Double, Double, Toilets and Trouble

this is the norm everywhere else; what happens to the water normally after it is treated? ..... or do you just dump the sewage in the sea / river?

In most houses the toilet water is exactly the same as the water coming out of the tap.

http://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/9738

it's a criminal waste of resources to treat water to drinking quality level only to use it for flushing toilets. Your cat obviously prefers fresh water rather than the stale stuff which has been in her bowl for a while - is it plastic? Maybe some chemicals from the plastic are leaching out re. your previous blog but the inert porcelain of your toilet bowl doesn't taint the water?

Essex & Suffolk Water recently invoked a project that involved the following:

• take secondary treated sewage
• remove phosphate nutrients → sludge → landfill
• convert nitrate to nitrogen and oxygen
• convert ammonia to nitrate → sludge → landfill
• UV sterilise the treated water
• discharge it to a river

Then:

• river intake, downstream of the discharge point, now at increased flowrate
• pump to a reservoir at increased flowrate
• treatment for drinking at increased flowrate.

All it does is speed-up what nature does on its own.

After an initial public outcry, the matter of drinking "recycled sewage" has been largely forgotten by the locals, who happily turn on their taps as though nothing has happened.

A truly good answer and I rated it as such.

We all live on a planet where the water we consume for either drinking, cooking , washing our automobile, showering, etc., etc. is recycled by nature. To assume otherwise shows a real lack of education about the facts.

The purity of water which can be made commercially or industrially currently far exceeds what is achieved naturally; to the point that truly pure water would not be healthy for long term drinking as some elements/compounds in pure water are eliminated by water processing.

Any one that has well water has been doing it for ever. Peoples septic systems drain off the excess water into the ground in a drain field. The septic system is only design to retain the solids. Once the water drains into the ground it become part of the ground water. I know that the well and the septic system are space far apart on the property. To think that the excess water from the septic system is going to drain down in to the ground 100 or more feet and not find its way back into the pool level of the ground water in which the well is in is pushing it. That 100 foot or so has done a good job of cleaning it up so far. By what you say they add another step. Its clean before it touch the ground. Should be no complaints. Most people don't even think about their waters potability it until things like that come up.

Its a wonder that they even put it back in the ground. Here the problem is contamination due to leakage from old service station gasoline tanks. The old style steel tanks rusted through.

"A proposed solution to this problem is to implement a "toilet-to-tap" program."

Most if not all waste water control systems are required to treat sewage so the effluent from the plant is as clear and sanitary standards of the municipal water treatment plant that serves the community.

The pin-heads that cooked up the "toilet-to-tap" program had no sensitivity to public reaction. "How dare you supply our d.w. taps with our sewage, treated or not."

One cities treated sewage is the source of drinking water for all the cities downstream

<...One cities treated sewage is the source of drinking water for all the cities downstream...>

Indeed. The river Lea is fully consumed 5 times between its source and its arrival in the Thames, reputedly.

Stan... you are the Man!!

In Europe they have been pulling their drinking water out of the river upstream of their city and discharging their waste downstream. Hmmm... but of course their downstream is the next city's upstream!

Wastewater reuse is a thing of the past (we have been doing it in Florida for over 20 years), a thing of the present and most importantly "The Thing" of the future. It is a "must have" if we are to keep a robust water supply.

Water is cheap, just compare it's cost to any other liquid commodity on the planet. We will pay $3.00 for a one liter bottle of filtered water at our favorite recreational hangout, but cringe at paying $3.00 a gallon for gas.

Out in the desert for 3 days and which commodity is really worth the 3 bucks?

One very important fact that all these nay-sayers all conveniently choose to overlook is this: any natural source of freshwater is a toilet for the creatures living in it.

What, you don't believe that the fish, frogs and newts etc. that live in the water all take a dump in it as well?

LOL! You GO! All the others made all the comments I would have about reusing water (what, somebody thinks we have a factory making 'new' water?!?) but you're the only one that caught this aspect of the story...the

(shell)fish, frog, and NEWT!

"(what, somebody thinks we have a factory making 'new' water?!?)"

The Singapore government certainly does; in fact they claim to do it. They call RO permeate created from treated sewage NEWater, although what is so new about water that has existed for millions of years, or that has been purified with technology that's more than 50 years old, I don't know.

