St. George • If Washington County residents want to know what’s on tap to shore up the drought-prone area’s water supply, they need look no further than their bathtub, dishwasher, kitchen sink – and yes, their toilet.
That’s because Washington County water managers’ plans extend to turning treated sewage, which includes wastewater from toilets, into drinking water – eventually.
“You will see that in the next 15 to 20 years,” Washington County Water Conservancy District manager Zach Renstrom said about its plan for a regional water purification system. “You are going to start seeing that all over the western United States.”
To keep pace with growth, the 20-year master plan Washington County Water Conservancy District unveiled in July 2023 calls for constructing a $1 billion regional reuse system that will eventually include a facility to treat and convert sewage into clean drinking water.
The system is a key component in the district’s goal to secure another 47,000 acre-feet of water by 2042. An acre-foot of water is approximately 326,000 gallons, which is about how much water two households use in a year. Thus far, the district says it has secured more than $250 million in funding for the project.
While the district’s plan to treat wastewater is nothing new, environmental journalist Peter Annin’s presentation in St. George earlier this month has brought the topic to the surface. He noted that water insecurity is a growing problem across the country and is especially acute in the Colorado River watershed, which is struggling amid more than two decades of drought and chronic overuse.
Dead pool a ‘triple whammy’
Reduced Colorado River flows due to climate change and increased demand from rapid population growth have caused water levels at Lake Mead and Lake Powell – the nation’s two largest reservoirs – to fall dramatically. That has raised fears of the reservoirs potentially reaching dead pool, or the point in which water can no longer pass through their dams and flow downstream.
If the Hoover Dam reaches dead pool, it would negatively impact 1.3 million people in Nevada, Arizona and California who rely on the hydropower it produces. It would dry up millions of acres of farmland in the lower basin of the Colorado River.
“So, if the dead pool ever arrives at the Hoover Dam, it will be a triple whammy–water, power and food emergency–the likes of which the United States has never seen,” Annin wrote in “Purified,” his book about the advances in water recycling.
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) A bathtub ring, marking previous water levels, is visible at Lake Powell near Ticaboo on Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2023.
In Washington County, which is currently experiencing extreme drought, water officials have long banked on the construction of the Lake Powell Pipeline, which was projected to bring more than 27 billion gallons a year to the area to meet the area’s fast-growing population. But with the Colorado River’s water woes, combined with the fact that Lake Powell stands at 33% of capacity, the pipeline increasingly seems like a pipe dream for the foreseeable solution.
Annin, director of the Mary Griggs Burke Center for Freshwater Innovation at Wisconsin’s Northland College, said that leaves water-stressed areas like Washington County with two options: desalination, which is expensive, and water reuse. “I would argue that water recycling is the more sustainable of those two options,” he told listeners who packed the St. George Children’s Museum on Feb. 13 to listen to his presentation, which was hosted by Conserve Southwest Utah.
The ‘ick’ factor
Still, Annin and district officials concede, wastewater recycling has sometimes been a tough sell. That was the case in 1997 when San Diego scrapped a $152 million effort to add purified sewage to its supply of drinking water due to bad publicity and public outcry.
At first, Annin said, the effort seemed to be going swimmingly well. But that imploded when a graphic explaining the system was published in the San Diego Union-Tribune that was headlined “from toilet to tap.”
Soon afterward, he added, the online news source “Voice of San Diego” sponsored a contest to see who could come up with the funniest name for water recycling. To inspire greater audience participation, Annin said the publication proffered a few examples: “feces to faucet,” “sewage to spigot” and “backside to frontside.”
“During the next 24 hours, a slew of sophomoric suggestions poured in,” Annin wrote in ‘Purified,’ including ‘poop to soup,’ ‘toilet bowl to pie hole,’ ‘fecal sequel’ and ‘quench with stench.’ And the winner was … ‘asses to glasses.’"
Orange County officials did not want the same public relations nightmare when they were investing $352 million in the 1990s for a major upgrade to their water recycling program. To avoid similar miscues, they hired Ron Wildermuth, the lead communication officer for Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf during Operation Desert Storm, to run an aggressive public relations campaign.
