Cities turn to ‘extreme’ water recycling
e360.yale.edu
e360.yale.edu
Agriculture is outright wasteful of water. California agriculture consumes 80% of the state's water.
https://water.ca.gov/Programs/Water-Use-And-Efficiency/Agric...
Its an environmental equivalent of Amdahl's law - spending so much effort to make a small portion of the water use efficient when we can work far less to make agriculture more efficient. Of course its all because of lobbying.
But one thing we can and should do immediately is stop (effectively) exporting huge amounts of water from Arizona to Saudi Arabia for free. That's very low-hanging fruit.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/saudi-company-fondomonte-arizon...
You're absolutely right.
Yet, much like the "No Farms No Food" bumper-sticker slogan, there's some rhetorical sleight of hand going on here. Those stickers are correct in a general sense, but the slogan is rarely deployed in a general sense. It's generally used to defend uneconomical farming in environmentally questionable places.
Similarly, you're completely correct in every single way that we need agriculture and banning it is not a solution. However, there's perhaps a substantial difference between banning all agriculture everywhere and matching the agriculture in a location to the resources available to support it. If there's inadequate water or sun to grow crops that need lots of both, perhaps that location is not the best for those crops.
Agriculture is essential for human survival. It's possible that growing almonds in areas with sharply limited and poorly managed water is less than essential for human survival.
In reality, middle America probably grows an entire magnitude more food calories than california, and most of that is inefficiently turned into beef, or ethanol for cars. America does not need to be worried about starving. We literally throw away like a quarter of the food we purchase, and for incredibly stupid reasons like people swallowing the "Best By" dates as gospel and refusing to eat food with a bruise. This doesn't even consider the massive amount of farmland that we used to use in plenty of rural states across the nation that just aren't as profitable as the factory farms that own the markets nowadays. My state used to produce mountains of potatoes for the entire country but got outcompeted by Idaho and now is stuck growing niche crops and small batches of broccoli for local consumption.
They're not perfect, but to my body, also clearly not meaningless.
Consider that food producers are logically often already under ample pressure to set those dates in reasonable thresholds on both sides by their reputations and their own supply chain lags.
I'm not saying this to be dismissive. These effects can be incredibly strong, I could not eat pork cutlets for years after I had an extremely strong migraine when I ate one. After my body associated the smell and taste with it and noped out every time I got close to one.
This is a pretty thorough paper on histamine intolerance specifically, and it discusses buildup of histamines in certain foods and associated symptoms.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/12/colorado...
I'm definitely not an expert here. Please correct me if this is all BS.
They are essential, ask any vegan :)
> but because they sell a lot in China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almonds_in_California
"Farmers exported $4.5 billion worth to foreign countries in 2016, about 22% of the state's total agricultural exports. The majority of these exports went to the European Union [37%], China [8%] and India [15%]. While the EU is the largest consumer, the latter two countries are expanding markets ...". Canada, Japan and UAE have 6% each.
> created a circle of increased water consumption
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23655640/colorado-river-wa...
1_049_555 million gallons ... beef, dairy
__125_218 million_gallons ... soy, rice, almonds, potatoes
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/12/colorado...
"Agriculture – mainly alfalfa – consumes 80% of the Colorado River’s dwindling water supply ... One out of every three farmed acres in the valley is dedicated to growing alfalfa ... used as food for livestock."
"In 2021, nearly 20% of alfalfa produced in the west was shipped abroad."
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23655640/colorado-river-wa...
"The Colorado River is going dry ... to feed cows."
"That means altering the demand side of the water supply-demand equation and shifting diets globally to foods that use less H2O, which ultimately means less meat and dairy, as well as fewer water-intensive tree nuts like almonds, pistachios, and cashews (nut milks, however, require much less water to produce than cow’s milk)."
https://environment.yale.edu/news/article/the-other-side-of-...
"1 kilogram of almonds produces less than 1 kilogram of carbon emissions. (For comparison, the Environmental Working Group estimated that beef causes more than 20 kilograms of CO2-eq emissions, cheese more than 10, and beans and vegetables around 2.)"
https://foodrevolution.org/blog/almonds-sustainability/
The authors compared the nutrition content of 42 different California food crops. They also ranked the economic value of 44 food crops. They concluded that for the water needed to produce them, almonds ranked among the most valuable foods grown in California for their dietary and economic benefits.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/environmental-footprint-m...