Isn't it the Singapore government that also believes caning is an appropriate punishment for dropping chewing gum on the sidewalk? I concur that is a despicable act, but not sufficient for corporal punishment. Therefore, it surprises who (not me!) that I concur their drinking water is reNEWed, but not sufficiently so to call it NEWater. As Feynman once remarked, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

Bottled water is and unregulated industry, there are no standards.

Put the lid down.

Use composting toilet if you want to save water.

My only safety concern would be proper system management and maintenance.

What health problems could happen with a system failure?

Would I want one in my town? It would be far more cost effective for me to accept personal responsibility for the safety of my drinking water by finishing the solar still I have been designing.

Maybe some of the people who are against the idea would like to spend a day aboard the International Space Station? A word of warning: bring your own drinking water but be prepared for the shipping charges.

Both my cat and my dog drink from the big bowl rather than the 1 gallon auto-watering thing that I purchased so I didn't have to refill it all the time.

I would encourage this and I have designed similar systems. In fact, I just designed a system very much like this one:

The town is Cloudcroft, New Mexico. The process is MBR to RO, permeate through UV and peroxide for oxidation, then to a holding reservoir where it is blended with other raw water sources, then UF / GAC, and finally a little sodium hypochlorite for chlorine residual in the mains.

http://www.ittadvancedwatertreatment.com/specialfeature.htm

http://www.wwdmag.com/%20Pioneering-Water-Reuse-article8850

All waste / cleaning streams are sent to a lined pond and that water is used for road dust control and other industrial applications (the article mentions mining and fire fighting).

This is clearly the future for water re-use / recycling. As others have mentioned, we are just shortening up the loop since many waste plants discharge to rivers and the towns located downstream use that water as a source. Granted there are arguments that the sun helps with things like hormones, drugs, and endocrine disruptors - but I use UV systems to accomplish this task.

Stephan

www.bradleyventures.com

Bravo!!!!!! Now let's design gray/black water processing systems to purify raw sewage,

oops! current sewer systems combine everything going down the drain.

How would you process toluene, medical wastes, hazmat fluids/solids etc found in sewage?

Would require total separation of sanitary sewage and industrial wastewater, something our infrastructure is currently poorly designed to accomplish outside of a few rather new facilities.

Greetings, to the best of my knowledge in Australia, at least, there is no feasable way of removing bromide flame reatrdants or eostrogen contaminants from sewage water. The outflow from most sewage plants here eventually make their way to the sea and it is that contamination that concerns many saltwater environmentalists. Equally, early child maturation and cancer causing properties of this coctail infer medium to long term issues for tertiary treated sewage. I do not know if this type of geopurification mentioned can actually prevent the above mentioned problems but if it can not then subterranian contamination could be the possible result.

This note is in reflection to #12StephanChe, #13bwire, #14EnviroMan: easier to write, than one-by-one.

When I wrote before, I intimated exactly the kind of complication arising of having two different grade of drinking water, local residential reuse of gray water. In the same sense, separating rain runoff from sanitary from industrial may turn out to be an absolute necessity, when the real (not subsidized) price of the water will be taken into consideration. Does that requires a fundamental rethinking our practices and codes? You can bet you bottom dollar on it!

Just for argument sake, let's say that domestic gray water cuts use by 1/2, strict separation of rain... etc. but caching rain for municipal use does the same 1/2, use industrial cleaned one for secondary or tertiary use, again !/2. That is respectable, because it reduces the demand on the 3 major users I can think of by 1/2. And all that before forced cleaning and short loop reuse.

That most of our infrastructure is not designed this way, that is a given. But, as there is more reason to consider the real cost of water both upstream and downstream, that and its projection into the future will guide the proper mix of various water grades.

What concerns me, and you guys are better qualified to answer, is the fate of some solvents and additives, like MTBE and toulene (and plenty more), hormones, drug residues and endocrine disruptors. These are all somewhere in the ppB (part per billion) present in the fluid, but waaay out of proportion potent in your body. How you measure them at all, and how to neutralize them!?!

For illustration, you produce a very run of the mill Thyroid hormone about a 1/2 teespoonful in a year. So a tiny drop on the tip of a needle, barely visible is needed to stoke your bodily furnace every day. Just imagine, how little it takes to mess that one up. This IMHO is a damn hard nut to crack, and wont be done, until the hard evidence is in.

