It looks like a normal glass of water. It’s clear, cold and tasteless. But just a few hours ago, it was raw sewage. That water is the end product of a process and technology known as water recycling.
PHEONIX — It looks like a normal glass of water. It’s clear, cold and tasteless. But just a few hours ago, it was raw sewage.
The process is expensive, and the new standards are stringent. But for growing cities with limited water, the opportunity to squeeze every last drop out of that finite supply is an attractive proposition. Castle Rock approved a proposal to double the size of its water treatment plant and possibly allow for direct potable reuse. Marlowe said construction costs would be upwards of $60 million.
Ingels said there aren’t any Colorado cities currently using direct potable reuse, but there could be “anywhere from three to several dozen” with such systems down the road. Castle Rock plans to get a system online in three to five years. Landon, the community education specialist for Colorado Springs Utilities, roamed the area showing people how direct potable reuse works. She took a demonstration trailer rigged with pipes, pumps and filters around Colorado Springs for four months and saw plenty of raised eyebrows.
The key, she said, was twofold. The first was all about semantics. Before she could convince people to drink treated wastewater, she had to figure out what to call it, which led to “several sleepless nights.”“When we ran that by our customers they were like, ‘Yeah, we don’t really know what that means. Just as a layperson, what is advanced purified water? That sounds a little fishy. What is it really?’” Landon said.
Landon said the “full transparency” approach was the right choice for Colorado Springs. Their efforts were aided, she said by the city’s large military population. Some who had served overseas had already lived in places where similar systems are fully operational. Pochiraju and other experts agree: The efficacy of direct potable reuse is not up for debate. The science supports it as completely safe for those who drink it.
The rules that govern how the river is shared were written in 1922, when water was more abundant, and recent changes to the rules have done little to bridge the gap between supply and demand. The current rules expire in 2026, and the region’s top water policy makers are fighting over how to rewrite them before then.
The facility’s operators have set up a demonstration site at a sewage treatment plant to convince policymakers and the public that the project is worth supporting. So far, it seems to be working.
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