Innovative Public Water System Design

by Francis P. Koster, Ed.D.

A surprising amount of the drinking water in the United States has already been used by toilets and passed through an old sewage treatment plant upstream, and back into a river where the next city downstream drinks from it.

The river also gets run-off from farms and feedlots, and storm water from parking lots. To this add new generation bad stuff including industrial, home cleaning and agriculture chemicals, and drugs, all mixed into the human waste, making a whole new brew unknown 50 years ago.

This is the raw material that our drinking water is made from.

In addition to old sewage treatment plants, many of these drinking water preparation plants are also old and do not remove all the latest generation bad stuff. Across the United States, more than 260 contaminants have been found in public tap water, and over 140 of them have no enforceable safety limits.   These include pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals.[i] A 2008 study by Associated Press discovered that these unregulated pharmaceuticals were found in the drinking water systems of 41 million Americans.[ii] This does not count those who get their drinking water from untested private wells, as 40% of North Carolinians do.

Before the mid 1800’s city people all over America had toilet buckets in their apartments which they emptied into the streets in the morning. Cholera outbreaks created support for public waste removal systems. [iii]   The first solutions were horse drawn carts that made neighborhood rounds and collected the contents of the buckets.

When municipal water supplies began delivering fresh drinking water to apartments and homes in the late 1800's, the flush toilet became possible. Using the running water now in the homes, human waste was carried through sewer pipes to a central place by the flowing flushed water. At the central place, it was put in ponds, where living critters already in us ate the bad stuff. Over time, the goop settled into liquids and solids. The solids were used to fertilize farmer’s fields. The left-over liquids were put in a nearby river.   The civil engineers of the day were taught a slogan: "The solution to pollution is dilution" - and as long as the sewage was only human waste, this was largely true. It no longer is.

We have gone from a nation whose sewage was from humans to one where we annually add millions of tons of drugs and chemicals to human sewage which mix together and make new dangers.  

One solution is to take wastewater and treat a portion of it for re-use for purpose other than drinking water. You take the waste water, clean it, and use it for landscape irrigation, flushing toilets, or building cooling, while lower the need for new under-the-street plumbing, or expensive large drinking water preparation plants.

One example of a success story is the headquarters building of the Port of Portland Oregon. By including an “on-site reuse wastewater treatment plant” that put two sets of waste water plumbing into the design of the new 200,000 square foot building, water use was reduced by 75%. Instead of sending all the waste to the sewage plant, the cleaner water is kept on site, where it is treated for re-use for irrigation, flushing toilets, and cooling buildings.

Because of the success of this concept, the City of San Francisco has adopted it for use in their new Public Utilities Commission building, where it will save water, energy and money, and serve as a role model.   A third example is an installation at Furman University, in South Carolina, where this model was selected over the "business as usual" systems based on low life cycle costs for both energy, water. [iv]

On a personal level, one thing you can do is install a charcoal filter on your faucet which significantly reduce the amounts of many pollutants. You can buy them at the hardware store.  

Societies require safe air, water, and food in order to survive.  We need to keep the issue of safe and secure water supplies in our radar - for our sake, and the sake of our children.

 

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[i] www.ewg.org/sites/tapwater/national/unregcontams.php/.

[ii] Http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-03-10-drugs-tap-water

[iii] . "Urban Wastewater Management in the United States: Past, Present, and Future." Journal of Urban Technology, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 33-62

[iv] Phone call and email exchange with Mr. Will Kirksey, Living Machine Systems L3C

 

This article was reviewed for accuracy by the US EPA, the Sierra Club, and Living Machine Systems Inc.