Singapore, Los Angeles, Windhoek (the capital of Namibia in Africa) and the tiny town of Cloudcroft, New Mexico are doing it. Astronauts do it – NASA considers it a high priority – and doing it in the desert can help to diminish the environmental impact of any town whose water needs surpass the sustainable local supply. This would probably include every community in New Mexico. And yet this remarkable marriage of space-age technology and Spaceship Earth ethics, which uses chemistry to create alchemy by making something pure and nourishing from something gross and stinky, spends a lot of time languishing in literal and figurative holding tanks. Although the entire American Southwest could be using it to mitigate the impacts of population increases, industrialization and climate change, very few New Mexican towns have even begun to consider it.
I’m referring to wastewater recycling, also known as blackwater recycling. The process also gets derided as toilet-to-tap reuse, a description that is reductive at best. As Belinda Smith of the Surfrider Foundation environmental advocacy group told the New York Times, “It isn’t toilet to tap. It’s toilet to treatment to treatment to treatment to tap.”
Ms. Smith was speaking on behalf of a plan proposed by the San Diego County Water Authority in 2004. Today, San Diego is working through the second phase (the Water Reuse Demonstration Project, intended to test and explain the safety of the recycling technologies) of its three-phase plan. The third phase, “full-scale reservoir augmentation,” would culminate in the introduction of “advanced treated recycled water” into the San Vicente Reservoir, where it would mix with water from other sources, then sit there for several months, and then flow into faucets throughout America’s Finest City. (That’s one of San Diego’s nicknames, according to Wikipedia. Apparently the Tuna Capital of the World also calls itself Silicon Beach. That is undoubtedly accurate, but hardly a distinguishing nickname on this planet. Other local attractions include Hydrogen Ocean and Carbon Forest.)
Phase Three of San Diego’s plan is just a plan for now, and won’t move forward until and unless Phase Two successfully demonstrates the safety of the proposed technologies. But San Diego already uses recycled water for irrigation and some industrial applications, and it’s far from alone. In fact, when the Surfrider Foundation was lobbying for the adoption of water reuse in San Diego County, they pointed out (again according to the New York Times) that, “almost every municipal wastewater plant practices water reuse anyway, since discharged treated wastewater is reused downstream.” This is a sound extension of the schoolyard logic that tells us we are all breathing the same air as Genghis Khan, Mary Magdalene, and Cleopatra. Perhaps more reassuring would be a moment spent pondering the impressive efficacy of advanced water purification, the technology that allows us to thoroughly cleanse that substance we use to clean everything else. What water purification really does is decouple this thing we need – simple, safe H2O – from the contaminants that provoke our perfectly rational revulsion at the idea of slurping up the bathwater of Marie Antoinette or Milton Berle.
Revulsion, with its rational origins as a protector against disease, and its irrational tenacity in the form of taboo, is central to the topic of water reuse. In fact the pull between these two sources of disgust – is it justified by the presence of a legitimate contaminant, or is it a fossilized emotional reaction against a challenge to the status quo – is the force that powers many of the most heated arguments relating to technology and social change. The shape of the debate regarding recycled wastewater should be familiar to anyone who has followed the controversies over gay marriage, childhood sex education, or school bussing. In each case we have, on the one hand, an activity found through peer-reviewed scientific study to be in various ways not only harmless but actually beneficial to our society. And on the other hand, we have frowning and anxiety and protestations that this supposedly beneficial thing is actually disgusting and unnatural.
What we have seen in each case is that science tends to win out, but slowly, and almost never completely over the old ways of thinking. We know that rational evidence is, no matter which side of whatever issue we’re on, almost never the only factor in how we form opinions. So the question of whether wastewater recycling is truly clean and truly safe seems almost beside the point; if we just can’t stop thinking of it as toilet-to-tap, we’re going to have a hard time swallowing it.
And yet many communities and their constituent individuals are eventually able to see the Carbon Forest for the trees, as it were. They’re able to see recycled drinking water as an opportunity to live well in overburdened environments without unnecessarily compromising the ecological stability of our shared and irreplaceable home. Why is it that Singapore embraces advanced purification, while San Diego slowly shrugs its way onboard, and Los Angeles obfuscates its adoption through “indirect potable groundwater replenishment” – eco-spin for “the water sits in the ground until it magically loses its urine aura”? More simply put, why do some people and communities innovate more readily than others? And why, when New Mexico’s water crisis is once again reaching historical levels – and this is saying something in a land where, famously, “whiskey’s for drinking and water’s for fighting,” – why is New Mexico not leading the charge to adopt and improve wastewater recycling? Why aren’t we doing more?
The urine aura is universal, by which I mean that every town everywhere that considers wastewater recycling must reassure its citizens that the water really will be clean, that there is no reason to worry, and this comes up no matter how tried and true the technology. (The technology, by the way, is tried and true but it is also recent and not cheap. Presently, different steps in the purification process face different degrees of controversy. There is debate, for example, over whether “groundwater recharging” is just about removing the urine aura, or whether it contributes vital filtration steps to the process. It quite possibly achieves both.)
This universal aversion and need for reassurance are why San Diego is presently mired in its Phase Two of indefinite length. But people tend to get over disgust more quickly in desperate circumstances. (Vide plane-crash cannibals, or contestants on Fear Factor.) New Mexico is desperate, and knows it. In 2009, Colorado State University conducted a survey of “Public Attitudes About Water Use in the West.” Out of 17 western states, New Mexican participants ranked #3 for their perception of current water scarcity in their state, behind only California and Arizona. (One wonders, given that Arizona and New Mexico are basically all desert, who the 11% and 15% of citizens were, respectively, who believed there is “enough water in my state for 25 years.” Literate armadillos?)
If New Mexican citizens know they are desperate for water, why are the state’s two largest cities doing so little to recycle it? Albuquerque and Las Cruces both employ some water reuse for irrigation, but I could find no mention of plans to expand these programs toward groundwater replenishing (a.k.a. “toilet to treatment to treatment to treatment to tap,”) or other larger-scale reuse. The state’s third-largest city does deserve some credit, as its water reuse brochure states that, “Rio Rancho is proactively implementing a Water Reuse Plan to conserve and extend our water supply to secure the City’s water future.” The brochure describes returning recycled water to the city’s general-use aquifer – Albuquerque’s Alibi newspaper describes the plan as well. Rio Rancho also states that its population has increased by nearly 2,500 percent since 1970, which might help explain its open-mindedness in this matter.
Not only has the population of Rio Rancho swelled dramatically, it is swollen with the challenges and benefits of the technology industry. Intel employs almost five times as many people as the second largest employer in town – the public schools – and HP is a close third. Massive corporate presence and universal wireless internet, two distinctive features of Rio Rancho’s current civic profile, are generally rare in New Mexico. They indicate the larger factors that are necessary for the adoption of radical new technologies, and are for the most part painfully absent from the rest of the Land of Enchantment: public money, and a willingness to innovate.
New Mexico for the most part is famously committed to its own proud traditions, and it is famously, proudly, traditionally, very poor. It may be that some mistrust of technology is reasonable in a land that has been so brutally and casually exploited for so long. It may also be that innovation costs money, and the communities that comprise New Mexico have none to spare for an upgrade that will yield, in the short term, ecologic but not economic returns. Regardless, New Mexico is desperate for water. There is no alchemy that will produce something from nothing. The best we can do is employ a different alchemy to make something clean from something discarded, to refill our aquifers while restoring some balance to the ecosystem, and to swallow the costs of living well in this land we love.
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