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Angela: Hello and welcome to Make It Clear, a conversational podcast about all things related to water and wastewater. I'm your host, Angela Bounds, and I'm joined by my co-host, Shawn Rapp. In each episode, we'll tackle a relevant topic with facts and expert opinions and make things clear.
Hi, and thanks for joining us again. Today, Shawn and I are going to do a new segment called Wastewater in the News.
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I don't know how often we'll do it, maybe quarterly, depending on what other stuff we have to cover. But we're going to start it today. So hey, Shawn.
Shawn: Hello. This was really cool. I was doing a lot of research for this before we decided to do this. And there's some very interesting things in the news in relation to wastewater.
Angela: Yeah. So let's kick it off.
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You want to start with the New York Times article on beer?
Shawn: Yes, that's an awesome one.
Angela: Would you drink wastewater? What if it was beer?
Shawn: Yeah, this was an interesting article by a lady by the name of Claire Fahey and was published on July 22nd of this year. So it's really current. This is actually, as I was reading through this and it's like, man, this is really interesting because they're talking about how to help
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people get over the yuck factor, which I know we've talked about several times.
Angela: Right. There is a, there is a preconceived notion when it comes to wastewater and that it's yuck. A lot of people, we've talked about this a few times on the podcast itself, but people don't understand where wastewater is actually discharged.
Shawn: Right.
Angela: Once it's treated.
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Shawn: And this is probably going to gross some people out, but the fact that since it's people get their drinking water from the stream and waste water is to charge back into the stream.
Angela: Yeah.
Shawn: Probably at some point they're ingesting it without even knowing it.
Angela: Yep. Exactly.
Shawn: However, because it is so highly treated, you wouldn't even know.
Angela: You don't know.
Shawn: No.
Angela: You don't know.
Shawn: That was one of the things that the article was very good about describing was the fact that
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they're making these beers out of wastewater that's reclaimed from gray water, which for those of you who don't know, gray water is what is collected or what comes from your shower and from your kitchen sink, not from the toilets. That's called black water. The gray water is the other sources of water that come from your house. And it's so highly treated that it's actually cleaner than the stuff that comes out of the river.
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Angela: Yeah. It’s something that…I don't think is widely enough publicized. I mean…
Shawn: I don't think so either.
Angela: Yeah. So that…
Shawn: It was a very interesting article.
Angela: Yeah. It kind of segues into the article that was published, it was published on phys.org PHYS in August, August 10th of this year. And it's a new study talking about how the article is titled new study, even treated wastewater affects
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our rivers. And it's kind of interesting how it talks about the different effects of discharging into the rivers and what ends up happening, the diversity.
Shawn: Right.
Angela: Right.
Shawn: Yeah, that was an interesting study that they did. This was conducted in Germany at Goethe university, and
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what they did was they studied, I think it was 170 different wastewater treatment plants in and around the area. And they studied the biodiversity upstream and downstream of the discharge points for the wastewater treatment plants. They found that it was a dual effect that some creatures and some biota actually thrived in the absence of wastewater, but either diminished or disappeared altogether
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downstream and there was some biota that was downstream that actually flourished in the presence of wastewater. So, it's very interesting to see the effect that it has, but it also talks very pointedly about what goes into and what comes out of wastewater.
Angela: Right. Yeah, what the effect is, is… It’s all just fascinating.
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There's no two ways around it, right? It's…
Shawn: Right.
Angela: It's just fascinating. All right. Then there was an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer published August 15th of this year. So just this week. And the title is as water reuse expands, proponents battle the yuck factor. So you were just talking about the yuck factor.
Shawn: Right.
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Angela: The subhead is that researchers say reusing water is safe and that it's essential to move past the 20th century notion that wastewater must stay flushed.
Shawn: Right.
Angela: Yeah.
Shawn: And I think this is to sort of combat the idea that some people sort of see wastewater reuse as toilet to tap.
Angela: Right.
Shawn: In other words, reclaiming wastewater from your toilets and so on, black water, gray water,
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and then putting it right back into the drinking water system, which is not the way things really work in real life.
Angela: Yeah. Yep.
Shawn: And again, this one kind of ties in with the other one that we read a little earlier about turning wastewater into beer. But this one goes a little bit further to talk about the need to really start leaning into wastewater reuse as...
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populations grow as cities become more dense and require more resources. Very interesting article. I guess in San Francisco, or maybe it's all of California, I would have to go back and look at it again. But they were saying that they've passed laws there that any building that is over 100,000 square feet has to have gray water treatment and reuse. And a lot of companies are using that for
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toilet flushing. But there are other companies that are going even further. I guess they're talking here about one of the beer breweries that partnered with NASA because NASA uses that same type of technology to treat water because you can't get new water in space. You've got to treat what you've got. And so they take the wastewater and they treat it. And so it comes out really clean so that you can drink it again. And they're using that same technology to
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treat wastewater and make it into beer.
Angela: Yeah.
Shawn: Of note, they're not using the black water. They're still using gray water.
Angela: Gray water. Yeah.
Shawn: We haven't got that far yet as far as overcoming the yuck factor, but…
Angela: We've defined that in previous podcasts, the difference between black and gray water, but it is San Francisco. So San Francisco PUC, the public utilities commission, it says that since 2015,
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the San Francisco PUC, which operates the dams, reservoirs, and aqueducts that deliver water from the Sierra Nevada to the city, has required all buildings over 100,000 square feet be equipped for recycling gray water. So it goes on to actually describe so the downtown Salesforce tower has its own recycling plant. Sinks, laundry machines, and showers drain into the basement recycling system, and the water is then reused for flushing toilets and irrigation.
