Drinking Water

by James Salzman

  REUSING WASTEWATER HOLDS TREMENDOUS POTENTIAL TO FORESTALL expensive alternative supplies of water both on Earth and in space. In May 2009, astronauts aboard the International Space Station first drank water recycled from their own urine. Seeking to celebrate the moment, the astronauts toasted to their own pee, “clinking” the water bags. The American astronaut Michael Barratt claimed “the taste is great. … We’re going to be drinking yesterday’s coffee frequently up here, and happy to do it.” Not quite as catchy as Neil Armstrong’s “One small step for man, one giant step for mankind,” but a nice try. The processor is housed in a space toilet purchased from Russia, which passes urine into an American-made filter. Solid waste in the urine is separated out and stored to be sent back to Earth. This process can recycle 93 percent of the water it receives and reduces the fuel needed to transport the heavy liquid from Earth to space. This source of additional water also increases the number of astronauts the space station can support.

  While the space station relies on a distinctly high-tech approach, recycling our sewage is not difficult to do. With enough filters, ultraviolet radiation, and other standard treatment technologies, we can take virtually any polluted water source and produce clean drinking water. Indeed, we already do. While not something most people dwell on, it’s a fact that our water treatment plants deal every day with excrement from animals that live beside the rivers and reservoirs where we store our water, not to mention oil leaked on driveways, lawn fertilizer, and other gunk that washes off our streets and drains into water bodies. Where water is scarce, why not capture, treat, and reuse what we flush down our drains? Is it really much dirtier than water we already treat before piping it to our water mains and faucets? If it’s good enough for astronauts, it should be good enough for us.

  While it might make perfect sense to an engineer, chemist, or economist, selling the idea of “toilet-to-tap” to the general public has proven far more challenging. The basic problem is that it just feels gross. Experts in the field describe this as “the yuck factor.” As Charles Fishman has memorably described, “The condoms flushed away, the stagnant water from the vase of roses that stayed too long, the washing machine water from the dog’s bath towels, the sour milk poured down the kitchen drain, the deceased goldfish given a toilet-bowl funeral—you can clean all that out of the water, no problem. But no matter how crystalline the water itself, you can’t filter away the images of where it comes from.”

  There are a few places where recycling wastewater has become an accepted, standard practice, including Windhoek, Namibia, and affluent Fairfax, Virginia, near Washington, D.C., where treated sewage makes up about 5 percent of the drinking water. Orange County, California, started reusing sewage water in the 1970s and now relies on this source for 20 percent of its water needs. To address the yuck factor, treated water is pumped into an underground aquifer where it is later extracted as groundwater. As the water percolates through the soil, it is further cleansed by microorganisms and the water’s “origin” is scrubbed from the public’s consciousness, as well.

  The most ambitious use of toilet-to-tap is occurring in Singapore. Branded “NEWater,” the reuse strategy is justified in terms of national security. A tiny country at the tip of Malaysia, Singapore has few natural resources and has traditionally relied on Malaysia for most of its drinking water. As twenty-year-old student Khaiting Tan explains, “In the past, we had to get water from another country, but what happens if the ties between the two countries are jeopardized? It’s better to be self-reliant.” The treated water currently meets about one-third of Singapore’s daily water needs and the goal is to meet 50 percent over time. A public education initiative explains where the water comes from, why the strategy is necessary, and that the water is, in fact, cleaner than most piped water. Two remarkable statistics show just how accepted this initiative has become—more than eight hundred thousand people have visited the wastewater purification visitor’s center and nineteen million bottles of NEWater have been distributed to athletic groups and at community events.

  Singapore’s experience proves that toilet-to-tap is clearly a viable strategy, but proof of concept has not assured acceptance in other parts of the world. Singapore, after all, is famous (notorious in some circles) for banning the sale of chewing of gum since 1992. The town of Toowoomba in Queensland, Australia, provides a cautionary tale in this regard. In the grips of a serious drought, the city council proposed treating and reusing the town’s wastewater. Rival groups soon sprang up to press the contentious debate on both sides of the issue. The Toowoomba Water Futures Project (with the motto “Keep our future flowing”) faced off against the memorably named Citizens Against Drinking Sewage. Charges flew back and forth (“sewage sippers” was one of the more memorable epithets). Despite the longstanding drought, the proposal to drink treated sewage water was soundly defeated in a referendum, 62 percent to 38 percent. They ended up building a much more expensive pipeline.

  Despite the experience of nearby Orange County, in the face of heated opposition, San Diego’s city council voted in 1999 to halt its recycled water project. The local paper, the San Diego Union-Tribune, ran an editorial stating that even though your golden retriever was comfortable drinking out of the toilet bowl, it didn’t mean people should as well. There is something of the profane in drinking one’s own waste.

  The basic challenge to recycling wastewater, of course, is perception. Water users need to feel comfortable with the water coming out of their tap, and the idea of drinking some vestige of what was recently floating in a toilet bowl is simply hard for people to accept. Opponents say it will lead to a public health disaster. Never mind that the treated water can be made cleaner than water from the local reservoir. Never mind that we are drinking the same water that dinosaurs drank seventy million years ago and that has gone through the water cycle (and various species’ gastrointestinal tracts) countless times since.

