In the near future, recycled wastewater could account for 30% of the drinkable water in the East county. The water would go through several purification steps at a new facility being built in Santee.
Perhaps the biggest development in water over the last three decades has been the change in attitude among consumers about their liquid assets. After repeated droughts punctuated by history-making deluges, Californians appear more open than ever to embracing reuse of stormwater, wastewater and seawater — as long as we can be certain that it is clean and safe to drink.
Earlier this summer, state water officials introduced draft regulations that, if passed, would allow purified wastewater to be directly introduced to drinking supplies.
Currently, purified wastewater has to be introduced to environmental buffers like groundwater aquifers before being added to drinking supplies, but the new regulations would allow treated water to bypass this step after undergoing additional purification processes.
Recycled wastewater is not only as safe to drink as conventional potable water, it may even be less toxic than many sources of water we already drink daily, Stanford University engineers have discovered. “We expected that potable reuse waters would be cleaner, in some cases, than conventional drinking water due to the fact that much more extensive treatment is conducted for them,” said Stanford professor William Mitch, senior author of an Oct. 27 study in Nature Sustainability comparing conventional drinking water samples to wastewater purified as a drinking water, also known as potable reuse water.
On a dusty hilltop in San Diego, the drinking water of the future courses through a wildly complicated and very loud jumble of tanks, pipes, and cylinders. Here at the North City Water Reclamation Plant, very not-drinkable wastewater is turned into a liquid so pure it would actually wreak havoc on your body if you imbibed it without further treatment.
First the system hits the wastewater with ozone, which destroys bacteria and viruses. Then it pumps the water through filters packed with coal granules that trap organic solids.
Drinkable water is becoming increasingly scarce. Population growth, pollution and climate change mean that more cities are being forced to search for unconventional water sources. In a growing number of places, drinking highly treated municipal wastewater, called ‘reused water’, has become the best option — and, in some cases, the only one (see ‘What is reused water?’).
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
