National Academy Endorses Waste Water Reuse

There may indeed be some situations where direct potable reuse -- that is, taking wastewater directly from the wastewater treatment plant outfall and running it into a water treatment plant and on into the potable water distribution system -- needs to be considered, but I expect those situations to be few and far between. The idea that this is the "expeditious" way to maximize reuse is simply an artifact of our institutions' addiction to a water resources infrastructure model developed -- and rooted in the conditions considered to be paramount -- in the 19th century, refusing to consider a fundamental transformation of the form and function of our infrastructure to respond to the conditions that are paramount here in the 21st century.

A very small fraction of the potable water supply is used for functions that actually need for the water to be fully potable quality. We can go a very long way toward addressing the problems that "toilet to tap" strategies would by moving to a reuse-focused decentralized concept of "waste" water management, in particular meeting a large majority of irrigation demand with reclaimed water. But our institutions are largely deaf to the very idea, in particular for our purposes here, Austin Water refuses to even discuss it.

Re the point that reclaimed wastewater can be made "safe" in the sense of pathogen risks, yeah, that's pretty easy, given sufficient attention to doing so -- recognizing that both people and technology sometimes fail to perform, so you need enough redundancy in the system to provide "high assurance" of continuously reliable treatment. But that is not the real problem with direct potable reuse. Rather, it's all the stuff that goes into the water that we don't even know what to test for. Just read the ingrediants in your shampoo sometime to get a clue. And then there are all the pharms that people eliminate. We have here a brew that may or may not be able to be rendered "safely potable". So to me, going with direct potable reuse instead of rethinking the infrastructure system to maximize direct NONpotable reuse is really pretty stupid, a product of indolence on the part of the institutions that plan and run these systems.

We have way more than enough demand for irrigation, toilet flushing, laundry, etc. to "absorb" all our "waste" water. Transforming the water resources infrastructure system to do that "just" requires the will to head down that road, instead of expanding and perpetuating the 19th century infrastructure system that has run us into the fix we are in.

Thanks for reading (even though I know no one reads this stuff).