  Water utilities are realizing they need to take a more indirect route than toilet-to-tap. Hence Orange County’s underground pumping of its treated water. San Diego learned this lesson, too. It revisited recycled water again in 2007, this time in the midst of a drought. Called the Indirect Potable Reuse project, the proposed new plant would treat sewage water and send it to reservoirs and aquifers rather than directly into water mains. It was approved. Las Vegas, El Paso, and Tucson have similarly chosen to pump treated effluent into aquifers, recharging the groundwater and later pumping up for regular use.

  Virtually anyone who thinks seriously about water shortages realizes how inefficient our current system is. Imagine if your next-door neighbor insisted on only using bottled water to flush his toilets, water his garden, or wash his cars. You’d think he was crazy. There is no rational excuse for using water clean enough to drink for washing down a driveway or watering your lawn. Yet we do just that every day. According to the American Water Works Association, the average American uses about seventy gallons of water a day. Most of our water, about 27 percent, simply goes down the drain flushing toilets. We use another 22 percent to wash clothes, and almost 20 percent for baths and showers. Once one adds in the water to wash dishes and run faucets and the water that leaks from pipes, the remaining “Other Domestic Uses” account for only 2 percent of total water use, and drinking water is an even smaller percentage than that.

  Any way you measure it, the water we use for drinking and cooking is a tiny trickle of overall water consumption. We take well over 97 percent of the water that has been treated clean enough to drink and use it for purposes where the potability of the water is irrelevant. Why do we do this? And, more to the point, why don’t we stop doing this?

  The simple answer is that we do it because we can. Water is very cheap. It was cheap when our basic plumbing and water distribution systems were designed and laid out. And for most people, it’s still cheap. In Durham, North Carolina, I pay less than ten dollars for every thousand gallons of water delivered to my house, and the national average is a good deal ch
eaper than that. While I am careful about not wasting water, the motive is not saving money.

  We have seen the same dynamic with another basic commodity. Until very recently, gasoline was cheap, too. Cheap gas led to highway programs, far-flung suburbs, big cars, and sprawl. The difference between gas and water is that gas has gotten more expensive, with the result of more fuel-efficient vehicles and more thoughtful trip planning. In most places, by contrast, water is still so cheap that reengineering is not worth the cost, even when water scarcity is a real problem. Cheap water leads to inefficient use. Neither cheap gas nor cheap water is inherently wrong or immoral, but each is deeply problematic in a world of scarcity.

  If water systems were being built today and deliberately designed to conserve drinking water, they would look very different. It is not necessary, of course, to put in place toilet-to-tap systems. It could just as easily be “toilet-to-hydrant” or “toilet-to-rose-bush.” Indeed, that is increasingly the case around the country.

  The basic idea is to segregate water supplies between potable and nonpotable sources, sometimes called gray water. Dual distribution systems—with one set of pipes for potable water and the other for gray water uses such as firefighting, lawn watering, etc.— are in place all over the country, with California, Texas, Arizona, and Florida in the lead. The state of Arizona even offers a tax credit for installation of a residential gray water system. Tucson, Arizona, has constructed more than one hundred sixty miles of pipes that carry the treated gray water to nine hundred sites, including school-yards, road medians, cemeteries, and parks. In 2005, the system handled more than 4.4 billion gallons of gray water. Tucson’s golf courses consume two-thirds of the recycled water, forced by law to switch from groundwater if gray water is available.

  In Honolulu, Hawaii, the wastewater treatment plant generates two grades of nonpotable water. R-1 Water is intended for landscaping and agriculture. Golf courses, now able to purchase R-1 water for only twenty-five cents per thousand gallons, switched over from the more expensive groundwater for watering their greens and fairways. Water that has been treated by reverse osmosis (RO Water) is used to feed boilers and for processes that require high-purity water. As the project manager, Ken Windram, describes, the program has been successful: “When one of the industrial customers uses the RO water, the island saves 600,000 gallons a day of drinking water. With all the industrial users combined, we save about 2.5 million gallons a day of drinking water. We charge industrial users about $5 per thousand gallons for recycled water, yet they save between $2 and $7 per thousand gallons.”

  Beyond treated water, other gray water opportunities may be found in rainwater harvesting (capturing rainwater from roofs) or stormwater discharge (collecting rainwater that has flowed from streets and fields). If we can overcome the challenges of creating infrastructure, these sources can save energy (thereby reducing greenhouse gases), increase supplies of nonpotable water, and increase water security.

  Beyond making more efficient use of the water we consume, a major opportunity for increasing freshwater supplies lies in plugging leaks. For the average American, a remarkable 13 percent of piped water is lost through leaking. And the problem is not simply at home faucets. Many of our water systems are in a shocking state of disrepair. The New York Times has reported that, across the nation, a major water pipe bursts every two minutes. In our nation’s capital, a pipe bursts every day. Nor should this be surprising. Most of our nation’s water systems were built decades ago. Some date back to the Civil War.

