Reclaimed Waste Water May Ease State’s Thirst

In an effort to help quench California’s unending thirst, officials are set to embark on unusual plans to turn treated sewage into drinking water.

San Diego is preparing to pipe water from the local sewage treatment plant directly into the city’s second-largest drinking water reservoir.

Communities in the South Bay and Livermore, Calif., have recently joined the Orange County Water District in approving the injection of treated waste water into underground supplies used for tap water.

Water recovered from treated sewage has already become an integral part of the state’s water supply. Despite high costs and worries over public squeamishness, the use of “recycled” water has increased about 30% in the last year.

It is being used to make snow for ski areas, grow hay, make newsprint and concrete, dye carpets, hose down landfills and fill cooling towers in oil refineries.

Water reclamation in some form has been going on for a long time. Irvine is the granddaddy of reclamation in California, setting an as yet unrealized goal in the early 1960s of recycling all its sewage water for non-potable uses. The Irvine Ranch Water District is still a leader, recently introducing reclaimed water to office air-conditioning systems.

In another innovation, the district recently created a special plumbing system that supplies recycled water to toilets and urinals in a 20-story Irvine office tower.

Irvine water officials also installed an underground irrigation system at an elementary school playground that allows reclaimed water to be used. The system irrigates the grass but does not send any water to the surface, where it could come in contact with children.

The Orange County Water District is now considering plans to expand its reclamation operation using treated waste water from the county’s sanitation districts.

The widespread use of waste water is not without doubters. Environmentalists and Newport Beach residents are fighting plans by Irvine Ranch to flush treated water through the San Joaquin Marsh and into Upper Newport Bay. Opponents fear the treated sewage will foul the bay, a fear water officials say is groundless.

In a larger sense, critics say that the process is expensive and may make many water drinkers opt for the bottled variety or turn up their noses and say, “Yuck!”

But Paul Gagliardo of San Diego’s Metropolitan Wastewater Department believes that his city is about to begin “pioneering a process . . . to get people comfortable with the idea of drinking treated sewage.”

California spews enough sewage into the ocean to meet a third to a half of the state’s urban water needs, Gagliardo said.

He is among a small group of zealots who dream of a future in which Californians drink sewage, processed to levels similar to bottled water.

Those views are shared by crusaders such as Santa Rosa organic farmer Lawrence Jaffe, who sells vegetables nourished with recycled water using the slogan, “Close the loop,” and Bahman Sheikh, a San Francisco consultant who likes to make the point by gulping down a long, cool glass of tertiary effluent.

“There is no reason to flush toilets with pure water from Mono Basin,” Sheikh said.

The surge in water recycling has been propelled by improvements in technology, regulatory changes and a new crop of government subsidies for reclamation systems.

Today, California uses more than 450,000 acre-feet of reclaimed water annually. That is equal to about one-and-a-half Castaic Lakes, or the water consumed by two-thirds of Los Angeles in a year.

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Projects now under construction will soon boost usage another 20%, according to the California Water Resources Board.

For all that, reclaimed water is less than 2% of the water used yearly by farms and cities in California.

But advocates predict that will change, and cite models such as Irvine Ranch, where nearly a quarter of the water comes from treated sewage.

“It’s like throwing money away if you just let this water go,” said Jaffe, who spent his law school student loan to start an organic farm in the shadow of San Jose’s treatment plant, where he grows vegetables using local compost and reclaimed water.

People such as Jaffe are fond of pointing out that while the state’s reliance on water from the Sierra Nevada and the Colorado River is coming under attack, recycled water is the one source in California that is growing.

It is also drought-proof.

And because reclaimed water is produced locally by cities, it is also largely politics-proof. “No one can take it away from us,” said Earle Hartling, water reuse coordinator of the Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles.

As a result, the uses of reclaimed water have multiplied so quickly that health officials have been scrambling to keep up. New regulations should be completed this year, said David Spath, chief of the division of drinking water with the state Department of Health Services.

The rules are expected to soon eliminate one of the ironies of this emerging water supply: its classification as a hazardous waste.

Until then, plant workers must fill out lengthy reports when they spill reclaimed water, even if it is drinking water quality.

Despite the regulatory confusion, recycled water is being used in a number of ways.

It has been proposed as a source of water to do laundry at San Quentin Prison. It is even being pumped under the sea floor off Long Beach to keep the harbor area from sinking due to oil extraction. The oil companies have used tap water for this purpose--enough to supply 20,000 people with water for a year--but are switching to reclaimed water.

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Throughout the state, independent sewer and water utilities are cooperating, and in the case of San Francisco, merging. Their engineers are taking on dual roles, and converting acre-feet--the conventional measure of drinking water--to gallons per day--the conventional measure of sewage.

In short, water agencies now see waste water as a resource and incorporate it into long-term supply plans.

Once chiefly an issue of handling sewage, reclaimed water is “moving over to the other side of the ledger,” said Lou Garcia, director of environmental services for San Jose, which plans to divert nearly 40% of its sewage stream to water supplies in coming years.

The West Basin Municipal Water District, which serves communities from West Hollywood to Palos Verdes Estates, has made water recycling the linchpin of its plan to cut dependence on imported water in half over the next 20 years, largely by converting the region’s water-hungry oil refineries to recycled water.

The purest of West Basin’s recycled water is being injected into the ground to protect drinking water supplies from seeping seawater. The plan will simultaneously cut sewage discharge into the bay 25%.

