We decided to introduce our article on the determinants of size, shape, and placement of water storage vessels in a playful manner on our cover, with the incongruous image of an old water tower amidst city skyscrapers. The eye-catching composition with lots of reflective surfaces may itself inspire reflection, and bring some smiles. There is another incongruity that doesn’t bring so many smiles. As communities grapple with whether wastewater and potable water systems will need to intersect more and more on account of population growth, climate change, the costs and consequences of diverting water, and significantly, contamination of fresh water, a not-so-happy juxtaposition is expressed with the phrase “toilet to tap.” The challenges in terms of keeping potable water and wastewater separate are nothing new.
When John Milton was living in London in the 1600s and writing Paradise Lost, his epic poem about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, he could conjure images of murmuring streams falling gently over rocks into a crystal lake, while under his nose London was in the process of becoming more and more fouled by sewage.
From the end of the 1500s to the middle of the 1800s, Londoners emptied chamber pots into cesspits under their homes; these grew to number in the hundreds of thousands. By the 1800s, flush toilets–water closets–were in development, and the first public water closets were even exhibited at the Great Exhibition’s Crystal Palace in 1851 (the first of the World’s Fairs), where you could use one for a penny. Sound like a Victorian dream, just right for the pocket watch and parasol crowd? Well, the planning for the plumbing was incomplete, and the regional infrastructure wasn’t quite ready for the flush toilet.
The increased volume of water entering the cesspits from the flushing would cause them to overflow–with both new and centuries old contents–into the streets, where drain ditches had been created to shuttle rainwater out to the Thames river. Some sloppy people (or pragmatists, depending on your point of view) skipped the cesspit altogether and threw their wastes into the street directly. Factory and slaughterhouse wastes were also going this route. London and its water source was becoming one big cesspool.
Drinking water was compromised. Prior to Milton’s time, conduit pipes had been attached to natural springs, and these brought water to cisterns where people could get it. Waterwheels on the Thames were also devised for pumping; water was then distributed using gravity and human carriers, even as the Thames became increasingly noxious. Though Cholera was being spread from the contaminated drinking water in the river, the nature of disease was apparently so unknown that it was thought that the foul smell was causing the Cholera! (At least they were somewhere in the ballpark.)
In July 1855, scientist Michael Faraday, known for his work in electromagnetism, wrote a letter to the Times of London on the condition of the river; apparently he had been doing a form of turbidity monitoring by tossing torn pieces of white paper into the Thames to gauge its “degree of opacity.” When the stench became unbearable in the particularly hot summer of 1858, the House of Commons tried soaking draperies with chloride of lime, then considered a relocation upstream to Hampton Court, but when that was recognized as too inconvenient, well, finally, “The Great Stink” had everyone’s attention and things started to change.
Wastewater treatment in the US handles disease causing agents and odor quite well. (See Paul Hull’s article on Treatment Options.) But what is starting to stink, it seems, is the lack of funding for infrastructure, and this crisis is engendering inventiveness and foresight in some quarters that may be slowly, and in stages, dissolving the line between potable and wastewater streams.
I recently attended a symposium, put on by California Onsite Wastewater Association (COWA), and listened to many innovators with treatment solutions to make use of graywater, rainwater, and even blackwater onsite. Some city water departments are, themselves, implementing graywater reuse programs in their public buildings. The biggest “cleanup” these engineers have been engaging in is probably the paradigm cleanup required to go from seeing wastewater as something to be treated and disposed of, to seeing it as a resource. But in drought-stricken states, as well as in regions unable to afford to upgrade their pipes, or where the sewer grid is at capacity while new development continues, reuse strategies are starting to flow into what seems to some to be an otherwise solution-less void.
I haven’t heard the campaign, “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” applied to water yet, but in one way or another it will be soon. The sense I get from those in the know is that these are the concepts through which we’ll be filtering our understanding of water use in the months, years, and decades ahead. Even treated blackwater becomes less of a dirty word the more it is talked about.
What do you think about onsite reuse, or about communities like Orange County, CA, injecting treated wastewater into aquifers for indirect potable reuse? If you have any thoughts, we would love to hear them.