  Buried beneath streets and fields, these pipes don’t provoke a second thought from the average citizen until they burst and faucets run dry, yet these water mains are breaking down at an alarming rate. The EPA estimates that $335 billion will be needed simply to maintain the current water infrastructure over the next few decades, not to mention upgrading the system. While a rough estimate, we may be losing up to six billion gallons of water daily simply from leaking pipes. It costs about $200 per foot of replacement pipe, $1 million every mile, so they don’t come cheap. New York City’s Third Water Tunnel, currently scheduled for completion in 2020, will span more than sixty miles and meet the growing water demands of more than nine million area residents, but it comes with a six-billion-dollar price tag. Expensive, but what’s the alternative?

  To date, the primary option has been to bury our heads in the sand and do very little. We are starving our water system of funds, and have been doing so for years. Part of the reason is the invisibility of the water system, part is the lack of public understanding over how antiquated our infrastructure has become, and part is the belligerent refusal to pay for what the system really costs.

  The obvious answer to inefficient water use and system maintenance is the same: raise water rates. When we have to pay more for something, whether gas or electricity, we either use less or do more with what we have. We drive less. We use more energy efficient appliances. We turn off the lights when leaving a room. The market signals make clear the benefits of efficiency, and we respond. And even with increased efficiency, raising water rates would still generate additional resources for needed infrastructure repairs and upgrades.

  Raising water rates, though, seems almost as taboo in America as talk of raising taxes. Most people seem to assume that cheap water should be ours by right and that government, somehow, should find the means to pay for it on its own. We have taken the ready availability of water for granted in the past and intend to do so in the future.

  To those in the water business, our unwillingness to make the proper level of investment is foolhardy. George Hawkins, the head of the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority, makes a telling comparison: “People pay more for their cell phones and cable television than for water. You can go a day without a phone or TV. You can’t go a day without water.” When he approached the District of Columbia’s City Council to ask for a modest rate raise, though, he was raked over the coals. Jim Graham, a council member, proclaimed, “This rate hike is outrageous. Subway systems need repairs, and so do roads, but you don’t see fares or tolls skyrocketing. Providing inexpensive, reliable water is a fundamental obligation of government. If they can’t do that, they need to reform themselves, instead of just charging more.” Graham was unhelpfully silent on how a water utility can reform itself to provide the money necessary for maintenance and upgrades on a decaying system.

  This is not the case across the country, of course. Some cities have embraced the importance of conservation and water pricing in an era of scarcity. Las Vegas is perhaps the best example. In order to supply the opulent fountains and water shows that grace the Strip in a city with an average rainfall of four inches per year, the water is reused and expensive. Major corporations are starting to get the idea, as well. In June 2008, the CEO of the soft drink giant Coca-Cola stated that the company would become “water neutral.” Every liter of water used to produce its drinks would be offset by water conservation and recycling programs. It’s not clear how this will work in practice, but such a major commitment merits attention. Water is the company’s most important raw material. In 2006, Coke used 290 billion liters of water to produce its beverages. The company was badly burned by protests in Kerala, India, charging that local wells had dried up because the company’s operations had depleted the groundwater supplies. Even if Coke falls short of its goal, water conservation and recycling will necessarily remain major priorities. A report by the bank JP Morgan similarly concluded that water shortages pose threats that need to be addressed in corporate planning. As the lead author, Marc Levinson, made clear, “These are real business risks. This is not something far off in the future.”

  BEYOND TECHNOLOGIES THAT PRODUCE WATER, MOVE WATER, AND increase our efficiency of use, the last approach to consider for water provision is greater reliance on natural capital. New Yorkers love to brag about the quality of their tap water. In fact, they like to brag about a lot of things, but tap water is high on the list. New York City’s water system provides over
one billion gallons of drinking water to almost nine million New Yorkers every day. And it really is good tap water, often beating out bottled water in blind taste tests. The reason, though, is that it doesn’t come from New York City. New York solved its drinking water problems in the early twentieth century through a massive engineering project, drawing water from the Catskill and Delaware watersheds located 125 miles north and west of the city and sending it through massive pipes to city reservoirs. In the late 1980s, however, New York City was forced to reassess its drinking water strategy. Congress passed an amendment to the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1986, requiring large municipalities taking their drinking water from surface water sources (i.e., reservoirs, rivers, lakes, and such) to pretreat the water prior to distribution in the water mains. When officials in New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection did the calculations, they figured it was going to cost about six billion dollars to actually build a water treatment plant and hundreds of millions of dollars to operate it every year. The EPA said it would only cost three billion dollars to build, but this is still a big number. It is a lot of water for a lot of people.

  New York was fretting over this cost when a clever city official named Al Appleton took a close look at the law and realized that there was a waiver provision. The law essentially said that if you could demonstrate to the EPA that there were other ways to provide safe drinking water, then you did not have to build the treatment plant. Appleton and some other folks started thinking, Since we’re getting our water from the Catskills and Delaware watersheds, maybe we should think about how land management up there provides water quality in New York City and how we can influence their land management practices.