Cow milk is still 2x more water intensive than almods, needs 16x more land, produces 4x more CO2 and 6x more euthropication.
Hmm, wouldn’t want to address the elephant in the room though.
Second, there is very much a way to manage water while ranching — the main thing is to have the herds help you maintain healthy soil (which retains and regulates surface water), rather than destroying it like in feed lots. You make sure you can move them to a different section of the land.
Third, livestock and crops can co-exist onsite, and there are mutually beneficial processes between the two. Most farmers and ranchers do one or the other. Combined with notill and letting limited grazing on fallow land, what would be toxic runoffs from manure turns into adding fertilizer back into fallow lands.
Fourth, price of meat should reflect the added cost. People keep using feedlots because they want meat factories and cheap meat.
Solutions already exist.
tldr: alfalfa is an unnatural food for unnaturally kept horses
source: have horses on range land.
(Aside: Anybody who wants free horses to break (not to turn into dog food), let me know.)
The real problem, and the real elephant that no one wants to address, is the human population size.
Usually nobody engages this because it's a boring conservative talking point. Do I consume too much? No, it's the world that's overpopulated. And they usually have drastic authoritarian solutions that have no chance of being enacted. But go ahead, you have the floor, what are your proposals?
Well, might want to look those up before you continue down this line of thought.
If you're missing river and aquifer water, you want to tackle the users of river and aquifer water
1 almond requires 1 gallon of water 1 egg requires 50 gallons of water 1 8oz steak requires 900 gallons of water
Almonds simply aren't good.
"omg lets just move the farms to where the water is"
like you're not talking about growing plants rooted in the literal ground, some that must be cultivated over multiple years to yield quality product.
like we're not all going to be chasing water on a hotter planet with a chaotic climate.
I'm talking about businesses, yes. Many of which will, as you say, need multiple years to start up elsewhere. I freely and readily acknowledge that this will probably be a difficult process for those businesses. Fortunately, food supply chains are now globe-spanning and de-emphasizing agriculture in drought-prone parts of the US is very unlikely to result in food shortages, much less famine.
We could start more gently by having them pay a fair price for the natural resources they require and are thus not available for everything else that needs water.
If anything, the last few years have shed light on is just how fragile global supply chains are. The war in Ukraine has impacted wheat prices globally.
> de-emphasizing agriculture in drought-prone parts of the US is very unlikely to result in food shortages, much less famine
There's a reason food security is considered a national security issue[1].
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2022/10/1...
In fact, if warming occurs, the US and Canada stand to net gain arable land and have increased growing seasons.
Of course the counter to that will always be “… but we’re going to have like SO much climate chaos!” which has become the perfect scary, vague and ultimately unprovable argument.
That certain regions are expected to "win" does not fully grasp the impact on our overall economic stability, the systems that keep necessities like food cheap and accessible. Whether you like it or not, the food market is global[1].
"Climate chaos" is not hyperbole.
1. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/global-wheat-prices-jump-...
Calling a flood, hurricane or even several years long drought a “climate related disaster” doesn’t count. These events have occurred since time immemorial.
Every weather measurement deviation from average is not some “disaster” that can be blamed on evil corporations and people driving SUVs.
The way it works is that you have a set quantity of water rights, and even in a drought, your entire water right is fulfilled before the next person in line. This means that the farms on the bottom of the totem pole, which is ordered by seniority and 100 year old connections to grifters, not actual need or value or anything possibly meritocratic, gets whatever they can.
In fact, a huge publicized fight about water rights in california was only so the last group in line, a shitty farming company and group of companies in the literal desert, spent millions screaming about "We are letting all the water into the ocean to protect some dumb smelt" ended up with those smelt, which were the food source to lots of valuable fishing communities in the bay area, dying off and going completely extinct, and that farming community hasn't actually gotten anymore water because their original apportionment was not being fulfilled before, because it's a drought and they are last in line. This was a HUGE talking point all over fox news and it was stupid and meaningless.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-consumer-expendi...
US corn farmers are producing so much corn with subsidies, that they dont know what to do with it.
From here you get more subsidies for ethanol gasoline (ethanol extracted from food - corn), and more subsidies for processed food - HFCS being added generously into everything!
