the risk of deteriorating the water that's been treated. You can make the water quality worse.'"
I am singularly amused at the possibility of contaminating treated post-sewage water with river water, resulting in a medically less safe but socially more acceptable water supply. The results of a public vote (as to whether to mix river water with the treated water) would at least tell us who needs to be mailed a printed copy of lesswrong.com.
Does such a critter exist? Not as an actual printed copy, but a way of diving into it that's not quite so ... scary? The closest thing I see to a "table of contents" is the list of Sequences.
> I am singularly amused at the possibility of contaminating treated post-sewage water with river water
It is bizarre, isn't it? I don't know about anyone else, but I've spent most of my life thinking of rivers as quite polluted. Even when hiking in wilderness I take a giardia filter.
Water rights in Colorado are...complicated. Aurora, Colorado doesn't have enough for its population.
So it pumps water out of the river, sends it to people, purifies the result, and pumps it back into the river.
Three times. At different locations. So really they're already drinking their sewage water, only slightly diluted with the water from Denver's sewage water...and heading downstream to supply water to Utah, Nevada, and Southern California.
Many sausages are made with the intestinal linings and viscera of animals who live in, root around in, and occasionally even eat their own feces. Shit that's passed through shit that's passed through shit.
And yet, few people bat an eyelash at hot dogs, brats, or cocktail weenies. Of course, there's that old chestnut about not wanting to know 'how the sausage gets made.' But, by and large, people cognitively distance the making-of-the-sausage from the sausage itself. Why? Because they've been trained to think of "sausage" as a wholly separate class of item from "pig's colon." And because they've first encountered -- and enjoyed -- sausage before anyone ever told them about how it got there.
We need to use similar psychology to fight the psychology of contamination thinking w/r/t treated wastewater. The message needs to be about how the input is apples, and the output is oranges. But we have to start with the oranges. It's very tough to sell the story when the story begins with the making-of-the-sausage and not the sausage itself.
Hot dogs, brats, and cocktail weenies are all types of Americanized sausage which don't use intestinal linings anymore. You have to work pretty hard today to find sausage in your supermarket that is made the old-fashioned way.
Fair. But I suggest that we're picking at nits here. Most mass-market sausages, even of the American variety, are made with mixed and mechanically separated parts, drawn from all over the animal and highly likely to be include portions of bone, head(!), feet, and visceral matter. And the animals themselves live in horrid conditions that often includes standing knee-deep in lakes of their own waste. I think my overall point still stands.
My local standard (non-specialist) grocery store sells whole pigs heads, chopped at the neck. Feet are even more popular. I think you might be overestimating how squimish the general population is/would be of such things.
Where do you live? I actually go out of my way to find exotic things, but I have never seen that. In fact, I'm one of this people that visit 3-4 grocery stores on the weekend. For reference, I live in New England.
Currently Philadelphia. I just checked the grocery store's website and although they list feet/tails/jowls/skin/neck, they don't seem to be listing head right now. I may be recalling seeing it in Reading Terminal Market^ which certainly has that kind of stuff (one stall there has piles and piles of chicken feet.. I have no idea what you'd even do with those. Stews perhaps.)
> the animals themselves live in horrid conditions that often includes standing knee-deep in lakes of their own waste.
Considering the oft repeated phrase "as happy as a pig in shit", I don't think many people are going to be squeamish about eating pig just based on its living conditions.
It's very interesting that you're in a way encouraging that the veil that is there concealing the process of food manufacturing ... remain there. Because that is something that sensible environmentalists argue against, as everyone could stand to know a bit more about what they're eating, and the issues of food safety and food security associated with the food taht they're eating. I think Food Inc does a good of bringing these issues to the public in a very presentable way.
"It's very interesting that you're in a way encouraging that the veil that is there concealing the process of food manufacturing ... remain there."
Not at all. I'm just drawing a point of comparison between the "PR" of the sausage vs. the PR of treated wastewater. I don't condone opacity or trickery on behalf of the food processing industry. Just the opposite, in fact.
