Drought boosts appeal of purifying sewage to drink
LOS ANGELES — It’s a technology with the potential to ease California’s colossal thirst and insulate millions from the parched whims of Mother Nature, experts say.
But there’s just one problem — the “yuck factor.”
As a fourth year of drought continues to drain aquifers and reservoirs, California water managers and environmentalists are urging adoption of a polarizing water recycling policy known as direct potable reuse.
Unlike nonpotable reuse — in which treated sewage is used to irrigate crops, parks or golf courses — direct potable reuse takes treated sewage effluent and purifies it so it can be used as drinking water.
It’s a concept that might cause some consumers to wince, but it has been used for decades in Windhoek, Namibia — where evaporation rates exceed annual rainfall — and more recently in drought-stricken Texas cities, including Big Spring and Wichita Falls.
In California, however, similar plans have run into heavy opposition.
Los Angeles opponents coined the derisive phrase “toilet to tap” in 2000 before torpedoing a plan to filter purified sewage water into an underground reservoir — a technique called indirect potable reuse.
In 1994, a San Diego editorial cartoonist framed debate over a similar proposal by drawing a dog drinking from a toilet bowl while a man ordered the canine to “Move over.”
Despite those defeats, proponents say the time has finally arrived for Californians to accept direct potable reuse as a partial solution to their growing water insecurity. With Gov. Jerry Brown ordering an unprecedented 25 percent cut in urban water usage because of drought, the solution makes particular sense for large coastal cities, they say.
Instead of flushing hundreds of billions of gallons of treated sewage into the Pacific Ocean each year, as they do now, coastal cites can capture that effluent, clean it and convert it to drinking water.
“That water is discharged into the ocean and lost forever,” said Tim Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies. “Yet it’s probably the single largest source of water supply for California over the next quarter-century.”
The advocates’ hunch that severe drought has changed long-held attitudes on potable reuse may be on the mark.
Recently, a leader in the effort to stop the Los Angeles project more than a decade ago said he still opposed it but might consider a new plan if officials made a solid case for it.
“You know, toilet to tap might be the only answer at this point,” said Van Nuys activist Donald Schultz. “I don’t support it, but we’re running out of options. In fact, we may have already run out of options.”
To be sure, it will be years, or even a decade, before direct potable reuse systems begin operation in California — if ever.
One reason for this is that there is no regulatory framework for the approval of such a system. Currently, a panel of experts is preparing a report to the Legislature on the feasibility of creating such rules. That report is due in 2016.