Background Info:
Recent events and news about water scarcity got me thinking about this. So the question is essentially the title. Or am I missing something?
If you live anywhere that uses a sewer system rather than septic tanks, isn’t it already doing that?
In my area, the water company pulls in from the river, filters and processes it, and pipes it out to homes. It gets used in the homes, discharged into the sewer to a treatment plant, treated, and then pumped back into the river.
Even if your water company’s intake is before the sewage treatment plant, the next town’s intake is downstream. So if you’re not drinking your neighbor’s processed toilet water, you’re drinking that of the town upstream.
Is getting mixed with river water simply enough to “dilute” the ick-factor here, or is there something I’m missing?
Listen imma level with you bro, if they are genuinely calling it “toilet to tap”, and you dont get why people might find that a little off-putting, then i dont think this thread has anything for you.
Poor branding aside, it doesn’t really change anything, though. But yeah.
I at least appreciate the honesty in the naming rather than some marketing doublespeak. That said, I’d be okay with it if they called it “astronaut water” or something lol.
Poor branding aside, it doesn’t really change anything, though.
Branding is everything when it comes to the masses. Ideas live or die because of their marketing.
Lol, I hate that you’re right :sigh:
Anyone who’s passed 5th grade science would know that water is fine, but that’s asking too much of more people than I’d care to imagine.
Men in Black nailed this 20 years ago:
“A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals…” - Agent K
People as individuals are usually pretty smart in at least a few areas. People as the masses are highly emotional. Our emotions produce revulsion at the idea of drinking reclaimed water, and so that’s what you get as a response from the masses without proper marketing to change those feelings. So, if anyone isn’t giving this enough thought, I’d say it was the person who came up with the slogan “toilet to tap”. They should have known better.
Haha thats actually a solid idea. I’d drink astronaut water in a heartbeat.
I think your right the honesty is refreshing but when it comes to marketing i think reclaimed water is just about the last place you want that kind of honesty
Same reason I don’t go to the butchery to watch my sausage get made. Just do it and don’t tell me.
I don’t understand that either
Cheap sausages here are commonly referred to as ‘lips and assholes’ or ‘hooves and sawdust’. We’re pretty blunt about these things.
here
Where?
Probably everywhere. Here in the NorthEast US, I’ve heard plenty of people describe hot dogs that way. I mean, come on, you throw all the leftover bits and pieces into the grinder to make sausage: what bit and pieces end up in the cheapest sausage?
Water is water. Get the “not water” stuff out of it, and you have … water. Add back in some “stuff that probably should be in potable water,” like minerals and fluoride, and there’s no problem.
You can build a bush filter with grasses, rocks, sand, and charcoal from your campfire which will catch most of the particulate, then boil it to make sure you kill all the parasites. The only thing a municipal filtering station might add to that would be removal of heavy metals and actual testing.
Water has memory! And while the memory of a long-lost drop of onion juice seems infinite, it somehow forgets all the poo it’s had in it!
The number of people who believe in homeopathy after it’s explained to them is TOO DAMN HIGH.
I thought for the longest time that homeopathy was just a generic name for alternative medicines or something. Wasn’t for me regardless so I never gave it a second thought or dug into it.
Someone recently explained what it was to me and I just started laughing. Hilarious. Kinda. I had no clue.
So what is it?
The fact that it’s not zero is so weird.
- “Sooo here’s a scam, proved to be a scam, based on a scam”
- “Oh so it’s natural, so it works!”
The river dilutes enough of the sewage that people don’t think about it. There are also usually laws on minimum distance between sewage outlets and water inlets.
In contrast, reclaimed water isn’t diluting treated water, it is the treated water, generally without the plausible deniability in saying that nature helped clean it.
Usually the water that will become tap water is also not pumped directly from the river but is bank filtrate from nearby underground.
Psychology, and sensible evolved repulsion from waste. MinuteEarth made a video about this, which you should watch (it’s only 2:53), but I’ll quote a key part: “we can trick ourselves out of our irrational disgust by doing irrational things like letting recycled water sit in tank for a while before we drink it.” Do see the full video for context.
I was expecting the video to be like 20 min long but it was actually very short. I don’t know how I feel about it but I am a follower of this channel now.
