TOILET WATER TO DRINKING WATER

Yesterday one of the Chemtura Public Advisory Committee members e-mailed an article titled "Breaking the Taboo on "Toilet to Tap"". Apparently the technology is quite capable of further treating sewage treatment effluent to the point where it becomes drinkable. Ughh! Unsurprisingly there has been some resistance to the idea even in areas of the arid U.S. southwest. Fortunately the spin doctors have been busy and have come up with various terms that make the idea more palatble, so to speak. "Indirect potable reuse" is one of the terms. "Recycled water" also works. Orange County in the U.S. is building a "Groundwater Replenishment System (GRS). Afterall doesn't a rose by any other name smell as sweet?

I certainly don't dispute the need for more water supplies. I also have long understood that even raw sewage in our sanitary sewers is by volume well over 95% pure water. Similarily our industrial discharges with or without solvent and other additions are primarily water. I also believe that with adequate filtration and treatment that we can literally take water from mud puddles on the ground and make it drinkable. Similarily it is technically possible to take seawater and make it drinkable. Why don't we do that on a large scale? It's not as if we lack seawater or that levels are dropping. The reason is cost.

Cost and volume are what worry me. Large scale water supplies will eventually be routinely privatised, most probably in the U.S. first. Eventually private industry will see an opportunity to cut costs ie. treatment- Not good. Secondly are the volumes involved. Current water treatment here in Ontario relies on treatment of either groundwater or surface water or both. Errors, mechanical breakdowns etc. do take place and have taken place. Recently the Region of Waterloo were fined for inadvertently allowing undisinfected water into the distribution system in Cambridge. It's one thing having a "slip" or "boo boo" happen with relatively clean source water. What do you think of a "slip" involving toilet water? Finally have we so soon forgotten the lessons of the Walkerton Inquiry? The "multi barrier" approach is our best chance of avoiding future disasters and tragedies. In other words start with safe, well protected water in the first place. Allowing contaminated water as source water and then relying on manmade, error prone humans and their technology to "treat" it is idiotic. At least it's idiotic here. In the middle of the Sahara Desert maybe there are no other sources. Here there are.