Without corn overproduction, the sugar consumption would be much smaller in the US and diabetes problem would not be as severe as it is
I'm pretty sure mcdonalds and frito lays would still be advertising even if their input resources quadrupled in price.
Everything is made with corn syrup because it is cheap, because it is an easy use for corn. If we made it easier to turn into other products like beef feed and ethanol, or less profitable to use corn syrup like with a tax, then there would be less corn syrup in food, but anything that doesn't provide an easy use for the oversupply will not work, because it just doesn't meet the desire of the US government to keep an obscene oversupply of corn in the market.
[1] https://agenciadenoticias.ibge.gov.br/agencia-noticias/2012-...
The problem with almonds isn't so much that the trees require water (like anything else). It's that they're inevitably planted where water is a particular problem. Like, needing to pump and deplete groundwater.
You could feed many more people with higher yielding trees, like apples or even citruses. But then again, the almond is such an integral part of the upper middle class suburbia which makes up so much of California that we literally have expression around it: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=almond%20mom
I'd like your assistance in classifying other items, such as
1: upholstered furniture 2: refridgerator 3: wheat mixed with water, non-baked 4: bread
IIUC, it takes more water to produce a single almond (~7 calories) than an orange (~45 calories).
Almonds are a great source of protein. Oranges are negligible by comparison.
Almonds are a good source of vitamin E. Oranges contain none by comparison.
Almonds are high in healthy monounsaturated fats. Oranges contain none by comparison.
So now compare water per the above metrics and see where Almonds stand.
Almonds and Oranges are both unique and valuable in their own way.
A ag product should be priced to reflect their 'externalities', and that includes things like water use, but perhaps we should be subsidizing healthy stuff like produce over field corn and soybeans
Almonds are closer to 1 gallon per ~6 calories - or almost 4 times worse.
It's almost as if there's reason almonds are expensive and tomatoes and oranges and lemons and limes aren't.
Its true, planting them in deserts (the central valley of california) is a bad idea. I only point out that there's nothing particularly bad about an almond tree vis-a-vis any other tree. Planted elsewhere, there would likely be no issue.
Except the context is very important here. California is routinely struggling with water availability. Planting trees, of any kind, in a Californian desert in this environment and climate is stupid and self defeating, no matter how much profit it brings into some farming company's hands, and there's not really a reason to defend that. Plenty of places in the US have enough water to support massive tree planting efforts, and also cheaper labor than California and fewer environmental regulations to work through. There's zero reason to plant a tree in a Californian desert.
Banning farming in California isn’t the same as banning farming globally. Across much of the US not only is water plentiful crops get enough rainfall to not actually need irrigation.
And of course banning CA farming is hardly needed, even a 5% drop would free up plenty of water. Cities would be much better off simply buying farmland with water rights and leaving it fallow than implementing severe water conservation methods.
If California is growing a little less stuff that I'm buying in Ohio, Ohio farmers can start selling it at a profitable price point. Then we're not transporting as much across the country, not draining California of water, employing more Ohio farmers, and diversifying our food supply chains.
Maybe there’s a reason we are supposed to be thinking inside of boxes, after all.
The issue isn’t that farming is using 92% of all water, the issue is farming is extracting water from aquifers faster than it can replenish. This reduces not only the amount stored but also the amount that ends up in streams and rivers.
Gradually shift agricultural activity to states that do not experience drought. There's plenty of arable land in the US.
It’s a catch 22: the more wet a place is, the less micronutrients there are available due to constant run off. As it turns out, historically it has been easier to bring water to a region than to replenish micronutrients in the soil to support industrial farming.
If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares
I think the point is that putting effort into reducing the water waste associated with farming is higher-impact than residential water use.
But we should be putting effort into both.
Which wouldn't be the worst thing. Recognizing that the true cost of farming in the desert makes it uneconomical isn't the same as banning farming in general.
There are other options between doing nothing like now and outright banning agriculture.
You could, for example, not try and farm water intensive crops in a desert.
You could, for example, use the water to grow vegetables rather than animals which need much more water.
You could, for example, farm crops that are meant to be grown in the region where the farm is.
Can’t we just farm in places with abundant natural sources of water and transport it to places without? Or transport the water.
Places without water tend to have more sun, so we could probably work out some kind of energy-for-water trade.
Warm dry places tend to be good because you can grow crops there year round and they get a lot of sunlight. That's not necessarily the case in places with lots of natural water.