On the subject of Food, Inc: Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma is an excellent read on the topic, and I recommend it highly. It has been highly influential on my personal philosophy toward food and the industrial food system.
And yet if you tell them that some cultures consume insects as part of their diet they will immediately start making yuck sounds and saying how disgusting it is. We truly are our culture.
I think if they bottled the water and called is 'Dasani' it would be acceptable to the public :-)
As a resident of California, and an engineer, I to find this discussion difficult to fathom. The notion of 'contagion thinking' was probably the best thing in that article. By having the water 'touch' something good it can become 'good.' NASA has a vested interest in such systems [1] for things like the space station. No doubt a lunar colony would have a similar system.
It's interesting how easily people mistake orders of magnitude when they are using different units of measure simultanously -- in the article you linked, first they say:
give it a mark-up from 0.03p to 95p per half litre;
and then:
In other words, Dasani is less healthy than regular tap water, but at more than thirty times the price.
It's not thirty times the price -- it's three thousand.
Simple solution: don't use the words 'sewer' or 'reused' anywhere near the promotional materials for this product. Call it 'filtered water' or some other safe euphemism.
Exactly. FTA, this is an identity problem rather than a safety problem. Put differently, it's a marketing & PR problem. Proponents of recycled water need to change the public perception of the water from sewage to something more palatable.
It's amazing how much a simple name changes things. People are typically trepadatious about eating something like blood sausage but they have no problem eating powdered bone slime so long as it's called jell-o.
I suspect the trick is to get people to think about it as "recycled water" (or whatever name gets them to accept it) while also intellectually realizing that it's treated wastewater, so when someone blogs about it, people just shrug and say "Oh, yeah, doesn't everybody know that?" I'm not sure if that's possible, but that's probably the only way it would work.
For example, the idea of passing it through an underground aquifer lets people think "yeah, I know it came from a sewer treatment plant, but now it's different". You're not trying to hide anything, you're just trying to get them to view it differently.
Here in Vienna the tap water basically comes straight from mountain springs in the Alps. Still, almost everyone here buys bottled water, instead of directly drinking the tap water which has the same quality, if not even better.
When I was in Vienna in 2007 I spoke to a random entrepreneur during lunch and he noticed I was drinking bottled water.
It turned out he was in the business of bottling water and said the tap water in Vienna was what he was trying to bottle, and the joke was on me that I was drinking water bottled elsewhere when the free tap water was a much higher quality.
I don't know if Vienna is the same, but when I was in Italy and Spain, I had to explicitly ask for tap water. If I just asked for water, they would bring me bottled water of some kind.
Why joke? I happily buy bottled water which tastes better than the local tap one. It really depends on what you look for. I wouldn't mind if it's filtered sewage, as long as it tastes good.
The "quality", which can be defined in many ways is hard to judge... Does it matter that much though? At least we can judge the taste ourselves.
Not just Vienna but many places have great tap water, much better than what you get in a lot of bottles.
There are obviously also places where the tap water is of a worse quality or just tastes awful.
(The problem for many Europeans is that they like fizzy water. It’s possible to add CO2 to your own tap water but bottled fizzy water is just do damn convenient compared to that. I would never buy plain water in bottles but I’m too lazy to not buy fizzy bottled water.)
I'm a scientist. I have no issues with the process of turning sewage water into clean drinking water. Absolutely none. However, I do have an issue with humans. Humans screw things up. Humans don't always implement the proper quality assurance programs, and when they do, they might not follow them. Every time I pour myself a glass of water from the tap, it's not the science I'll doubt, I'll just be wondering if Timmy down at the local water treatment plant did his job properly today, because if he didn't, I'm now drinking someone's shit.
"Whoah Timmy, that stuff is expensive! The inspector doesn't take samples until the end of the month so go easy on the disinfectant until then will ya?" says Ned the beancounter. True story though my google fu is failing me.
The failure modes are not equal. Timmy cuts corners with river/aquifer water and I get some very diluted nasty shit. Timmy cuts corners with waste water and I get some very concentrated nasty shit.