San Diego leads the state. Officials decided to convert waste into drinking water after court rulings forced the city to better treat its sewage to protect the ocean. The result is water similar to what most people would consider good for a swimming lake.

Rather than dump that water back into the ocean, San Diego has designed a $150-million system to add another level of treatment, bring the water up to the quality of extra-pure tap water, and pump it to the city’s San Vicente drinking water reservoir.

The water will be mixed into imported water supplies, comprising up to 10% of the supply by 2001.

“It’s a very significant step,” said Ken Weinberg, water resources supervisor for the San Diego County Water Authority. “We are creating a new source of water.”

The technology for recycled water has developed to where San Diego’s water will supposedly be 10 times purer than tap water, Gagliardo said.

State health officials have already approved San Diego’s plan, developing a new set of guidelines for the purpose because none exist. The water will be fine to drink, they say. The only worry is breakdowns in the system, so duplicate safeguards have been built in, Spath said.

So far, the project has been more controversial because of its high cost than because of health concerns.

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San Diego officials estimate that it will cost about $600 per acre-foot to produce drinking water from waste water, about 30% higher than the cost of purchasing water from the Metropolitan Water District. They acknowledge that figure is fuzzy, however, because it includes federal subsidies and is counted against current sewage treatment costs.

And some San Diegans contend that it would be better spent on developing other water sources: “If you are willing to spend that kind of money, you could flood the city of San Diego,” said Elmer Keen, a retired geographer and critic of the project.

But supporters counter that the cost of recycled water, although expensive, is still far less than the cost of desalinating water or building dams. “It’s competitive in my book when compared to other new sources,” said Peter MacLaggan, executive director of the Water Reuse Assn. of California.

San Diego officials are keenly aware of how easily public perception of the project could go awry. “This issue,” said one advocate, Dr. Rosemarie Marshall Johnson, “gets everybody in a very personal way.”

The city conducted focus groups to test monikers for the water, and ultimately chose “repurified” over “recycled,” which, it seems, left too much to the imagination.

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Outreach to community groups came next, with officials gingerly pointing out that the city’s existing water source, drawn from the Colorado River, contains sewage that has been treated and discharged by cities upriver, such as Las Vegas.

Across the state, similar public relations efforts are underway, with water agencies gently seeking to tell the public that they are using a new source of water that’s quite close to home.

“All water has gone through countless other organisms before it gets to us,” said Hartling. “Dinosaurs, fish, humans--some a lot more recently than we would like to think.”

“It’s a delicate balance,” said Steve Kasower, water recycling specialist with the state Water Resources Board. “It’s important the public understands this and doesn’t get upset by fear-mongers. . . . But, dirty or clean, water is just molecules of H2O with stuff floating between them.”

Public acceptance for water recycling is not without precedent.

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In Northern Virginia, a sewage utility has been treating waste water so that it meets drinking water standards for 20 years and releasing it into the Occoquan Reservoir in an unusual project similar to what San Diego plans. No health problems have been reported.

At the most advanced sewage treatment facilities today, utilities employ reverse osmosis and microfilters, devices that involve pressing water through microscopic membranes, similar to what is used at bottled water companies such as Arrowhead Water.

Elsewhere in the state, environmental regulation has also spurred new efforts at reclamation.

San Jose is one example. The city is under pressure to reduce the sewage it dumps into South San Francisco Bay, not because the discharge is poisoning anything, but because it is so high quality that it is converting natural saltwater marshes into freshwater ones.

“In effect, the water is too clean,” said Steven Ritchie of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.

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With bullrushes springing up in the bay where pickleweed once grew, and pressure mounting to do something to help endangered saltwater species, it was only a matter of time before cities like San Jose came to view their sewage as an enticing supply of freshwater, Ritchie said.

San Jose now has a $140-million reclamation system under construction that will deliver reclaimed water to parks, farms and industries in Silicon Valley, said Garcia, the city’s environmental services director.

Some areas are even using reclaimed sewage water to upgrade the purity of their conventional water supplies.

Monterey Regional Water Pollution Control Agency will unveil a $75-million project next month that will free farmers from dependence on wells that have grown too salty.

Since statewide more than three-quarters of urban water is used for things other than drinking, the most optimistic activists predict that someday 20%, or even 40%, would come from treated waste.

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“Toilet to tap” is the phrase that they use to denote a futuristic urban environment in which treated waste water would be transferred directly to drinking water pipes.

Such a system would require new technology to instantaneously detect germs in treated water. But some reclamation enthusiasts still see it as inevitable.

The very thought seems to make Spath, of the state health department, uncomfortable. “The time for that is not now, I will tell you that,” he said.

Even the strongest advocates sense that the quick turnover of water from sewers to faucets may be a bit too dicey to win wide public acceptance.

“I forbid you to print this,” said Orange County reclamation advocate and farmer Charles Peltzer, while expounding ideas for mixing reclaimed water into public drinking water. “The public isn’t ready to hear it.”

Already, one water recycling plan has run afoul of the public: Three years ago, the Upper San Gabriel Valley Municipal Water District was forced to scale back a plan to replenish ground water with recycled water because Miller Brewing Co. voiced fears that the project might taint its nearby wells.

Other attempts to gauge public reaction have shown conflicting results. A few years ago in Denver, water agency officials conducted focus groups to find out how the public might feel about reusing waste water for drinking. They found to their surprise that many people would rather not think too much about where their water comes from. “They wanted us to just get on with it,” said Jane Earle, of Denver Water.