Of course, we do farm in places with lots of water too, it's just not the same crops.
Corn has commercial uses too. In fact it's largely used for that - sugar, starch, protein, roughage are used in all sorts of processes. Touch nearly anything near you right now, corn was involved in it's manufacture.
Hard to say what impact cutting back on corn would have. A big one.
Edit: in the US
One fun factor is that corn is drought sensitive (esp during certain stages of growth) and only about a fifth of our corn is irrigated or something like that. As climate change heats up, we may experience more crop loss.
"The market" isn't magic, despite what your Economics 101 youtube channel of choice says.
Its only been 2 years since they started actually controlling the pumping of groundwater, and that fight took well over a decade. [1]
[0] https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article4215302.html
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/07/22/1019483661/without-enough-wat...
It's not a waste, but it's also not your food, it's sold for profit. Farms in CA literally ship water out of the state in calorie form for profit. I'm glad they do, living in MN, but I hope they can sustain it.
Many other things should be grown in California, but you know, be smart about it.
The best thing for this country would be if California axed their agricultural industry because it would both force and encourage Ag development elsewhere. It would simultaneously be the worst thing for Californians and the cost of food production. But why am I arguing with you? It ultimately, brings my food production closer to home and you and your neighbors bear the cost of higher food prices.
Or maybe they believe it, who knows.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/05/22/climate/color...
The reality is slightly different than this. Water has already been allocated. The current price to reallocate is high, and residential users don't want to pay to purchase more allocation from a current owners.
The main thing with agriculture is managing ground water onsite with rainwater harvesting. By that, I specifically do not mean holding it in tanks. I’m talking about things like on-contour swales to slow down water so some of it recharges groundwater, or use of percolation ponds upland from the crop area.
These work in arid climates. You have to use a different set of patterns for wet places that can receive too much water. Many of the patterns can be found in how beavers instinctually manage water.
"Better go take a 30 minute shower so I can justify that almond-milk beverage I had yesterday!"
https://www.epa.gov/waterreuse/california-treated-municipal-...
Also I don't want to know how much we'd have to spend to buy out even a quarter of the farms in the Central Valley.
https://www.khou.com/article/news/houston-will-be-drinking-d...
"We re handling right now about 135-140 million gallons [of raw sewage] per day, said Bill Tatum, manager of TRA Central Regional Wastewater System."
"This city needs almost a half billion gallons of water a day during the peak usage of the summer months, said Alvin Wright, spokesman for the City of Houston Public Works and Engineering Department."
That's a pretty big dent in the overall demand - though, amusingly, somewhat at risk because the cities in north Texas are going to start using more of their own sewage themselves.
Between things like this and capturing more storm runoff there's a ton for California cities to do to make them less dependent on other geographical areas and phenomenons beyond just "make people farm less." And especially if the climate patterns shift, closing the loop is just as important as getting rid of upstream consumers.
Water's a reusable resource, why are we still in the habit of polluting it and not cleaning up after ourselves?
My understanding is that prior to the Iranian revolution, there were Israeli experts working in Iran on drip irrigation methods. Of course, they had to get out pretty quickly.
The most egregious examples are the desert areas that are made to look "tropical." Many of the desert cities require water waste by law- you can be fined for, e.g. not having a bright green lawn. Many of the residents don't even know they live in a desert. It seems crazy to talk about limiting water to agriculture when this is still going on.
There’s no individual incentive to do those things, at least on a year-to-year basis which is how people make decisions. You think about this year, within the boundaries of your own property.
But the benefits are largely for the region, not the individual.
So, it need to be done by government, or it won’t be done at all (at scale).
Of course some small individual farms will do (and are doing) it on principle because it’s the right thing to do. But we can’t rely on ethics to drive behavior at the economic level.
There are a lot of big reforms that need to happen, but they’re big, often involving several states, international treaties, and long standing expectations.
It’s not a “why don’t you just” situation but a complex system of varied interests that have to renegotiate.
The core problem is that people, voters, need to understand the complexities. “Saving water is good, let’s do that” is hard enough to agree on right now… balancing the needs of many is very very difficult with a poorly informed and motivated electorate.
Urban areas, faced with the choice between purchasing those rights to increase their allocation, or spending on increasing urban efficiency, have largely chosen the latter because it is cheaper.