I watched a documentary on this awhile back. The municipality asked the public if it would be enough for them to dump treated water into a lake and then draw from that lake? And then someone with expertise in the matter commented that this would necessitate another treatment phase, since any wild animal could take a dump in the lake. So he seemed to think closing the loop made the most sense from a practical standpoint.
I honestly think because they haven’t been to the treatment plant and tasted the water straight out of it. It’s better than out of the tap.
Funny you mention that.
Our city’s treatment plant was a frequent field trip destination. I think I went 3 times (two different class trips, and once again with my engineering club). All 3 times, the plant manager gave the tour and concluded it by drinking a glass of water out of the output pipe to show how clean the water was that they were putting back into the river. (Supposedly, anyway).
As proud as he was for what they did there and of the standards they had, I’m going to give him the benefit of doubt that it was the actual effluent from the plant he was drinking. He always seemed fine and never hesitated to down a glass of it.
So yeah, like you said, people probably haven’t been exposed to that to know how clean the water that comes out of treatment plants usually is.
The dude who used to run the local plant (since retired and moved away, we’ve lost touch) was a friend. He’d bring the church youth group out for tours and I helped run the group, so I tagged along because hey, small town it’s something to do. I mean the local spring is better, but are we really comparing filet mignon and cube steak?
You’re not missing anything, people are just weird about it.
Also the person who named it “toilet-to-tap” is an idiot. Reclaimed water is “toilet to tap” in the same way that a vegetable grown in compost is “garbage to garden.” There’s a host of sophisticated engineering processes in between the two, making the water just as clean as any other treated drinking water.
Mixing with river water or putting the water in a reservoir and then pumping it back out again simply makes people feel more comfortable about it and, like you said, reduces the “ick” factor.
if you live anywhere….
That IF is doing quite a bit of work there …
And again IF the water is treated…
Yes. If those are both done then there is little issue
In some parts of Phoenix AZ , they use the treated grey water to water grass golf courses
The issue is really when there are heavy rains and the treatment facilities are overwhelmed and RAW sewage gets dumped into the river In other places there is insufficient or no treatment and again raw sewage goes into the river where the next town downstream needs to use the river water for drinking
In some parts of Phoenix AZ , they use the treated grey water to water grass golf courses
Using grey water for agriculture / irrigation purposes is pretty common. It’s why they tell you not to drink (or make sun tea) from the sprinkler water.
The issue is really when there are heavy rains and the treatment facilities are overwhelmed and RAW sewage gets dumped into the river
Yeah, that’s why combined sewer and stormwater systems have fallen out of use (and are illegal in most places now). That used to be a much bigger problem, but thankfully, most places have separated those systems and made it illegal to discharge stormwater into the sanitary sewers. My house still has the old connections where the gutter downspouts tied into the sewer line (house is from the 50s), but they’re capped with concrete.
im not sure if they ever happens here. They have overflow areas and those get dumped with a bunch of chlorine added. So its not totally raw but its not properly treated. They also have seperate rain water and sewer so the overflow is not sewage but they still treat it because it can still pick up all sorts of stuff from roads and surfaces and such. If the overflows don’t get overwhelmed then it gets full treatment before being let into the watershed. Which basically means enough time is given for the chlorine to work. Granted they spent a bundle for the public works to get this done and prevent flooding. Not that im complaining as that is why I like where I live. You get all this talk about folks running from the area due to high taxes but you know im fine with high taxes and a well managed watershed, public spaces, public services, and such. disclaimer. I am not a watershed expert and don’t work for the water district so this is just my understanding from the various things that pop up on it (you would be surprised the information you get if you actually read your water bill and such)
An inability to think past knee-jerk emotions. It’s a common problem.
My poop feeds the fishes. My city has a giant protected watershed so we drink only the finest bear poop, piped directly into our homes, then our waste is treated, fermented for 30 days until ripe, and pumped out to sea
Having had water in a somewhat arid country that pretty much did “toilet to tap” after treatment let me tell you that the smell is hard to get rid of. Your water still smells like shit. And drinking it was a gamble of you were going to get sick or not. All the local markets sold bottled water by the flat tray. Even the locals knew not to drink the tap water.
