We need to start drinking recycled wastewater
bbc.com
bbc.com
This is the end result of an education system that has not prepared people for the modern world, if we engineer a solution that produces water of a purity greater than water from a reservoir and and half of people are still not sure it is safe to drink then we have a massive problem.
For the record: I've no issue with grey water recovery systems, every drop of water I've ever drank has been through at least a few fish in it's time.
I don't think this has to do with the education system. My friend's father has a terminal illness, and in his attempt to understand and rationalize it, he thought that he did it to himself by leading an "unnatural" lifestyle. The man has a masters in mathematics and owned a software company, he's quite intelligent.
I think people just try to rationalize their situation, sometimes they rest on the idea that natural is better.
Is it really intellectually dishonest, or did someone else just come up with a different risk and cost/benefit analysis from yours? I'm not saying they're right, but it's entirely possible they're making an honest mistake. (Also, the ethics of science get tricky when your subjects are human beings.)
Exceptions can of course be made for places that are experiencing acute malnutrition, but even so it probably makes much more sense using the same money to make sure the African farmers have access to fertilizer so they can get better yields.
Changes are changes, whether random or induced mutation. I feel better if there's at least one brain inspecting the changes vs throwing dice.
Random or induced mutation like they do in GMO has lots of unintended consequences(for example radiating it). It is like a program that has not been debugged, only that a crash could be people dying or getting ill in the thousands or millions.
Also mixing genes from species that have nothing to do with each other like creatures that live in deep ocean that emit light with those that live on the surface will also have unintended consequences.
Human beings could be cocky and arrogant. I have a river near my house. Someone had the brilliant idea of introducing an alien small fish to help native fish as food. The unintended consequence was that the new small fish ate the eggs of native fish and made them disappear completely from the river.
And why do you think that genetic code within the same species is different in the first place...?
EDIT: I will grant that all of these studies deal with animals rather than directly at effects on humans, but it doesn't seem there is compelling evidence thus far for one to assume there would be a significant difference.
[0] http://www.fass.org/page.asp?pageID=52&autotry=true&ULnotkn=...
In 100 years people may reasonably feel that pre 2060's GMO food is fine, but that new stuff is risky. And they would be reasonable to feel that way. After all, we have recalled a lot of great new products from the market due to long term issues.
PS: This might be unreasonable, however the pro GMO argument is lower food costs which is a non issue for many people.
I mean, if you come across a dish of quinoa, macadamia nuts, and beef, would you object to eating it because it contains DNAs that never made contact with each other for a hundred million years, and there's just no guarantee what their combined power could do once ingested?
The only credible potential danger of GMO food is what they might do to the ecosystem while they're still alive (that is, before you eat them), but somehow most GMO opponents just gloss over this important distinction.
I think it's ultimately to the detriment of the environment that the preservationist/Muir/Sierra Club strain of environmentalism won out over the sustainability/Roosevelt/management view in the public consciousness.
Of course, I generally stop listening when an "environmentalist" starts railing against nuclear power without a cogent argument (of which I'll admit there are a few). Love alone doesn't save nature, sadly.
No. People are afraid about GMO because they expect private companies incentives not being healthy food but economic benefits (for them).
That means for example, that if they could flood our food plants with "Roundup" because the plants are resistant to it, and the pesticide ends in our food, and we start getting cancers 10 years from now they don't care at all if they can profit now from it.
"sometimes they rest on the idea that natural is better."
Well, natural is usually better because nature had millions of years of adaptation to the environment. You can protect yourself against natural sunlight or natural nuclear radiation because nature created mechanisms against their bad effects, but you can't protect against manmade Pultonium or xrays or cosmic radiation not protected by Ozone.
Day after pill for example contaminates water with estrogens that are not easy(cheap) to filter.
If the concern is that municipal water standards are too low to do this then the solution is to push for higher standards.
The pressure on water supply in many regions is only going to get worse and more efficiently recycling waste water can make a significant difference.
Additionally if the standards are so low as to make grey water a risky proposition then they are simply too low generally, water from reservoirs can also be very polluted with things like agricultural run off.
Not quite.
> if we engineer a solution that produces water of a purity greater than water from a reservoir
This statement hinges on our ability to accurately measure the purity. This is far from settled and I can understand the hesitation.
Personally, I would take a look at the methods of purification. If they're using tons of chemicals, and most purification processes do, then I would pass.
I would prefer they use osmosis and then dump the contents out where they can filter down to natural aquifers, allowing natural filtration to take place. Then you pump it back up using the infrastructure we already have in place and put it through the regular process.
