{"id":233869,"date":"2021-07-10T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-07-10T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/grist.org\/?p=540308"},"modified":"2021-07-10T13:00:00","modified_gmt":"2021-07-10T13:00:00","slug":"a-massive-water-recycling-proposal-could-help-ease-drought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/07\/10\/a-massive-water-recycling-proposal-could-help-ease-drought\/","title":{"rendered":"A massive water recycling proposal could help ease drought"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This story<\/a> was originally published by Wired<\/a> and is reproduced here as part of the <\/em>Climate Desk<\/em><\/a> collaboration.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lake Mead, which provides water for 25 million people in the American West, has shrunk to 36 percent of its capacity<\/a>. One rural California community has run out of water entirely<\/a> after its well broke in early June. Fields are sitting fallow, as farmers sell their water allotments instead of growing crops, putting the nation\u2019s food supply in peril<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the West withers under extreme drought, legislators in the U.S. House of Representatives have introduced HR 4099<\/a>, a bill that would direct the Secretary of the Interior to create a program to fund $750 million worth of water recycling projects in the 17 western states through the year 2027. (The bill, which was introduced<\/a> at the end of June, is currently before the House Committee on Natural Resources.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis is beginning to be our new normal \u2014 88 percent of the West is under some degree of drought,\u201d says Representative Susie Lee, who introduced<\/a> the bill. \u201cLake Mead is at the lowest level it has been at since the Hoover Dam was constructed. And the Colorado River has been in a drought for more than two decades.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All the while, the population and economy in the western U.S. have been booming, putting tremendous pressure on a dwindling water supply. \u201cWe have, I guess, more people \u2014 one. And there’s an increase in the agricultural area \u2014two,\u201d says Representative Grace Napolitano, who introduced the bill. \u201cAnd then climate change is exacerbating the problem.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part of the solution, the legislators say, is to fund the construction of more facilities that can recycle the wastewater that flows out of our sinks, toilets, and showers. You may think that\u2019s gross and preposterous, but the technology already exists \u2014 in fact, it\u2019s been around for half a century. The process is actually rather simple. A treatment facility takes in wastewater and adds microbes that consume the organic matter. The water is then pumped through special membranes that filter out nasties like bacteria and viruses. To be extra sure, the water is then blasted with UV light to kill off microbes. The resulting water may actually be too pure for human consumption: If you drank it, the stuff might leach minerals out of your body, so the facility has to add minerals back. (I once drank the final product<\/a>. It tastes like\u2026 water.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The recycled H2O can be pumped underground into aquifers, then pumped out again when needed, purified once more, and sent to customers. Or it may instead be used for non-potable purposes, like for agriculture or industrial processes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Basically, you’re taking wastewater that\u2019d normally be treated and pumped out to sea \u2014 wasting it, really \u2014 and putting it back into the terrestrial water cycle, making it readily available again to people. \u201cPart of what makes it so important as an element of water supply portfolios is its reliability,\u201d says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. \u201cTo the extent that urban centers exist and produce wastewater, it can be treated. It gives a reliable source of additional water supply \u2014 even in dry years when supply is limited and developing alternative sources would be difficult or impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recycled water is also bankable, in a sense: Injecting it underground to recharge aquifers stores it up for use during droughts. This is likely to be particularly important in the American West, because climate change is both making droughts more punishing and futzing with the dynamics of rain. Modeling from climate scientists<\/a> shows that future storms will be more intense, yet arrive less often. And by the end of the century, the mountain snowpack\u2014which normally banks much of the West\u2019s water until it melts into the spring runoff\u2014is predicted to shrink by about half.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOur hydrologic cycle is going to get more unpredictable,\u201d says Rafael Villegas, program manager of Operation NEXT<\/a> at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which has been recycling water since the 1970s for non-potable reuse. \u201cCoupled with population growth, not only here in California, but where the water comes from \u2014 Nevada, Arizona, and Northern California \u2014 you can expect that there’s going to be additional demand on those systems. So we’re at the end of the straw, right? We have to then start thinking, how do we become more efficient with the water that we do have?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Currently in California, about 10 percent of wastewater in municipal and industrial usage is recycled. The goal of Operation NEXT is to upgrade the Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant so that it recycles 100 percent of its wastewater by 2035, producing enough purified water to sustain nearly a million households in LA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The technology is there\u2014it’s just a matter of deploying it all over the West. \u201cThis isn’t a moonshot, if you will,\u201d says Brad Coffey, water resource manager at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which has partnered with the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts on a water recycling demonstration facility<\/a>. \u201cThis is really putting the building blocks together that have been tested and proven in many other facilities, and applying it to a regional scale.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While water recycling is not a newfangled technology, it\u2019s not a simple or cheap process, either. It takes time to retrofit a wastewater facility for efficient recycling, and the tab for building one from scratch can run into the billions. And once a facility is up and running, it takes a good amount of energy to push all that water through the filtering membranes and other equipment, which is also expensive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, says Villegas, the bigger cost would be running out of time. \u201cIf we wait to act, we’re going to be too late,\u201d says Villegas. While the bill would fund $750 million for projects over the next six years, it will take longer to actually build those facilities and bring them online. \u201cA program like this is going to take multiple decades,\u201d he continues. \u201cSo if you react a couple of decades later, then you’re already behind the eight ball.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Water recycling is only one strategy for adapting the American West to a climate emergency that has created a water emergency. Since the 1980s, per capita water use in Southern California has plummeted by 40 percent, thanks in large part to changes in building codes, but also to behavioral changes among residents, like replacing lawns with drought-tolerant native plants. Cities are also adapting. For example, the LA Department of Water and Power has been experimenting with turning medians and roadsides into green catchment zones<\/a> that direct stormwater into tanks underground, so LA doesn\u2019t have to import as much water from Northern California and the Colorado River.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While these individual and local efforts help reduce demand and increase supply, $750 million from the Feds would be a huge stimulus for building out the recycling infrastructure that\u2019ll help the West survive climate change. \u201cThe magnitude of changes that we’re seeing with climate change, and with long and persistent droughts\u2014that’s not about how many gallons per flush a toilet is,\u201d says Coffey. \u201cIt’s really a broader issue that we have to attack from the supply side as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

This story was originally published by Grist<\/a> with the headline A massive water recycling proposal could help ease drought<\/a> on Jul 10, 2021.<\/p>\n

This post was originally published on Grist<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Members of Congress from Western states are pushing for $750 million to turn wastewater into pure water. Here\u2019s how that works.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":387,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108,553,369],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233869"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/387"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233869"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233869\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":233873,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233869\/revisions\/233873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}