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?

  • Nougat@fedia.io
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    5 months ago

    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.

    • Thavron@lemmy.ca
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      5 months ago

      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!

      • isles@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        The number of people who believe in homeopathy after it’s explained to them is TOO DAMN HIGH.

        • LordTrychon@startrek.website
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          5 months ago

          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.

        • Deway@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          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!”