Reclaimed Sewage Water: Any Takers?

The L.A. Times reports on a Southern California conundrum: Apparently people just aren't that interested in drinking poop water:

In a semi-arid region such as Southern California, where most of the water is piped in from far-flung rivers, recycled water — a.k.a. treated sewage — is in many ways a utility's dream.

It's locally produced. As long as people keep flushing and bathing, it will keep flowing. Agencies would like to use more reclaimed water, not just on freeway landscaping and golf courses but for drinking supplies, by pumping it into groundwater basins and surface reservoirs.

Parts of Southern California have been doing that, without controversy, for a long time. Some 5 million people drink from regional aquifers partly recharged with treated wastewater. But over the last decade, similar projects in the San Fernando Valley, San Diego and Northern California have triggered a collective gag reflex from the public...

Recycled water can't escape its past, despite stringent state regulation and assurances by officials that today's sophisticated treatment technology can scrub sewage to better-than-drinking-water standards.

Settling tanks, sand filtration, chemical disinfection and naturally occurring bacteria are conventionally used to clean wastewater. Those methods do not remove all traces of the pharmaceutical products that researchers are finding in sewage. But studies indicate that more advanced treatment, consisting of reverse osmosis — pushing the water through ultra-thin membranes — and disinfection with ultraviolet light and peroxide can reduce such contaminants to undetectable levels.

Even then, it's against state policy to send reclaimed water directly to household taps. It must make an intermediate stop in a reservoir or aquifer, where it is mixed with other water sources.

But that's still not enough to counter the bathroom imagery.