Example report for my region
http://www.ywonline.co.uk/web/WQZ.nsf/0/26AA27A47E437B1B8025...
The natural filtration process has been around since forever and we know it works well. There is no reason not to use it.
We know more about bacteria today, but can we filter for e.g prions?
Anyway the current system works, the new system might be better, but on the off chance that something goes wrong, why risk it?
It has nothing to do with the education system and everything to do with human social evolution and evolutionarily stable strategies.
You're looking at the problem "like a nerd"[1] wherein you have a fixed set of definitions and guidelines and the end product (the water) fits or exceeds all of them and therefore, presto! Anyone who disagrees with your framework is therefore an idiot.
But these people aren't disagreeing with the stats - they don't care about the stats. They have a built-in, knee-jerk revulsion to drinking anything that came from sewage. That might not be rational or useful in 2016, but it has been tremendously useful over the past hundred thousand years of human social evolution. In fact, so useful, that people without that revulsion have been heavily selected against.
If your response to this is to show them more and more data and "proof" you're missing the point.
[1] ... to use Nassim Taleb's technical term.
That's not necessarily true. First-world capitalist society focused on intellectual labor does a great job of mentally dividing the world into 'clean' and 'unclean', where everything unclean moves invisibly through a series of subterranean pipes.
If you go to any farm, this division is much more vague. Farmers dump horse manure onto soil, from which your vegetables grow. Bruised and almost-rotting apples are picked, crushed, and pressed to create apple cider. Milk comes from the teats of a cow into a tin pail that might have some bits of hay that are later strained out.
The notion that humans have "built-in, knee-jerk revulsion" to sewage is a trained behavior arising from an ignorance or a visceral distance from production processes.
Many humans also probably have "built-in, knee-jerk revulsion" to the sight of animals being slaughtered, with their blood draining into a pool, yet will happily devour a plate of barbecue. Why would we consider that recycled water from sewage would be any different?
I live on a farm and we have fairly stark divisions here.
People aren't sure because they aren't equipped to do the science themselves and have a well reasoned distrust of being told things are safe, that then turn out not be (or vice versa).
"What's in waste water?" People would answer, "E coli, food scraps, garbage".
Okay, so here's tap water. Show them lab samples.
Do the same with our 'grey water' (after processing). Lower impurities.
People still wouldn't touch it. We could use it for things like golf courses, etc, which lessened the load, to be sure. But still.
[1] http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150527-solving-a-space-sta...
On the assumption that you may not be a native speaker of English, I'll mention that here in the United States, at least, the term "rocket scientist" (which some people who work on the International Space Station project literally are) is a synonym for "very smart person." In other words, my statement is that even though the International Space Station presumably has enough prestige and budget as a project to hire very capable engineers, those engineers have not found it easy to design a toilet-to-tap water treatment system (as the linked article in my first comment reports). Yes, designing a system to work in free fall while confined to the space station is itself a difficult engineering problem, but even here on earth in normal-g conditions, it looks like there is a lot of engineering work still to do on the problem of potable water recycling.
I'm lucky in one way to live in Sweden where there is virtually unlimited fresh water (except in a few places). On the other hand, it doesn't stop people from trying to save water, for no particular reason at all, other than some general climate angst. Water is really cheap - somwhere around 1 EUR per m3, and there are no big lawns that needs water. (And if they do, and it's large, you probably have a lake or a stream within pumping distance nearby.)
It's a bit counterproductive. Old sewer pipes are clogging up because of modern toilets that use very little water, and dishwashers and washing machines should probably be set up to use ten times more water in cold pre-cycles and while rinsing, to be able to save a bit on the warm cycles.
I can add that we probably have one of the best waste treatment facilities in world, so the total volume through the system is more or less irrelevant, except some marginal costs for chemicals and pumping.
But no. EU mandates that saving water is important...
The utility companies are now forced to increase the water rates- typically the fixed component, since the total used volume- and their budget- is shrinking.
Why not call it BluWater or something simple and marketing-like? Follow up with some blah text like "BluWater is the freshest and cleanest water humanity has ever drank! You can get it straight from the taps!"
(Parks and Rec)
A lot of it is treated with bacterial vats, chemicals, and UV, and then run back into local tributaries, because while it's safe for the environment, it isn't quite safe for human consumption.
A glass or two won't hurt you, but I wouldn't want to drink it regularly, mostly due to the cocktail of pharmaceuticals that can't be filtered.
A lot of that water is also used to irrigate large tracks of land not used for food. Many golf courses use this method, and sometime big pipes just run through forests spraying treated water onto drought-prone areas.
Once you get past the "ick" factor, waste water management is actually pretty cool.
