Report gives consumers low grade on water reuse
By Jeyling Chou
Nov. 3, 2002 9:00 p.m.
The water drinkers of Southern California haven’t quite
been making the grade.
The UCLA Institute of the Environment recently published its
fifth annual Southern California Environmental Report Card, which
discusses water treatment and recycling, along with three other
local environmental issues of concern.
With a constantly increasing population and scant rainfall, the
Southern California water supply has always been under pressure.
The study in the report card, written by Professors Mike Stenstrom
and Richard Berk, discusses the technology of water reclamation and
reuse, which can help ease the strain.
Water reclamation is the process in which wastewater is treated
and filtered for reuse. Currently, this recycled water is being
used to water highway medians, golf courses and private front
lawns.
The report card gave water reclamation agencies and plants an A
grade. The rest of us, the water consumers, received a D.
Southern California residents have been given this low mark due
to a bad attitude and inaccurate outlook. There has been a long and
wrongly held perception that water reclamation is simply channeling
water from “toilet to tap.”
“People know where the toilet is, people know where the
tap is,” said Earle Hartling, water recycling coordinator of
the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts.
“They can connect the two very easily. But they have no
idea of the hundreds of millions of dollars of infrastructure in
between those two that keep them separate,” he said.
The product of the three-stage reclamation and water filtering
process meets all federal qualifications for drinking. Thousands of
gallons of wastewater go through a reverse osmosis filtering
process in which semi-permeable membranes reject viruses, bacteria
and other impurities.
“What Mother Nature takes weeks, months to accomplish, we
do in 12 hours,” Hartling said.
So far, the public hasn’t been receptive to putting this
water to use.
“It’s a change of attitude,” said Berk,
professor in the Department of Statistics and Sociology and
co-author of the report. “People have no problem with using
recycled water to water golf courses, but they don’t want to
use it or wash with it in their homes.”
According to the report card, this wastewater could create new
supplies equal to approximately 50 percent of our water
consumption.
The Southern California water supply is imported from a variety
of places, including sources in Sacramento and the Colorado River.
Agriculture uses 85 percent of that water, and another percentage
goes to preserve environmentally sensitive areas like Mono
Lake.
But consumers show an aversion to drinking recycled water,
preferring its bottled and sealed counterpart. Ironically, the
regulations on bottled water, according to Hartling, are much more
lax than those placed on tap water. Bottled water is not required
to meet the standards imposed on tap water by the State Health
Department.
“People seem to automatically think that because
it’s in a bottle and it’s got a fancy label on it,
it’s better than tap water.” Hartling said.
“Sometimes it may taste better, but it’s not
necessarily safer.”
In a survey, the IoE found that only 18 percent of respondents
would use reclaimed water for drinking, even after it was proven to
be as pure as the water that currently flows from the tap. On the
other hand, 91 percent wouldn’t mind using it to water
highway medians, and 85 percent would use it to wash their
cars.
The IoE and Los Angeles sanitation and water agencies declare
this is solely due to the public’s misconceptions of recycled
water. Residents of Southern California can’t afford to have
those misconceptions after receiving below average rainfall for the
past three years.
Several projects are being conducted by the Bureau of
Reclamation, a branch of the U.S. Department of Interior, to
increase the reclamation of water in California.
Among these are the West Basin Water Reclamation Project at the
Hyperion Wastewater Treatment Plant, which will ultimately recycle
70,000 acre-feet of water annually.
The East Valley Reclamation Project being constructed by the Los
Angeles Department of Water and Power will recycle 35,000 acre-feet
of water.
The numbers worsen with impending drought. Water runoff in
Sierra Nevada was about 45 percent to 80 percent below average this
past year.
In the event of a drought, water will be rationed and usage will
be necessarily cut back. The drought that lasted from 1981 to 1997
brought with it an increased interest in reclaimed water.
“I don’t think that people pay attention unless
there is some sort of a crisis,” Hartling said.
So far, this has proven to be true in Southern California.
“There is a lesson to be learned from the recent energy
crises,” wrote Stenstrom and Berk in the article.
“Water-reclamation plants take just as long to construct as
electricity-generating plants, and water is much less transportable
than electricity.”
The report card by the IoE brings to light that the greatest
barriers are still the public’s outlook and a lack of
awareness of this pressing issue.
“The time to drill a well is not when you’re
thirsty,” Hartling said. “Because then it’s too
late.”
Go to www.ioe.ucla.edu/publications/report02/RC02.pdf to view
the full Southern California Environmental Report Card.
