Just so long as there is money and energy enough to keep purifying.
Dry
San Diego to look to sewers as water source
Acknowledging
California's parched new reality, the city of San Diego has embraced
a once-toxic idea: turning sewer water into drinking water.
Yahoo,
19 November, 2014
The
City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to advance a $2.5-billion plan
to recycle wastewater, the latest example of how California cities
are looking for new supplies amid a severe drought.
Each
of the nine council members effusively praised the effort before the
vote as a way to make San Diego less dependent on imported water and
insulated from drought.
"We're
at the end of the pipeline," said Councilman Scott Sherman. "We
have a real problem getting water down here."
Such
recycling, called toilet-to-tap by critics, has suffered an image
problem that industry insiders call "the yuck factor."
San
Diego, a city of 1.4 million people that imports 85 percent of its
water from the Colorado River and Northern California, has slowly
warmed to the idea. A 2012 survey by the San Diego County Water
Authority showed that nearly three of four residents favored turning
wastewater into drinking water, a major shift from one of four in a
2005 survey.
"The
drought puts a finer point on why this is so necessary," Mayor
Kevin Faulconer said. "Droughts are unfortunately a way of life
in California, so we have to be prepared. This helps us to control
our own destiny."
The
plan calls to initially recycle 15 million gallons by 2023 and 83
million gallons a day by 2035, about one-third of the city's water
supply. It enjoys broad support from business groups and
environmental advocates.
The
Orange County Water District, which serves 2.4 million people in
California, plans to boost production of recycled water next year
from 70 million gallons to 100 million gallons a day. It has reused
wastewater for drinking since 2008 through treatment that includes
sending water through ground basins.
The
Santa Clara Valley Water District, which serves 1.8 million people in
the San Francisco Bay area, decided in September to pursue
construction of facilities that it says could lead to turning
wastewater into drinking water for Sunnyvale and western Santa Clara
County.
Still,
it remains rare to turn sewage to drinking water. The WateReuse
Association, a group of agencies behind the efforts, counts only 10
projects nationwide, including El Paso, Texas, and Fairfax County,
Virginia. Two Texas cities, Wichita Falls and Big Spring, started
projects within the past two years.
On
Tuesday, the San Diego council ratified an agreement between the
mayor and four environmental groups — San Diego Coastkeeper,
Surfrider Foundation, Coastal Environmental Rights Foundation and San
Diego Audubon Society — to ask the Environmental Protection Agency
for another reprieve and to commit to the recycled wastewater plan.
Unlike Orange County, San Diego plans to send water through a
reservoir because it lacks groundwater basins.
Richard
Nagel, general manger of the West Basin Municipal Water District,
which serves about 900,000 people in Southern California, said he has
fielded inquiries from about a half-dozen agencies lately who are
interested in recycling wastewater. His agency began in 1995 in
response to an earlier drought.
"It's
the investment you make for a locally produced, drought-proof water
supply," he said.
For rain-drenched New England to use water as a means of fecal deposition is one thing, for drought-stricken California to do so is quite another. Even as people all over the country pick up the shit their pets defecate onto the public spaces, carrying it around like its their lunch, there is no alternative proposed for humans from using perfectly good drinkable water for taking a dump into. Oh no, can't do that. How much smarter to waste energy and money by cleaning that water AFTER shitting into it rather than not doing so in the first place. This is the result of Centralization and standardization of everything in our lives. The computer, in direct contradiction to all the claims made about it before it became ubiquitous, has, far from enabling innovation and creative thinking, been instead put to the task of standardizing everything in the world to a preconceived notion of how things should work. Thus we end up with the nonsense of drought-plagued regions of the country, and indeed, the world, using the exact same stratagems for human waste disposal as those that are swimming in excess water. Instead of a Brave New World, we've created a Brain Dead World, where we think its so smart and "innovative" to scoop our feces out of the water we've just befouled so we can then drink it instead of just not shitting into it in the first place.
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