(Stuart Palley | The New York Times) A water holding tank at Orange County's reverse osmosis water purification plant, which recycles wastewater that is then sent underground to help replenish the area's aquifers, in Fountain Valley, Calif., April 15, 2015.
Wildermuth’s proactive approach worked. Orange County currently recycles 100% of its sewage effluent and converts it into drinking water, making it a global model for water recycling, according to Annin.
Today sewage recycling programs are cropping up throughout the country – from California to Virginia and many states in between, even surfacing once again in San Diego. Generally speaking, recycling programs come in two categories, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Indirect potable water-reuse systems like the ones in Orange County and Las Vegas, use an environmental buffer like a lake, river or aquifer to store and further clean treated water before it is withdrawn and retreated before being distributed to taps. Direct water-reuse systems – like Pure Water Southern California which is gearing up to produce 150 million gallons of purified water per day – skip the environmental buffer by treating the water and distributing it directly to consumers.
Learning from Las Vegas
Las Vegas uses its indirect system to recycle Lake Mead water. Annin said the saying in Nevada’s entertainment capital is “99% of any water that hits a drain in Las Vegas gets recycled.” Moreover, he added the recycled wastewater is cleaner and often tastes better than the potable water many municipalities pull from aquifers or bodies of water.
Southern Nevada Water Authority spokesman Bronson Mack said its member agencies treat roughly 200 million gallons of water each day that get distributed to Las Vegas Wash, which acts as an environmental buffer that further cleans the water before it is returned to Lake Mead.
Las Vegas can only access 300,000 acre-feet per year of Colorado River water from Lake Mead, about 1.8% of the river’s total yearly allotments and the smallest slice of the pie allocated to Colorado River Basin states. By treating and recycling the water that is used for showers, toilets and laundry and sending it back to the Colorado River, Mack explained, the district is able to use more than its annual share.
“The fact that we recycle all of our indoor water use and are so water-efficient is a point of pride for most southern Nevadans,” Mack said.
(Christopher Cherrington | The Salt Lake Tribune)
When Washington County starts recycling sewage and turning it into drinking water, district officials say its system will likely be an indirect model similar to the ones in Las Vegas or Orange County. That system, Annin explained, typically involves treating wastewater with microfiltration to remove harmful bacteria, protozoa and viruses. The water is then deep-cleaned by reverse osmosis to remove pharmaceuticals, pesticides and viruses that microfiltration might have missed.
At that point, the water undergoes ultraviolet disinfection and ends up in storage tanks before it is injected into an environmental buffer like the ground or in reservoirs for at least six months before it is drawn, treated again and delivered to taps in homes and businesses.
Washington County’s treated wastewater, district officials attest, will meet or exceed government drinking water standards.
“This purified water will be stored in our local drinking water reservoirs,” district spokesperson Karry Rathje said. “When needed, the water from the reservoirs will run through the drinking water treatment plant before it is delivered as potable (drinking) water to our municipal customers.”
District officials say county residents have done such a good job conserving water that the reuse facility likely won’t be needed for another 15 years. Since the launch of the county’s Water Efficient Landscape Program in December 2022, residents have replaced over 2 million square feet of grass with more water-efficient landscaping.
Is it safe to drink?
Whenever the county’s indirect potable reuse system arrives in the St. George area, Santa Clara resident Brian Hilts will welcome it without any qualms or hesitation.
“As a professional engineer in the water reclamation industry with over 25 years experience,” Hilts said, “I can tell you that water recycling/water reuse is a scientifically sound and proven process and that it is a necessity for communities in water-scarce areas like ours.”
As for the “ick factor,” Ivins resident Wayne Pennington said most Americans have already drank purified wastewater in their travels to other cities and towns without realizing it. Besides, he added, Washington County’s current drinking water, which is hard and often contains arsenic, is not great.
“The Washington County Water Conservancy District does a terrific job of bringing that water up to at least the required standards, but most households still install water softeners, and many also use under-the-sink reverse osmosis,” said Pennington, a geophysicist and retired dean of engineering at Michigan Technological University.
“After that in-home treatment, [customers’] water is almost as good as it would be if the water district purified our own wastewater and put that in our culinary supply,” he added. “That is, our culinary water would be much better if it were obtained from wastewater processed to the standards that other communities are already using.”
