Green Daily

Water's clarity is quite deceiving. Turns out there's a lot of icky invisible stuff in the liquid that comes out of your faucet. Some of it is filtered out. In fact, a lot of it is. In some cases, it's the stuff you've flushed down the toilet.

That's right. The water we drink comes from a variety of not-so-sanitary sources and goes through a lengthy cleaning process before it's safe to ingest, according to various water officials across the country whom I've spoken to recently. A couple of them in Los Angeles described the process, which involves multiple filtration systems, reverse osmosis and exposure to bacteria-eating microorganisms, hydrogen peroxide, chlorine and UV light. All of this results in water that meets or exceeds the government's drinking water standards. Nonetheless, public perception of water - where it comes from, what's in it and how it makes its way to our tap - is often skewed while powerful images take the place of education. (Think commercials with snow-capped mountains and trickling streams.) Even though the advertising is far from realistic, those images have prevented the innovative and environmentally friendly technology of recycling sewage water for human consumption from moving forward in the past.

But persistent drought and projected population growth that add up to future water shortages have forced attention back onto the process, known officially as "indirect potable water reuse" but termed "toilet to tap" by skeptics, and is covered rather well in this recent New York Times story. Several municipalities here and abroad have found success with recycling sewage water, including Orange County, an affluent region in the heart of Southern California. Similar projects are under study in San Diego, San Jose, Texas, Florida, Australia, Singapore and Los Angeles. Hopefully, an educated public will allow these projects to make a difference in what would otherwise be a very dry future.

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