That might actually be an argument that fewer shortcuts would be taken since the consequences would be so dire. Ned is willing to take shortcuts on river water because it's likely that nothing will happen, but if he's smart, he won't make that same statement with sewage.
(Not saying this is any sort of guarantee, just thought it was an interesting thing to consider.)
The problem isn't just contagion theory: it's percentages.
We know that the treatment process doesn't remove everything (witness the taste of tap water in various cities).
Purification rates are generally stated as percentages, suggesting that the dirtier the input, the dirtier the output (GIGO)
Searching for "waste water treatment effectiveness" yields interesting articles about failures - for instance: http://www.cabq.gov/progress/public-infrastructure/dcc-18/in... which indicates that upstream failures treating the waste water increase health risks and treatment costs of water users downstream - why should it matter without the GIGO principle above?
How sure are you that the treatment systems remove 100% of the micro-organisms? 100% of the chemical hazards? All the time?
There's definitely room for concern, even on the purely scientific/engineering side, though advocates say that the treated waste water is the cleaner water source.
"How sure are you that the treatment systems remove 100% of the micro-organisms? 100% of the chemical hazards? All the time?"
I am 100% sure that they do not. It's impossible. No water in nature is that clean, either, by any standard.
But also, you are not a wilting flower that can only survive on the purest triple-distilled angel tears. There absolutely is a such thing as "good enough" and any water that meets existing US standards is well in excess of "good enough". It is certainly far, far, far cleaner than anything your ancestors ever had to drink!
This isn't about safety. All "room for concern" has been abundantly addressed; US water standards are incredibly strict both in theory and in practice. It is entirely about psychology.
The article, and all of the responses I've seen so far, all ignore the problem that sewer water is overflowing with the prescription drugs that people have consumed. Municipal water AND many bottled water suppliers don't even bother testing for drug contamination.
Broadly speaking, I would consider the burden of proof to be on those who say that things in concentrations measured in small numbers of parts per billion are really bad and worth panicking over. It may be, it can not be ruled out, but the list of things that you routinely consume, that you can't help but consume, at similar concentrations would blow your mind.
Heck, a complete rundown of every microorganism you just ingested the last time you took a breath would blow your mind. (Mine too. I'd love to see it.)
The world is a dirty, dirty place, and always has been. You aren't a wilting flower, you are the product of billions of generations of organisms that survived, all of which except maybe the last three generations lived in a radically dirtier world than you do. I'm really not that worried about ppb pharmaceuticals in my water; if I'm going to go that route I'm going to finger my food for things like hormones and antibiotics long before my water.
"""
Troubled by drugs discovered in European waters, poisons expert and biologist Francesco Pomati set up an experiment: He exposed developing human kidney cells to a mixture of 13 drugs at levels mimicking those found in Italian rivers.
There were drugs to fight high cholesterol and blood pressure, seizures and depression, pain and infection, and cancer, all in tiny amounts.
The result: The pharmaceutical blend slowed cell growth by up to a third suggesting that scant amounts may exert powerful effects, said Pomati, who works at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
"""
Unfortunately (and I mean that, I wish this style worked better than it does because it is so easy compared to real experiments), that style of experiment is well known for producing useless results.
Think about it; if the water was that poisonous, such that 1/3 of our celluar growth was being eliminated, we wouldn't be speculating about whether our water was killing us, we'd know and long since have taken some sort of action. The strength of the real signal is bounded by the fact that we have millions upon millions upon millions of real people consuming these things every day. Reality always trumps both theory and experiment, and don't ever listen to anybody who forgets that. An experiment that shows an enormous signal, which we can observe in the real world can not possibly be occurring, is far more likely to be a flawed-beyond-usefulness experiment than a real reason for concern.
It is, however, a great way to get in the news.
You get the same problem when some people discover that X causes cancer, except that if you take their results seriously you end up with (metaphorically) 245% of the population dying of cancer X by the time they are 30. Except we don't. Hidden dangers can only be so dangerous.