Stephan, you mentioned use of UV systems. Would you care to expand on it: what it is good for, how many chemicals neutralise, how effective, etc.?

To all: A simple cost effective way of removing ALL toxins and chemicals from water is to distill it . The water would evaporate to be collected and the unwanted contaminates would be left behind. Distilling would prevent the heavier materials from entering back into the water cycle. More volatile materials would evaporate first. They could be put through catalytic crackers.

The energy necessary for this process could come from the cheapest source in the area of the plant. In the southwest, for example, focused sunlight from a mirror array.

Just a thought. Dragon

PELLU too I suspect but wouldn't using waterless toilets be a step in the right direction? The universal solvent is too precious for effluent conduit.

Dear bwire, Waterless toilets would be a step in the right direction. So would outhouses. And please understand, I am not putting down your suggestion, it is just that Earth is composed of %75 <> of water. Most of it is not potable in its present form, but that is easily remedied. The process may be accomplished any number of ways from multi-million dollar desalination plant all the way down to a shallow sectioned box with plastic stretched over it. The water is there it is simply a matter of using the tools you have.

Dragon

Yes and no comparison a outhouse to compost toilet.

Toluene will remain after distillation either method.

Bwire, Do you have any data on the amount of toluene released to the environment?

The reverse osmosis method seems to work.

Dragon

Test water anywhere and everywhere and toluene will be present in varying amounts. It is used in production of aspartame.

Considering it's effects on the reproductive and nervous system any amount is alarming because of prevalence.

http://www.epa.gov/chemfact/f_toluene.txt is the official report

Distillation or desalinization by reverse osmosis seem to be good processes; surely we can do something about the toluene which people are excreting in their urine. However, both distillation and reverse osmosis use a lot of energy.

One way to reduce the energy consumption is to distill the water as a "free" by-product of another process. For example: use a wind turbine to compress air but cool the compressor by injecting water; dirty or salty water is OK as long as there are few abrasive particulates. The output of the compressor is a mixture of steam and compressed air. The compressor is not cooled by warming the atmosphere, as is now the usual method of cooling it. The mixture of compressed air and steam is then put through a "steam engine" (expander), and the mechanical energy used to produce the "wet compressed air" is put to good use, perhaps generating electricity or running a vehicle or pumping irrigation water or... The output of the expander is cool air and distilled water. The water droplets are easily filtered out and put to good use. The overall efficientcy of the process, mechanical energy out vs. mechanical energy in, is very high, demonstrably higher than using an electric generator and motor. It was demonstrated in Germany in 1930 in a diesel-pneumatic locomotive, but I have found no quantitative description of the German process, except that it saved diesel fuel as compared with the diesel-electric locomotive. There is description in US Patent number 5,832,728, which is now unenforcible and is free to the public.

This should put a new perspective on the topic!

One day my mother was out and my dad was in charge of me and my brother who is
four years older than I am. I was maybe one and a half years old and had just
recovered from an accident in which my arm had been broken among other
injuries.

Someone had given me a little 'tea set' as a get-well gift and it was one of
my favorite toys. Daddy was in the living room engrossed in the evening news and
my brother was playing nearby in the living room when I brought Daddy a little
cup of 'tea,' which was just water. After several cups of tea and lots of praise
for such yummy tea, my Mom came home.

My Dad made her wait in the living room to watch me bring him a cup of tea, because it was 'just the cutest thing!'

My Mom waited, and sure enough, here I come down the hall with a cup of tea
for Daddy and she watches him drink it up, then says, 'Did it ever occur to you that the only place that baby can reach to get water is the toilet?'

And sure enough!

With that sort of treatment, reverse osmosis, etc., the water should be able to go right into the water mains for drinking. In Europe, I believe, water is routinely reused. I used to live next to the Thames river. Our drinking water came from it and our waste water was returned to it. Other towns did the same. The entire flow of the Thames goes into the London water system, already used 7 or 8 times.

I understand Paris puirifes their sewage with ozone and pumps it back into the mains for drinking.

If the nuts of California won't drink reused water, bottle it and sell it to New Yorkers.

Sounds like a good idea.

If every city was required to put their "effluent" back upstream of their collection point, then they'd make sure it was fit for return to the environment.