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Saving about 30,000 gallons a day.
Shawn: It's absolutely incredible.
Angela: Yeah. Yeah. I, I, yeah. We need to start talking about things on that kind of grand scale. Yeah. I've seen a number of, of smaller scale gray water systems go in to use household waste, flush toilets and irrigate property. But
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things of this magnitude. I guess it is not just of this magnitude because it takes all of them, right? It takes everything together.
Shawn: Right, it's a combined effort.
Angela: Yeah. Yeah.
Shawn: Yeah. Very interesting stuff to look at if this is something that you find fascinating, Angela:which I kind of do. It's really kind of fascinating.
Yeah. So there was another article on phys.org talking about
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greenhouse emissions. And the title of the article that was actually published in March of 2023 is research finds improved wastewater treatment could lead to significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
Shawn: Yeah, this one was kind of interesting to read through as well, especially as we find ourselves moving from summer into the fall and winter and the Northern Hemisphere is going to start getting a lot more rainwater.
Angela: Yeah.
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Shawn: And if you live with a system that is an older big pipe system, you're probably on a system that is prone to inflow and infiltration. And we're going to start seeing articles in the news about systems releasing wastewater, either planned releases or unplanned releases. Angela: Or unplanned releases, yes.
Shawn: Which, yeah, one is definitely not good, the other is way worse.
Angela: Right. Neither is preferable.
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Shawn: No, but interesting article because they were talking about how if large communities and large cities just treated or were able to treat the water that would go out as an overflow, then we could reduce greenhouse gas emissions in some cases by six to eight percent, I believe, of some of the numbers that they talked about, which is not insignificant when we're talking about greenhouse gas emissions.
Angela: Mm-hmm.
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Shawn: And some of them could be even more than that. By reducing the emissions of the 33 cities with medium to high levels of untreated wastewater to the mean emissions of cities with zero to low untreated wastewater emissions, 2% of the worldwide emissions total could be cut.
Angela: Right.
Shawn: And if all 61 cities reduced their emissions to the lowest rate, it would cut 6% of total worldwide methane emissions. That's pretty much what we're talking about is methane. That's what they've been tracking.
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The scientists they were talking about by the name of DeFoy, was saying some urban areas could reduce emissions by 50% or more by fully treating all of their wastewater. So not insignificant.
Angela; No, not at all. All right. In the last article or report that we wanted to cover today was actually from Precedence Research. It was published in July of 2023, and it talks about the global water and wastewater treatment market
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is estimated to grow to a $572.2 billion market by 2032.
Shawn: Wow.
Angela: Which is just huge.
Shawn: Yeah.
Angela: The article goes on to kind of talk about how wastewater treatment system suppliers could have considerable growth, the growing need for practical strategy for the application of industrial wastewater
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is one of the primary causes of the rising demand. Growing urban population and growing industrialization, population growth and urbanization have all raised the need for wastewater treatment. So it's, it's pretty interesting if you want to dig down into the weeds of what's going on, but, but there are a lot of factors that are leading to growth
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in this arena. And I really do think in the article actually talks about a focus on infrastructure. So municipal infrastructure and both rurally and in urban settings and reuse. It's pretty interesting. Yeah, it's pretty interesting.
Shawn: I like the fact that it's a global perspective.
Angela: Yeah.
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Shawn: You know, we tend to focus a lot on what happens here in our own backyard, but it's actually a lot bigger than that. And while we try to see things as the big picture, because a lot of these things are ubiquitous, they're, you know, treating the yuck factor is the same here as it is in Europe. You know…
Angela: Wastewater is wastewater.
Shawn: Exactly. And water reuse is the same here as the need for it in Europe and Asia and Africa and everywhere.
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Angela: Yep.
Shawn: And so it's interesting to look at this on a global scale and not just from, like I said, our own backyard.
Angela: Yeah.
Shawn: This article you were just referencing talks about Asia, the Asian Pacific market leading the way with 32.7% of the sales share and predicted to, let's see, it's predicted to grow at 5.5% and I think that's per annum.
Angela: Yeah.
Shawn: I mean, that's, and especially in developing countries.
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because these developing countries start to look at more industrialization. People again, moving from the suburbs or from the rural communities into the cities, you know, industry is growing in these places. So they start producing more and more wastewater. We need to figure out ways to keep up with that. So yeah, very interesting.
Angela: Really interesting. I found, I actually found all of the articles interesting.
Shawn: Yeah.
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Angela: I suppose that probably goes without saying, because we wouldn't talk about them if we didn't find them interesting, right?
Shawn: I like the one about beer.
Angela: I'm sure you do. There are probably a lot of people interested in that, like, oh, wait a minute.
Shawn: Right. I’d try that.
Angela: Who's putting wastewater in my beer?
Shawn: Right.
Angela: I guess that does go without saying, doesn't it? If it was boring, we'd be like, oh, I don't want to talk about that.
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So funny. Anyways, so that is all we have for you today. As we said in the beginning, wastewater is in the news daily it feels like. So keep an eye out and thanks for joining us again today.
We want to thank you again for joining us today. Before you go, don't forget to subscribe where you listen to podcasts so you're notified when new episodes are posted.
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Also, you can leave your comments or suggestions through the contact link on our website, www.orenco.com. Until next time, have a great day!