Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Wasting the Wastewater by Dylan Walsh

Wastewater being treated at a plant in Fort Worth. While its reuse in industry and on golf courses is common, scientists say that recycling will also be crucial to the drinking supply someday.

Each day, American municipalities discharge enough treated wastewater into natural sources to fill Lake Champlain within six months. Growing pressure on water supplies and calls for updating the ancient subterranean piping infrastructure have brought new scrutiny to this step in the treatment process, which is labeled wasteful and unnecessary by a spectrum of voices.

“As the world enters the 21st century, the human community finds itself searching for new paradigms for water supply and management,” says a report released this month by the Water Science and Technology Board of the National Research Council, a division of the National Academy of Sciences. The report investigates the potential for establishing a more resilient national water supply through the direct recycling of municipal wastewater.

“Law and practice have always been that water goes back into a river or into groundwater or the ocean before it returns for further treatment,” said Brent Haddad, founder and director of the Center for Integrated Water Research at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a member of the committee that wrote the report. The critical question, he said, is “whether that natural stage of treatment is actually an efficient stage of treatment.”

Sixteen experts representing industry, government, and research fields in the social sciences and hard sciences collaborated over three years to produce the study, examining everything from pathogenic risks to public attitudes about reuse. 

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