Orange County in SoCal has been doing this for a few years. They start with the type of treated sewage you mention above; then they microfilter it; then they do reverse osmosis; then they treat it with UV and H2O2; then they use it to recharge the aquifer (where it takes some time to trickle through before they pump it back out of the wells).
You can never be 100% sure because science has no way to count to that level of accuracy. But you can take samples to validate that a scientifically proven process is working correctly. The ability of chlorine to purify water is quite well understood.
If there's a set of processes feeding into each other taking sewage and producing clean drinking water, I feel that there's a much higher possibility of a failure causing contamination to the drinking water. Engineers can be complacent about fail-safes and politics may compromise good engineering.
If there's a river in the way, then although the water must be processed again, this apparent wastefulness also has the effect of preventing engineers (or their managers) from taking shortcuts.
Any system for producing drinking water is fallible - why is this one special? Why should we be more suspicious of it than any other process?
Just for one example, I remember in 2004 when Dasani launched in the UK [1]. Aside from a bunch of other rather hilarious mistakes, their purification process (applied to regular mains drinking water) introduced bromate - a suspected carcinogen.
But isn't the idea of homeopathy to consume miniscule amounts of things that are toxic in large quantities, like arsenic? In that case, cleaned sewer water should be good for you.
Its not good water or bad water; its desecrated water or sanctified water. No engineering principle is involved; only culture, belief and emotion guide the issue. For better or worse, its people that have to be convinced, and people are emotional creatures.
While in school I was taught and learned that all water went through a filtration system including sewage and after cleaning it would go back into the drinkable water lines running to our house.
I learned the same. I was quite disappointed later to find that, while all the sewage here goes through treatment, it does not get directly pumped back into the water pipes, but instead gets pumped back into the rivers. Although pragmatically speaking that makes more sense, since surface water is surface water, and completely separating these systems avoids any risk of contamination.
I'm not sure "irrational" is the best description. It's not obvious to most in California that water is in that short of supply. It also seems reasonable that treated water would be used for things like watering crops before things like human drinking water. Finally, it's reasonable to be wary of something newish that sounds obviously problematic.
People alive today are descended from people who've been through a multi-thousand year selection process, where the main factor that determined whether you lived or not was how important you & your parents thought it was to drink really clean water. It's no wonder people are pretty touchy about the water issue.
I cannot understand why California has a water supply issue when they are located right next to the largest body of water on Earth. I think the public is much more accepting of desalinized ocean water than they are of reclaimed municipal water.
Because it's much, much harder and energetically more costly to de-salinate water than it is to "de-poop" water. Biological contaminants can be removed using organic processes, settling and chlorination. Salts and ions form relatively strong bonds with water that are hard to separate.
It takes 5kW/h to produce a cubic meter of fresh water from sea water via reverse osmosis.[0] The population of just LA is a bit over 3 million.[1] The average U.S. citizen consumes 2842 cubic meters of water per year.
I will conservatively estimate that a nuclear power plant will produce 800 MW.[3] So:
4863 MW / 800 MW/plant = 6
That means we're talking about six full-size nuclear power plants running 24/7 with their entire energy output going toward desalinization to supply LA alone.
Extrapolating further, I get that it would take twenty nuclear power plants running full-time to meet just half of the demand for the entirety of southern California.
Does that answer your question?
(I know my sources aren't all that authoritative--they are just what Google pulled up. Feel free to redo the calculations with more accurate numbers, or just to double-check my arithmetic.)
You've got the h on the wrong side of the fraction. A Watt is a rate of energy usage: 1 J/s. It requires an amount of energy that could power 100 50-watt light bulbs for an hour to desalinate a cubic meter of water. That is, the 8765 h/year in your calculation doesn't belong.
I think the public is much more accepting of desalinized ocean water than they are of reclaimed municipal water.
It would be hard to justify the expense, increased energy usage, and damage to marine life that comes with desalination. It makes sense in places like Israel and Saudi Arabia, but in California there are more economical and environmentally friendly options.
from my survey engineering course (which engineering major should you choose?) it's because reverse osmosis is a bitch to do, especially compared to cleaning sewage or building dams.
however, this isn't as huge of an issue as the article makes out because almost all of california's water goes to agriculture, and no one seems to have a problem with using grey-water for agriculture.
