Bloomberg should be ashamed of the sensationalist title of this article. The article points out redundant water systems is beneficial to the space station operations.
Not only that, the title is outright wrong. They have two water systems up, yes. However they already HAVE agreed that the silver-ion system is preferrable and NASA plans to switch to it.
And the only system that processes urine is the american one.
"The U.S. water recycling system produces... slightly more than the Russians [because] NASA takes Russian urine... 'collect it in bags, and then the crew hauls it over to the U.S. side,' Carter says. 'We don’t do 100 percent of the Russian urine. It depends on our time availability.'"
Going by this.. The American astronauts drink Russian Urine and the Russian astronauts drink American Sweat?!
It's interesting once you get past the crappy headline.... they CAN agree, and have stated that they intend to use Silver Ion filtration in the future: "NASA has decided to switch to silver-ionized water on future missions"