If you are going to drink the toilet water that is recycled incorrectly, it may really harm you – but perhaps not the way you think. Advanced disinfection technology completely cleanses sewage for stools and other pollutants that are also raised from natural minerals, which the treatment facility then must add again. If this does not happen, this purified water will weaken you by absorbing these minerals from your body while moving through the inner plumbing.
So if it is completely safe to consume the toilet water recycled, then why do Americans not live in Western countries to drink more of them? new a report Among the researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Council of Defense for Natural Resources finds that seven western states depend on the Colorado River on average, a quarter of its water, even like They fight each other and Native population tribes To reach the river amid a worse. The population also flourishes in the southwest, which means that there is less water for more people.
The report finds that countries recycle different dimensions of their water. In the end, Nevada re -use 85 percent, followed by Arizona by 52 percent. But the other states, including California (22 percent) and New Mexico (18 percent), with Colorado and Wuingg in less than 4 percent and Utah recycling alongside nothing.
“In general, we are not doing enough to develop a wastewater recycling in the seven states that are part of the Colorado River basin,” said Noah Jarison, a water researcher at the University of California in Los Angeles and the co -author of the report. “We will get a shortage of 2 million to 4 million acres annually in the amount of water that we promised to deliver from the Colorado River.” (The foot acres is what it takes to cover an acre from the ground in a foot of water, equal to 326,000 gallons.)
The report found that if the states, unlike Nevada and Arizona, increase the reuse of wastewater to 50 percent, it will enhance the availability of water by 1.3 million acres every year. Experts believe that it is not a matter of whether countries need to reuse more toilet water, but how quickly the infrastructure is constructed while drought and population enlargement exacerbates.
At the same time, countries need to double efforts to reduce their demand for water, as experts say. The Southern Water Authority in Nevada, for example, Provides cash discounts In order for homeowners to replace the meadows that require water with landscapes, and store them with the original plants that flourish without machine guns. Between preserving water and recycling more of it, Western countries have to re -negotiate their relationship with the precious supplier.
“It is unreasonable for me that people do not realize that the answer is: you will not get more water,” said John Healy, a researcher at the Skrips Foundation for Oceanic Sciences that did not participate in the report. “We destroyed ourselves in this feeling of contentment about the importance of water and we just started at dawn on people that this is a serious problem.”
However, the report indicates that countries differ greatly in their development and organization of water recycling. For one, they treat wastewater at different levels of purity. To get it very pure to drink, human waste and other solids are removed before treating water with ozone to kill bacteria and viruses. After that, the water is forced through the microscopic membranes to arrest other molecules. Then the facility strikes the liquid with ultraviolet light, killing any microbes that may remain, and adds those lost minerals.
However, this process is expensive, as building a wastewater treatment facility itself is expensive, and it takes a lot of electricity to pump water with sufficient force to obtain it through filters. Instead, some water wastewater agencies will treat sewage water and pump underground liquid into groundwater layers, where the Earth will filter them more. To use water to golf and unconfirmed crops, they treat wastewater on a large scale.
In the absence of guidance from the federal government, each state rotates differently, with its own regulations on how to use clean water for drinking or unscrupulous. Nevada, which receives only 10 inches of rain per year, has an environmental section that issues permits to reuse water and supervise quality standards, along with a government fund that funds projects. “It is an expensive institution,” said Jarison said. “This is easily permanent water supply.”
Drying water recycling can occur on a much smaller scale. A company called Epic Cleantec, based in San Francisco, manufactures a miniature treatment facility that suits high tools. Recycled water again to the units for uninterrupted use, such as toilets. Although it takes many years to build a large therapeutic facility, these smaller systems come online within months and can reuse up to 95 percent of the building’s water.
Epic Cleantec says its municipal systems and plants can work alongside a type of network for wastewater recycling. “The same way we do energy, as not only solar energy factories are on the surface and large energy, both create a more flexible system,” said Aaron Tartakovsky, CEO of Epic Cleantec and co -founder. “To use aqueous pun, I think there is a lot of unbelievable potential here.”