There was this guy at a TED event that mixed the filthiest, most disgusting glop I've ever seen, pushed it through a filter he invented and drank the resulting water all onstage. He said it could even filter virus-sized particles out. Of course, I cannot find a link.
I thought it was all very neat and practical, but never wondered if simpler chemicals such as drugs would pass through. Maybe they're diluted enough not to be an issue? As the article notes, we're already purifying sewage from cities upstream.
And remember that all water must be treated. So the real question is, why is sewage different than all of the other contaminants that get in fresh water?
Sewage is different, because it has a high concentration of WC water (urine), which in turn contains high level of hormone supplements (contraception). Some of the problem is, that these drugs can eventually find their way to fresh water.
The standard scientific (chemical) process is the mechanical separation and dilution mentioned, but there is no evidence that there is a safe level of hormone that can be absorbed daily. Not unlike DDT: actually hormones were cited as evidence during the fight for the ban. However, there is scientific evidence of sexual mutation in creatures living in water (frogs, fish etc. -- though many other things could be blamed for this, but none rule out the above)
Here in South Australia (Adelaide, a city of 1m or so people), we often face water restrictions due to low water levels in our reservoirs and low rainfall projections. These restrictions include only being able to water gardens on certain days of the week, etc. It's quite remarkable to hear about a city/council 'wasting' water and spending money to do so.
It's quite remarkable to us in California as well, only a few hundred miles south of Portland. If Oregon has that much water to spare, maybe we should get them to let us build a pipeline.
Words like "irrational" are propaganda and "how to change their mind" suggests that people should be drinking cleaned sewer water provided by a municipality whose equipment is run by drug addicts and losers, and equipment provided by the lowest bidder.
I know for a fact that the sun only evaporates the water and leaves the crap behind. Its a process that has been happening for a very long time.
And we all know how perfect industrial processes are, especially when managed by the government.
The sewer water isn't THAT MUCH cheaper than regular water. So I'd prefer that the experiment be run on someone other than me.
If it is cheaper and a city wants cheaper water, let them enjoy it. We should be charging market prices to all users. Then if this actually made economic sense, it would be adopted.
This would make some semblance of sense if it weren't for two things:
1) You're not drinking rainwater, I assure you.
2) Sure, the sun evaporates water, and that forms into clouds, and then it rains. Except that things in the atmosphere can taint that rain; this is most noticeable in the form of acid rain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_rain
There's absolutely no reason to believe that treated sewer water is any less safe than the water that's sitting in your reservoir at all.
And then that water in the clouds falls as snow and rain and then feeds into rivers and reservoirs where fish, insects, deer, ducks, beavers, bears, bird, etc. urinate, defecate, bleed, and die into it. That's why pure unfiltered river water doesn't feed directly to a municipal water supply and is filtered and treated first.
Yes, that's true. I guess I don't trust the municipal water system to do the job.
I also don't see how they can filter out all the drugs and salt that sewage water currently contains and is being released into the environment. These things are just going to accumulate. Or is there new invention I'm not aware of?
Granted, that's not the argument I originally stated but its definitely a question.
If you're aware familiar with the Colorado River, you may know that the water gets saltier and saltier as it is taken out, run through the land and drains back into it. Without any intervention, its pretty brackish by the time it gets to Mexico.
Running the same water through humanity over and over again is bound to have a similar problem.
The water of the Mississippi river gets filtered and processed and drunk by the residents of Minneapolis, then their waste water gets dumped into the river only to be taken up and processed by St. Louis who also dump their waste water back into the river only to later run out of the taps of the residents of New Orleans.
I am singularly amused at the possibility of contaminating treated post-sewage water with river water, resulting in a medically less safe but socially more acceptable water supply. The results of a public vote (as to whether to mix river water with the treated water) would at least tell us who needs to be mailed a printed copy of lesswrong.com.