Drought-stricken Australia considers drinking recycled sewage This article is about my home town. On Saturday, we're all voting on the question Do you support the addition of purified recycled water to Toowoomba’s water supply via Cooby Dam as proposed by Water Futures – Toowoomba. Which way would you vote and why? Also, do you think that a local referendum is appropriate for this type of decision? Does anyone live in an area where wastewater is indirectly recycled into the driunking water supply?
I would say scientifically its perfectly acceptable to make human sewage water comparable to normal drinking water in regard to bacteria levels, viruses and toxins. Therefor any opposition to this(assuming the process can be guaranteed to not fail at any time) would be irrational. Problem is no process can be guaranteed fail safe.
even if the water is clean, it still carries the taboo of being sewerage water. if they are going to recycle it, they should still allow a drinking supply of fresh water. i dont think anyone cares what comes out of the garden hose, i mean... most of us just piss straight into the garden anyway.
Even so for purification of normal water. The water out of the tap in the old house smelled very very bad. The link in the 'no case' contains a host of non sequiturs Pete. #4 contradicts #5 since the extensive testing invalidates the objection of it being a 'new technology. #1-#3 are either completely unrelated to the local issue or are gross non sequiturs. I don't even feel like reading the rest because that nonsense contains not a jot of cogency.
I think most of the water we use was once sewage water. But if they don't have the right procedures to remove synthetic chemicals, maybe distilling it after the treatment process would work. The stigma of sewage water is ridiculous if it really can be purified. In some countries there is separate water for cleaning and consuming. Maybe that could be a compromise.
Yes that is a point, but if a run of unpurified reservoir water slips through the net in the current system there isn't a diverse amount of organisms and chemicals that could be present. If a run of unpurified sewage slips through the net a vast amount of communicable organism together with a deal of chemicals could wing its way to you.
Extremely unlikely, to the point of impossibility. The effluent from the existing sewage treatment plant will be piped to a new secondary treatment facility. This facility will purify the water, which will then be piped to an existing reservoir, where it will be mixed with the collected creek water. Water from the reservoir is piped to the existing water treatment plant, where it is filtered and disinfected as usual before entering the water supply. If a run of untreated sewage slips past the treatment plant (never happened, but it conceivably could), then it will stop at the secondary treatment facility. Even if it goes past that facility (by deliberate sabotage?) then it is collected in the reservoir. This would be detected by regular testing, and the reservoir would be shut down (this has happened before - not with sewage overflow, but with an algae bloom). Even if that fails, and the untreated sewage (now diluted with reservoir water) is piped onward, then it will still be tested, treated, and tested again at the existing treatment plant. I think that you're much more likely to have a rat die in your water tank!
People tend to trust processes that they control--that's why they so irrationally feel safer driving a car than being a passenger in an airliner. See http://www.treehugger.com/files/2004/09/augustin_solar.php for one of many commercial implementations of the principle of the watercone. It's just a small solar distillation device that produces about 1.5 quarts or liters of drinking water per day. Just put your own blackwater into it. No external energy is required, just sunshine. You can watch it in "action" (it's pretty slow) and satisfy yourself that there is no contamination and that the output is just about surgically pure. It's all elementary-school (not even high-school) physics. Water evaporates, condenses, and is collected in a reservoir that you can keep as clean as you want. No moving parts, nothing to fail, no way for the input and output to get mixed up. The impetus for the recent flurry of development of this no-brainer technology is the plight of the Third World. They've got no shortage of water, but it's full of crap--both literally and figuratively. Their governments are dysfunctional so there's no infrastructure to maintain and operate municipal water purification plants. These things are water sources each person can own and operate for himself or his family with no reliance on anybody else. They could be mass-produced in the nearest country with a functioning economy and low but fair wages and sold and delivered for something like a dollar apiece. The charity budget of the developed world is not unlimited, but it's big enough that we could actually give one dollar to every inhabitant of the Third World. It would wipe out several of their worst health problems like dysentery. You Australians probably use more than a third of a gallon of water apiece per day, but you also have enough money to buy more than one watercone apiece. (I think gravity puts a limit on the size so you can't just build a fifty-gallon version.) It wouldn't be unreasonable for a family to maintain a hundred of them, gives the kiddies something to do to make them feel important. They can even pee directly into them and save wear and tear on the bathroom plumbing. There are so many advantages. I would imagine that in many parts of Australia the temperature is so high and the humidity so low that the processing speed of a solar still would set a new record. The technology exists and the products are already on the market, although in the First World they're naturally priced quite a bit higher than a dollar. It gives people the choice they need. Do you want to manage your own water supply? Or maybe you'd start thinking that municipal water is so much easier that you'll stop fussing over the source material? It's entirely up to you! You could also drink more beer. And don't ask the brewers where they get their water. Oh wait, I suppose it's just not possible for Australians to drink any more beer. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! A little-known fact about the Renaissance: It occurred about the time that coffee, an Ethiopian crop and beverage, was introduced to Europe. The European water supply during the Dark Ages was not potable. People had gotten in the habit of drinking beer to quench their thirst, and the impact of a 24/7 buzz on both the quality and productivity of their work did nothing to hasten end the Dark Ages. Imagine the change in society when they switched from beer, an intoxicant, to coffee, a stimulant!