Large scale does not imply efficiency. Soviet union did many things large scale
> cheaply enough to lift millions out of malnutrition
Millions were lifted out of poverty. Rhey lifted themaelves out of malnoutricioun because now they can afford food.
Some irrigated farms in the Central Valley will be withdrawing from aqueducts, but part of the reason why the valley is dry is because we built these aqueducts, harming agricultural land for the benefit of SoCal cities, with the promise that the farmers would be able to use that water. So not sure it's fair for us to claim the moral high ground.
Much of the California water crisis is manufactured too. There's no shortage of freshwater for the foreseeable future, but we're not building new dams, aqueducts, etc, essentially relying on the infrastructure built in the 1960s and before, for a population only fraction of what we have right now. Climate change plays a role, but the bulk of the pain is self-inflicted and has little to do with growing rice or watering our lawns.
Citation needed.
Counter-citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_land_subsidence
Recycling greywater is an old technology. People in Tuscon pioneered municipal laws to allow this, which then spread across Arizona.
Blackwater treatment comes in many forms — your septic tank with a leach field is an example.
The Earthship folks out in Taos, NM have designs that recycles residential water at least five times for years.
There are permaculture sites that have been doing this, and advocating for this for years.
There are commercial sites recycling greywater here in Arizona. A major outlet mall here in Phoenix. Intel’s fab in metro Phoenix (there’s even a slide deck!). The new TSMC fab in Phoenix will use similar methods.
It’s not as if a startup invented all of this. These can all be accomplished with fairly low tech. It isn’t even an “extreme” decentralization. If people want to get into “extreme” decentralization, there are also: onsite composting, onsite food production (such as perennial food forests), integrated pest management, etc.
I've heard snarky sayings like that for decades. Yeah, old news.
But some older US cities that wore historically a lot more wasteful never really paid attention, and now think it's new.
https://www.khou.com/article/news/houston-will-be-drinking-d...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEWater
It's worth noting, though, that Singapore has invested a lot into potable water tech like this not because it makes financial sense in itself (it doesn't), but because the vast majority of Singapore's drinking water is piped in from Malaysia, which thus has a literal stranglehold over the country.
It costs 5$ for 1000 gallons and that is the monthly consumption of a household
1000 gallons is 4546l, so the cost for desalination is £0.86 for 1000l by your price.
Sounds like desalination is worth it even in soggy England (which hasn't been soggy at all until a few days ago).
That excess salt needs to go somewhere and wherever it goes, it will be a problem.
And you can't just divert the brine onto land. Where ever you put it will be salted earth - completely unlivable. And it will probably pollute ground waters.
Meet the Resnicks [1], who are agricultural billionaires and control a huge chunk of California's water supply.
This is why you should get mad whenever you see California invest in desalination [2]. Would you ever use desalination to grow oranges or almonds or alfalfa? No, it's way too expensive. But when you build desalination plants in a place like California what you're really doing is further subsidizing inefficient uses of water for agriculture when you could totally solve the problem by simply growing less water-intensive crops and/or letting some arid land, well, stay arid.
[1]: https://story.californiasunday.com/resnick-a-kingdom-from-du...
[2]: https://water.ca.gov/News/News-Releases/2023/April-23/Califo...
Read about this here: https://www.newindianexpress.com/good-news/2022/jun/05/how-k... and https://www.deccanherald.com/city/bengaluru-infrastructure/u...
The article also uses the term 'purified' which is non-specific. All sorts of things end up in water: soaps, detergents, drain-o, medications, you name it. You can't just distill it, some chemicals are volatile. You can't just filter it, some contaminants will pass through.
On a city-wide scale, it only introduces more problems. Having pressurized gray water would require an entire new set of lines, and hopefully the people installing them don't accidentally connect the lines to the wrong distribution (it will happen inevitably).
So yes, it's a feel-good story, but it's nonsense. No way to capture the economies of scale, and the water isn't suitable for most uses.
They can already make that mistake. And they can do that with electricity too. If you employ idiots, there is no way to be safe.
> No way to capture the economies of scale
Does this sentence mean anything?
Does a water reservoir "capture economies of scale" in a way that purifying wastewater of aan entire city doesnt? Does building a giant canal to readistribute water?
i.e Grey water.
Flushing toilets with flawless drinking water is insane
You may not be doing anything wrong and still get a bad result, while somebody else in a different location may do a lot of things wrong and still get good results.
