The world faces a severe and growing water scarcity crisis, exacerbated by climate change, yet a viable and advanced solution—reclaimed wastewater—is largely underutilized due to public perception and a lack of political will.
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According to Hollywood,
this is what our future looks like.
What do these pictures have in common?
Not a single drop of water in sight.
And Hollywood isn't exaggerating.
Our planet right now is running out of water.
Water scarcity impacts more than 40% of the world's population.
The continent is facing an unprecedented drought.
Check out Cape Town in 2018.
Cape Town, South.
Africa, could become the world's first major city to
run out of water.
Government has imposed severe water restrictions,
11 gallons of water per person, per day.
That's all you got. To put that in perspective.
One toilet flush uses up to four gallons on average.
That's a huge chunk of our water usage for just one flush.
So where does this water go?
And what if we could get it back?
Let's take a look at the future of our drinking water.
Disclaimer It may be a little hard to swallow.
Water.
It's something way too many of us take for granted.
And as obvious as it sounds,
water is so important.
Crucial, actually. In a world where access to drinking water is a human
right, a quarter of the world's population is facing extreme water shortages.
And today, it's at the heart of how we're experiencing the climate crisis.
Floods, droughts, rising sea levels. There’s either too much of it or not enough.
Water is also a huge driver of geopolitical conflict.
Some say water could be the next oil.
Access to water fueled
some of the biggest conflicts in recent memory.
The truth is we're recklessly consuming more and more water
without replenishing its supply.
Here's the thing, though.
We have a solution right now, but people are hesitant, to say the least.
A plan to use reclaimed wastewater as part of Tampa's
drinking water system is enough to make some people gag.
Newsflash:
everybody poops, but not everybody has drinking water.
80% of what goes down our drain ends up untreated.
But we have the tools to bridge that gap and turn most of our wastewater
into clean drinking water.
The problem is
the idea of drinking water that had poop in it doesn't go down too well.
The media isn't helping either.
Labels like: the toilet to tap.
Make it look like not much happens between the pooping and the drinking.
But let's have a look at what really takes place.
There are loads of different types of water treatment techniques,
but they roughly follow a similar process that starts with your toilet
flush and carries your waste all over town to a wastewater treatment facility.
The sewage is first filtered from large particles, then moved to a container
that uses advanced technology to separate water from other content.
It’s then pumped with things like bacteria and oxygen
to completely purify the water and remove any harmful excess bacteria.
In other
words, we filter over and over and over again.
And just trust me, the water is pure and clean.
In fact, it's sometimes too clean and ends up
needing minerals added to it.
Namibia, one of the driest countries in Africa,
was one of the first places to recycle domestic wastewater into drinking water.
And now it's been doing it for over 50 years.
In some other parts of the world, though, the yuck factor really took
hold of the public imagination.
In drought prone California, public outcry
almost killed plans to start recycling sewage water for drinking use.
But as the climate crisis got worse,
people have started to come around.
Orange County is now home to the world's largest wastewater treatment plant,
pumping recycled water into taps all over the state.
Singapore, on the other hand, anticipated
the public blowback to the whole poop to tap thing. They labeled
their recycled water, NEWater and now it's everywhere in the country.
A simple branding solution did the trick.
Recycled wastewater may be the only hope we have to avoid a future of severe
water shortage.
So why isn't wastewater treatment everywhere?
The simple answer is there’s no real reason why not.
It’s actually a little shocking
that there's only a handful of countries that seem to be doing it. There’s
way more attention on desalination, the process of treating seawater,
which is a lot more expensive and energy intensive.
So what's the holdup?
It'd be foolish not to acknowledge
the lack of political will to invest in wastewater management facilities,
especially in parts of the world that can't afford these projects
and are, of course, the ones that need it
the most.
But what if the real hurdle is something much more simple?
What if it's actually just the psychology of it all?
Research tells us that our disgust is buried so deep in our brains,
we believe poop to be a magical substance that can never be cleaned.
Can you believe there are people
who have actually dedicated their entire lives to researching this?
And thank God they are.
The science is clear.
We have the technical solutions and it's heavily evidenced. Our disgust,
it’s irrational. Recycled wastewater
is cleaner than most other sources of fresh drinking water,
we’re just not doing such a good job at communicating it.
The answer to this problem, ironically, is to fight our gut feeling.
And maybe it's time to put the same resources that went into this
behind a new kind of purified water
that's probably cleaner than the water you're drinking right now.
Got water?
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