Hehe. I know what you mean. I trust the food I make but when I go to someone else's house and they make the same thing for me, I don't trust it. Mostly because I didn't make it nor did I buy the stuff. I had no control over it. It has nothing to do with the person, just I fear anything I don't control for myself.
No, I didn't make my point clear. I had more of a failure in human integrity in mind rather than a failure in technology, as I said I have faith in the technology and to snub it on those grounds would be irrational. The reason I said the system may not be fail safe is least to do with chemistry but most to do with human failure i.e. when all eyes are no longer on the company responsible for a time it is easily concievable that corners could be cut and/or low payed workers could be involved in the treatment process. BTW im not against the idea at all, I voted undecided.
Given this, it's also possible that 'a run of unpurified water' could make its way through anybody's sink. I'm sure people in Haiti and Guatemala don't put on such airs as these Australians are doing about drinking water. I am sure the politicians involved as well as the technicians understand just how crucial it is that babies don't, out of the blue, sprout three eyes and four arms. It's not as if the technology and expertise isn't there to carry the program through. This is a problem even in America. With all the stringent standards set for water that runs through their pipes, the bottled water companies continued to make millions on the idea that it's from the mountains, it's cleaner, and it even tastes... natural.
I'm in toowoomba myself and the water we drink here is bloody aweful already, any sort of purifying would have been welcome. But to let you all know, the vote came through as no, so they're not going ahead
I think it would be fitting if toowoombians drank shit. It would just be the final straw on the camels back to make it the scummiest town in queensland. Shit drinking drug addict inbreds... has a certain charm about it wouldn't you say?
With exceptions so rare they make headlines (such as the lead in some of Washington DC's 150-year-old pipes, "duh") American municipal water supplies are unerringly healthy. Yet Americans in droves are installing on-demand water filtration units under their kitchen sinks. Another drove (or perhaps a sub- or superset of the same drove) buys colorfully labeled bottles of exotically named drinking water at the same per-gallon price as gasoline. All the fine print promises is "purefied," which means nothing more is legally required than to be taken from any municipal water supply! If you folks are sincerely worried about the quality of your drinking water, America has once again leapt out ahead of the curve and pioneered the easy fixes for you. More seriously, I redirect you to my earlier post about watercones. I am dead serious about them, as are their inventors and marketers. Perhaps your sensibilities argue against actually recycling your own blackwater waste, but the stuff that comes out of your taps is less esthetically objectionable than the laundry and shower effluent that desert households use as greywater for their gardens. All you have to do is run it through watercones. It would be trivially easy to purefy with watercones and the only cost would be the purchase of the cones.
Small islands and Large ships have Recycling tanks, I know because at one point I was involved in the design of building them. In short they usually contain a number of cavities that deal with the process of recycling, one of the cavities actually has a bacteria added to it to eat away the sewerage. It was said that you could take raw sewerage as an input and the output would be not just safe and drinkable but completely clean. Of course someone mentioned that it would be Taboo drinking it and knowing the sorts of faults that could occur in the tanks with bad welders or incorrect paint types for lining the insides I would think twice about drinking it
Of course you could. We've been doing it on purpose for about ten thousand years and unknowingly for a good deal longer. We take feces, which is mostly water like the rest of us, and we put it in the soil underneath our apple trees. We do it for the nitrogen, but the tree's roots happily also extract the water indiscriminately from the nice moist feces as well as from the other ingredients in the soil. Eventually the tree bears fruit, we pick them and squeeze them, and drink the apple juice. It contains a certain percentage of the water from our feces, the absolute worst natural source of blackwater, yet all the harmful bacteria have been filtered out. Sure, maybe you don't use human feces in your garden, but look up the euphemism "night soil" and see how many millions of people still do. I'm sure you use cow feces. We don't think about it because of all the biochemistry that goes on between the dumping of the feces and the pouring of the juice. Or perhaps because of all the time that passes, I'm not sure which. Simulating those biochemical processes in a municipal water treatment plant does the same thing, only faster. As for engineering errors... I think it's a lot easier to weld up a water tank correctly than an airplane engine, and I trust them.
The only way that anyone can answer this question intelligently is for an informed professional to reply that knows what technology we now have available to purify sewage water to the point that it is safe to drink compared to natural uncontaminated water sources.