Of course, if the system is cycled frequently (i.e. the water doesn't stagnate for months), then it's even better
I meant more utility provided grey water. Meaning they still clean it up...just not all the way to drink quality. As with many things in life getting to those last few % to 100% are disproportionate and incrementally expensive/hard. So if you can flush toilets with 95% or whatever that's a win
It's not that expensive to install at that time and saves a lot of potable water. Seems like a no-brainer to me to do this everywhere.
You're also not paying for the sewer use if you flush with it (since sewer isn't metered)
Assuming Google is accurate and the average American is similar to the average Canadian.
> The average American uses over 100 gallons of water per day
100 gallons/day * 365 days * 3.78 liters/gallon = 137,930 liters
Isn't that just 8 or 9 people's drinking water?
If you disagree with that, work backwards from your answer.
950,000 liters saved divided by 40,000 = 23.75 liters per year? That seems too low.
potable water has very well defined properties. Its has a low salt concentration, pretty well known (and diminishing) chloride concentration, and known hardness.
It wont give you any surprises when designing a water system.
Grey water is whatever a human decided to put down certain drains. This could be very benign, but end users are... special.
Will they out cooking grease down the drain?
Will they pour industrial cleaners?
How about if the end user is an artist who etches glass in the attic bathroom and rinse the HF in the sink?
Will they pour "Jimmy"'s, the fish, bowl water and sand?
Is shower water "grey"? How about those fellows (they exist) who poop in the shower and squish it down (one of the grossest things I learned on the internet)?
And what about "Poochie", the pitbull, who loves to drink from the toilet bowl?
What about "Max", the three year old toddler, who loves to wash his hands in the toilet bowl?
Grey water should be used, extensively, but it is not a turn-key solution, and it certainly is way more expensive to build for.
Any good kits for this in the UK?
however, using greywater puts additional burden on the equipment in terms of maintenace (dirt layering on the walls and general externalities of unclean water) hence the economic incentives have to change before this will take on.
Such plenty and availability could be an advantage for urban farming. Perhaps every many-story building could devote a floor or two to such "recycling"? Given how much excess commercial space there is it's not that crazy of an idea. That is the floors for recycling would find a place in the market's excess.
Human and animal waste is compostable but only at industrial scale. They have to brought to a high temperature to kill bacteria and then aerobic bacteria has to be introduced to begin the process. This is not something your backyard composter can do. It’s why only allow pant matter. Composting animal waste is so much harder.
Not true! Plenty of people use composting toilets, for example people without plumbing (e.g. off grid houses) or homesteaders that embrace a re-use philosophy. You can do it at home - it's not that hard and it doesn't even smell if done right. Completely safe to use for trees and decorative plants if you keep it separate, but some people mix all their compost together and use it for everything. (If you want do the latter, you should probably read a little bit of compost literature first.)
humanure.
I've got to say that this beer would not be high on my list of beers to try.
And then it’s boiled, and chemically treated with alcohol.
But I personally know a beer brewer that was "remineralizing" water to a certain specification, and at some point they stopped because it was far too expensive. So I'm not so sure about the claim that people can make water with whatever properties they want, at least not in a way that is broadly economically viable.
I'm guessing that the beer brewer you spoke with was talking about the cost of buying distilled or RO water, as opposed to the cost of the water adjustment itself. It's probably a lot more economical if you're cleaning and reusing graywater, vs. trucking in distilled water, or running municipal water through an RO filter and essentially paying twice for water treatment.
it's a mixture of gypsum, calcium carbonate and epsom salt, conveniently pre-packaged as Burton salts.
I use 1/4tsp per gallon of distilled water. the expensive part is the distilled water (even more-so than the co2 used to carbonate it).
This seems convoluted; if it's clean enough to go in the ground, and ground-water is clean enough to treat and then add to the drinking-water supply, is it really just optics to use the local aquifer as a buffer, or is there some actual benefit from traveling through the ground (maybe different dissolved minerals?).
It seems like one of the following should be true:
- the treated wastewater being pumped into the ground has been so successfully treated that it doesn't contain more harmful contaminants than ground water, and so it could be just piped through to the same treatment as ground water, saving a pump-into-ground + pump-out-of-ground cycle
- the treated wastewater being pumped into the ground contains harmful contaminants at a greater concentration than existing ground water, which the soil may mediate before being pumped back up for further treatment -- but the concentration of these contaminants in the soil will increase as a result
I want some kind of "time buffer" and mass buffer between sewer and drinking if it happens to malfunction abit ...