What a weird world.
I suppose it's possible that they're only broken down by human biological processes, but that seems unlikely given the diversity of microbial life in the environment (and inside us!).
For instance, an arctic shaman would eat poisonous mushrooms, taking the hit for the dangerous toxins in the fungus, then other people would drink the shaman's urine, which still contained the active hallucinogenic chemical, and go on a much safer trip. The hallucinogen would persist in this fashion through multiple kidneys before it was no longer worth drinking someone else's piss.
Now imagine that instead of pissing into a cup, you're pissing into a creek, and someone downstream will be taking a lower dose of something that was prescribed to you. That's one of the current problems with just running the wastewater output to the water treatment input. The treatment systems can sterilize and flocculate, but that makes it biologically sterile, not chemically sterile.
It's similar to the difference between distilled water, deionized water, and pure water. There will be some things that your specific purification process does not remove. If you have no outflows, your water system will become like a salt lake, where soluble chemicals enter via the tributaries and are left behind when the water evaporates, thus making the lake saltier and saltier the longer it exists, until it is so salty that otherwise soluble salts precipitate out in certain weather conditions.
Essentially, you would need a desalinator plant between your wastewater plant and the water treatment plant, and those are somewhat more expensive than just diluting your more problematic waste into the whole ocean.
Protein-based drugs, such as oxytocin or insulin, are likely to be consumed and recycled into component amino acids.
Most molecules left out in the environment will eventually be oxidized, have an important bond cleaved by UV light with enough energy, or undergo thermal decomposition.
As sunlight, dissolved oxygen concentration, and temperature can vary wildly just by moving a few meters away, and the chemicals themselves have different stability, it is very difficult to predict how long a pill that was flushed down the toilet will persist in the environment.
Generally speaking, certain drugs are only useful because they take longer to degrade inside the body. It wouldn't do you much good to get an injection of a drug if your body's proteases chop it up to uselessness in the first ten minutes, or if it zooms right to the liver and gets methylated, or whatever it is the body does to clear foreign chemicals. In those cases, microbes will also have a hard time turning them into something else.
Any animal that eats them can usually break them down given their low concentration and half-life, using liver enzymes, and since the majority of the chemicals are human-targeted, they often have much affect on local flora or fauna.
We have bigger problems biggest waster water management anyway. When it rains, your town probably dumps raw sewage into the nearest river through a CSO (Combined Sewer Overflow), which is... less than ideal.
The previously mentioned mechanisms are actually considered eco-friendly approaches in comparison.
So yes, it is a very weird world.
Did you win the Putnam ?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35015
"Did you win the Putnam?"
Yes, I did.Usually the recycled waste-water is send in to the rivers.
The fresh water usually comes from dams, ground water or river bank filtration (you don't suck out of the river, but from a well right next to it, so it get's filtered by the ground in between).
The water from the dams tastes really really good. The one from the big river (at least in my town) is very rich in minerals, not exactly the tastiest, but perfectly fine to drink too. The minerals build up in water cattle though and are annoying to clean off.
German tap-water is usually cleaner than german bottled water I think.
In the warmer parts of europe water is often is chlorinated I think, wouldn't want to drink it.
I didn't read the article, but I'd be afraid of purely recycled water. I know the fish have problems because of contraceptives, which are hard to filter out and in Great Britain there are traces of ataractics even in the ground water.
Before you get all high and mighty with your anti-americanism, check your facts.
A lot of water has such a heavy chlorine smell and taste, I can't drink it - same goes for US soft drinks that are created with tap water, can't drink. There is practically no smell or taste in German tap water [0].
[0] I might be biased and not taste it any longer because of growing up here
Sure, the wastewater gets treated to be extremely clean, but I think it just gets pumped into rivers.
It talks about why toilet-to-tap is technically feasible, but not (specifically) why we "need" to adopt it, let alone whether it's inevitable. In Perth, or anywhere else. (Yes, it mentions general factors. But at no point does it make a logical case to support what it says in its headline).
BTW, a prediction: in the same way that corporations have strenuously (and in some cases, successfully) lobbied for prohibitions on labeling GMO-derived foods as such, or rGBH-derived milk as such -- one day we'll equal if not more energy put into efforts against against labeling toilet-derived drinking water as... exactly what it is.
And I'm sure one day, these efforts will ultimately succeed, also.
However, I'm not sure how practical that kind of thing would be to do at house-scale. You'd need to have extra set of plumbing, plus storage tanks for the greywater (and probably pumps to get it there), among other extra things.
"If anything, recycled wastewater is relatively sweet,"