Drought-Stricken Texas Town Taps Urine For Water 300
An anonymous reader writes "Texas is in the midst of a drought so severe that local water management teams have decided to distribute reclaimed wastewater (aka urine). The Colorado River Municipal Water District in West Texas has broken ground on a $13 million plant that will capture treated wastewater and ready it for redistribution. After being run through microfilters and undergoing reverse osmosis, slimy sewage is cleansed with peroxide and ultraviolet light. This intense process ensures that any pharmaceuticals and carcinogens are removed, and that the H2O stands up to drinking water regulations."
Re:If your town gets its water from a river... (Score:3, Interesting)
What would be news is if the USA would get their heads out of their asses regarding greywater systems [greywateraction.org]. I tried to see about getting one set up in my house only to be shown a local ordinance (they seem to be just about universal round my state) banning them because it LESSENS usage of the sewer system. The bullshit reason given was that they are worried about the sewer system "drying out" and developing problems if the water levels in the sewer pipes "get too low." Meanwhile, they altered the rates to a tiered system so that if you use an average amount of water (enough even to keep your foundation from cracking and shifting [foundationrepairs.com] you wind up paying the excessively high "overuse" rate, ostensibly to "encourage people to use less water".
Yes, that's right. I can't install a system to use greywater to water my lawn and garden plants because the local water monopoly (bought and paid for a decade ago when the Republicans took over my county and sold off the public utility to private hands) want to FORCE ME TO USE MORE WATER and bribed the local government to pass an anti-greywater ordinance.
Re:Lack of strategic planning (Score:5, Interesting)
It's amazing to me that this type of thing only gets implemented due to a crisis when it should be obvious from the get go that developing and improving the methods of recycling and reclamation should always be part of the way we do anything.
Not everywhere...
I'm currently sitting less than a mile upwind of one of the great lakes... The energy requirement for this sewage filtration process has a far larger environmental impact than just regular sewage treatment combined with pumping a bit more water out of the lake. We could probably reduce out draw out of the lake 50% with this technology, at the mere cost of kilotons of extra fly ash and mercury dumped into the lake from our coalburners ... the same lake we're getting our drinking water out of...
California / desert SW solutions are not appropriate everywhere. If anything, on average, east of the mississippi river, we have way too much fresh water and need to focus tech on dealing with floods caused by rain. Much like fixing failing school systems or sick care systems, just dumping more money on the problem doesn't seem to help.
They should ask South Africa for help (Score:5, Interesting)
South Africa, being a dry country, has been doing this for years. All sewage gets sent to treatment farms, where it is cleaned, and the water from it are then placed back in the river systems from where it is used for irrigation, drinking water and everything else - just like rain water.
South Africa also boasts that the water from the treatment plants are cleaner than rain water. My father is an electrical engineer and helped design one of the plants (the electrical systems obviously). The process is quite spectacular - and moreso than what is described here. For starters the first phase includes the sewage being cleaned by specially cultured bacteria to break it down, before chemical cleaning, filtering etc. step by step turns it back into pure H20.
The two main waste products from the process is methane and solid waste. The solid waste is used to create fertilizers. The methane is burned off (being a clean-burning gas) but quite a few people here have converted their cars to run on methane (any gasoline car can be converted) and fill up there - for the moment at least (since the demand is pretty low and they have massive amounts they need to get rid off) the sewage treatment farms don't even charge them. Fill up the car, no cost.
Re:If your town gets its water from a river... (Score:5, Interesting)