That is great news for all the ISO certified labs out there that need to perform the daily water quality checks.
I can't help but think of "extreme-recycled" water as a socially acceptable version of Soylent Green, produced from liquid instead of solid waste.[a]
More seriously, I think recycling waste-water is a great idea. If we, human beings, continue to change our natural environment as rapidly as in the recent past, many prominent climate models predict that traditional forms of food and water production will likely become untenable due to extreme weather events like heatwaves and fires. If those climate models are right, we'll have no choice but to resort to creative forms of recycling to provide everyone with enough food and water.
---
One of the less well publicized great advances of the past decade is that we have essentially solved desalinization.
Recent advances in the reverse osmosis process mean that capital costs for desalinization capacity have been driven low enough that they can be economically powered by off-peak intermittent power, essentially using reservoirs of fresh water as a grid battery of sorts. The cost of solar and wind in the places that need fresh water are low enough that this can economically replace natural fresh water even in middle-income countries.
Large-scale buildouts are ongoing. We will not need "extreme water recycling" to provide anyone with sufficient water.
Not that it's a bad idea anyway, because it's good for the environment to recycle the other stuff that you pull out of the wastewater stream.
https://www.gov.il/en/departments/news/desalination_260520
Freshwater withdrawals in the US (which includes all agricultural use including exported crops and animal feed) is around 1550 cubic meters per year.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/water-withdrawals-per-cap...
So, even if we replaced all freshwater use in the US with desalinated water at current prices it would only incur a additional cost of ~600$ per capita per year. If our water use were more similar to peer countrys such as Germany (410 m^3), France (475 m^3), Australia (724 m^3), or Japan (640 m^3) the per capita costs would only be ~150$-250$ per year.
Can you link to any sources backing your claim?
The problem with anything designed to run "off peak" is that you have to pay the capital cost the whole time, even while it's not operating.
Do you have some examples you can cite? There's a lot of stuff that can be done but isn't yet at scale.
There is certain fixed costs for facility and then adding capacity increases on top of that. But question is really by how much? 10-50% for 200% or 300% capacity might be acceptable if that sum is saved in energy costs.
There is a myriad of drugs, pesticides and chemicals which are known to be inside the water system in the us. Your neighbour is depressed? Good for you. You might get some anti-depressants yourself (no, the body does not break down drugs completely, they are mostly escaping with the wastewater).
But hey, maybe I am just paranoid.
Good watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FccVv5NsIY
Jack up the rate so both pay the same, and introduce a huge pollution / cleaning penalty for companies that don’t emit virtually fully (talking something like 99.999% here) cleaned wastewater.
It’s slowly happening in Europe, but we’re decades to late with it. Even in The Netherlands and Belgium we’ve allowed companies to dump a continuous stream of PFAS-production polluted water straight into a river. Clown world :)
It's shameful and wasteful, and our country will run out of fresh water in my lifetime; I even heard one that says the aquifers will be running out within ten years. And they just used it for cooling.
Likewise, there's heavy investments in offshore wind parks, but companies like Microsoft just come in (with government subsidies) and buy up the whole capacity. It was supposed to replace, not supplement, existing power generation options.
This doesn't seem to track.
They take water out of the river and put the same amount back in as its a closed system in a pipe. How can they be responsible for lower water levels if they are net zero in usage?
Send me a link that backs up your claim that they are depleting the water table so I can fix the holes in my knowledge
> It's shameful and wasteful
What you've described does not sound shameful OR wasteful?
As always "if done correctly" carries a bit of an asterisk.
Maybe we'll find out that the reduction in violence we've seen since the 90s is partially due to SSRIs in the water. Might not be helping obesity rates either.
Makes sense that with such a huge global pop and increasing usage of medicines and pesticides the global water supply will eventually turn into a toxic sludge.
Anti depressants have just been found deep underwater in Antarctica so it seems all fish are swimming in a soup of blood thinners and psycho-active medication.
I wonder when the ocean ecosystem will collapse from this and when humans will turn "weird", if they haven't already done that. Imagine constantly being medicated with 1000 medications from the moment you are in the womb.
