Why people irrationally reject cleaned sewer water, and how to change their mind
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wbur.org
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.
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/72m/an_epub_of_eliezers...
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.
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.
Can't find the reference, though. Sorry.
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.
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.
^ https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Reading_Termi...
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.
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.
[1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=nasa-all-...
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.
It reminds me of a Verizon Math story[1].
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
(Not saying this is any sort of guarantee, just thought it was an interesting thing to consider.)
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.
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.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/there-are-drugs-...
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. """
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.
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.
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.
I grew up in Europe :-)
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.
Pretty amazing when he invites the host to drink from a bottle of that filth at the end.
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)
If a virus will find way to bypass all filters and return back to human body, then we will have huge problem.
[0] http://www.fastcompany.com/1750612/the-dangerously-clean-wat...
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.
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.
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.
5 kWh/m^3 * 8765 h/year * 3,000,000 people * 2842 m^3/person-year = 4863662 kW = 4863 MW.
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.)
[0] http://lightbucket.wordpress.com/2008/04/04/large-scale-desa... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_California [2] http://www.waterfootprint.org/ [3] http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_average_output_MW_of_a...
From http://www.nei.org/resourcesandstats/nuclear_statistics/usnu..., a 90% capacity nuclear power plant can produce 7.9 billion KWh in a year. Let's round that down to 6 billion. The math is:
5 kWh/m^3 * 3,000,000 people * 2842 m^3/(personyear) / 6,000,000,000 kWh/(power-plantyear) = 7.1 power plants for LA.
It looks like something funny happened in your math/numbers, but your final calculation and conclusion somehow ended up correct.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2011...
The reservoir is completely open. Untold numbers of animals pee, poop, and die in it every year.
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.
How is that relevant?
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.
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.