Not to get too gross about it, but do you know where that water you’re drinking has been?
Out in Lake Michigan, which is filled with fish and, sometimes, people, doing the things that fish and people do … well, we don’t need to get too specific, do we?
If you think about it, the water you’re drinking at some point probably was cycled through, well, through a lot of people you don’t know, through the sewage system, through filters and processes and all sorts of purification … and then back down someone’s gullet, and so on.
The point is, water is the ultimate recyclable. That’s why we had to smile when we heard about the public uproar over Orange County’s new water purification system.
Typically, water is treated and then released into the wild, to be harvested, as they say, later. But Orange County is skipping that middle step. It has started taking sewer water and, instead of dumping it into the ocean after treatment, is scrubbing it clean — really almost distilled — exceeding all state and federal drinking standards. The water then is sent back to percolate into the aquifer that lies beneath Anaheim, which serves 2.3 million people in 20 cities. Predictably, this process has come to be known, in a particularly, infelicitous turn of the phrase, as toilet-to-tap.
But there’s no reason to be so squeamish about this trend. (Although this does provide some ammunition against friends and relatives taunting winter-bound Chicagoans about the sun-swept paradise of California.)
“We are part of the water cycle, so ultimately the water comes through us, like it does all organisms, whether it is bacteria or plants,” says Richard Whitman, chief of the Lake Michigan Ecological Research Station at the U.S. Geological Survey.
Here’s an interesting statistic Whitman dug up: The percentage of water in all human beings relative to all the water in the world is 0.00000000074 percent. In other words, tiny. Much of that water makes a brief circuit through people, plants and animals and then returns to nature.
Even the best water purification doesn’t expunge all traces of that journey.
An Associated Press investigation recently revealed that tiny amounts of pharmaceutical drugs had been detected in the drinking water supplies of 24 major metropolitan areas, even after it had passed through wastewater treatment. Many water providers, including Chicago, don’t test for drugs, and the federal government doesn’t require it.
Water officials don’t like to talk about this much. They don’t want to panic people or create unnecessary fears. But burying information or simply denying those fears doesn’t help assuage them. It’s not clear how alarmed — if at all — we should be about this. So why not test the water in Chicago and elsewhere and explain publicly why this is or isn’t a problem?
What people may forget is that much of the world’s water is not fit to drink at some point. But with water supplies strained in the West, and demands increasing here and just about everywhere for fresh drinking water, California’s potty-to-potable process looks promising.
Not that it’s coming to the shores of Lake Michigan any time soon. It would be a “tough sell” to the public, said Dick Lanyon, general superintendent of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District. “At some point in the future, we may be hard-pressed to meet our water needs. With Lake Michigan next to the city, we’re not there yet.”
Nor will we need to be for a long time, provided we are wise about shepherding our great natural resource.