I hope many of these things are so trace that it's almost homeopathic, ie. doesn't have an effect - can anyone confirm or deny this?
Indeed. At least in the case of fish it turned out that plastic pollution starts to affect the hormonal balance males starting from the 3rd generation.
Makes you think about the ever lowering sperm-count in males across the board.
People pour all types of chemicals down the drain....pharmaceuticals, solvents, paint, oil, and whatever other liquid they have to dispose. There's no way that's cost efficient to properly filter out and certain things there's no safe levels so even trace amounts shouldn't be allowed.
I guess it depends on how thorough the filtration is, whether reverse osmosis is used.
recycling won't do much to help remote or add, it's already there
The Yale article is entirely unrealistic for residential and much of what it talks about would only work for some very large buildings that don't have any mixed usage ( if you follow the links in the article, you will find that the water system installed in the one San Fran had a starting cost of $1M dollars, which did not include all of the redundant return sanitary plumbing ).
The article glosses over the fact that you cannot re-use water in your home and that this is not going to change.
Reusing water that was used for washing your clothes?
People put all sorts of stuff into their washing machines and not all of it can be cost effectively, or even safely, reused just for toilet water.
In one word? "bleach"
Any sort of cleaning is going to involve soaps, detergents, etc... none of which you want to pump into a pipe with a smallish diameter to feed to a toilet. Environmentally? It is not worth the copper nor the electric required for a pump; a pump which would need to be designed to handle the grey water. Your municipal water is likely to be gravity fed, which is energy efficient.
Let's talk about the reality of residential properties.
Home owners are never 100% on top of every maintenance requirements and adding systems which will require ongoing maintenance and refitting? That is not viable.
Even using rainwater for toilets is not going to be cost effective, or reliable. You may believe your rain water is "all natural", but that is far from the truth once it hits your roof and makes its way to where you believe you are going to store it. It will need to be treated/cleaned before it can be use; which will then require its own pump that requires electricity.
The Yale article is misleading, at best.
I can't see that working have they not heard of evaporation? It would work but need a top up. It's a good idea to save water but it may need some fine-tuning for technical reasons and for acceptance by people.
It’s “Dilution is the solution to pollution.” We are dumping borderline water and hoping the people downstream don’t sue because it’s X% of the flow.
It just feels discriminatory, like, "Let the poors have the dirty water."
SF continues to save pennies by throwing away dollars.
It irks me that all of these climate initiatives involve forcing people to buy expensive EV's, solare panels, give up this/ give up that. But, when it comes to the elitists in SF the solution is to just do whatever it takes to allow them to live in a dried up state that has scarce water resources.
No, you can move. Time to practice what you preach.
So a condo/apartment has it's own elevators, solar rooftop, and now a hi reliability water recycling system that can support a few hundred units.
Sounds financially viable at scale ...
You will still have to pay taxes, fees, condo maintenance fees, etc. that are far more financially worse than if you just paid for these in the old traditional way.
A building being "self-sustaining" from an all-things-considered accounting perspective is not a bad goal, but there's no reason the "self-sustaining"-ness of a building needs to be physically co-located with the building. It's not like we anticipate the building taking off into space at some point in the future where it will need this functionality on its own. It is far more sensible to work proper water recycling into all the other fees they're paying anyhow.
we dont need green lawns, golf courses, swimming pools and car washes. we have lots of "low hanging fruit" if desired to drastically reduce watwr use in the coming years
Sure, we don't "need" anything nice. But few people want to live at a subsistence farming level.
San Francisco (about which the article was written) averages over 20" of rain a year, and with its mild climate, lawns and golf courses shouldn't be a problem.
We need agriculture, yes, but we don't need it to be in the places that it is in at the moment. 30% of all lettuce grown in the US is from Yuma County, AZ[0], which gets low single-digits inches of rain a year. It's farcical, but on its own it wouldn't be a problem as long as the water they do get is from a sustainable source (i.e. not tapping into aquifers that take millennia to fill). It would be much better to grow thirsty crops like that east of the Mississippi, where precipitation is plentiful.
Have you moved to these locations and grown lettuce? Are you speaking from experience? If not, I can assure you the climate is significantly different East of the Mississippi than it is in Yuma. Because of this the growing methods and associated costs dramatically change the profit margins, which are already very slim. i.e. it becomes unprofitable very quickly because "green" energy has increased overall energy costs.