California has 38 million people,
Who Shit about once per day,
And piss about 5 times per day.
If you go super conservative and say each of these people is flushing 6 gallons of drinkable water per day you are looking at 228,000,000 million gallons of water per day.
in a month thats 6,840,000,000 (Note thats Billions) gallons and over the course of a year it adds up to 83,220,000,000 billion gallons of water.
Did I just solve Cali’s drought? I kid to some extent. there are obvious issues with disposing of that waste in other ways, but there ARE other ways. Why the hell not seriously explore this? Humanure as compost, as fuel, think of all the arts and crafts you could make with it?
I think we use this system because its the system that is already in place, if you told someone from a poor country that in the midst of a massive multi-year drought that Californians are flushing over 80 billion gallons of drinkable water they would look at you like you are insane.
This is one good idea. It’s a damn shame we’re flushing all that lovely phosphorus out to sea, when our fields need it.
Another very good idea is recycling much of the water, at very least into “grey-water” systems, to be re-used for irrigation.
Ideally, we’d recycle all the way, in what is unpleasantly known as “Toilet to Tap.” We will eventually have to go that way, not so much because of the drought, but because of expanding water demands.
But, yes, definitely, recapturing the nutrients from our effluent is just plain good sense.
If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down.
I just solved 5/6 of the problem.
But, as noted in other threads on this subject, agriculture uses 80% of the water in CA. Any solution that does not involve conservation efforts by farmers is not really a solution at all. The 80-20 rule is useful. The 20-80 rule… not so much.
That’s true…but kind of facile. It’s like saying there’s no problem with world hunger, just a shortage of energy. Literally, yes, quite true, but misleading.
Sure, we could tow icebergs from Antarctica, or desalinate sea-water (which, by the way, we are certainly doing here in California; new facilities are being built.)
But recycling can accomplish much of the same benefit at far less energy cost.
Desalination instead of recycling is a little like using a gasoline-driven leaf-blower instead of a push-broom.
It most definitely does not need someone with a degree to handle it. For centuries in Europe and thousands of years in China human waste was a valuable resource in farming. And comparing California to a poor part of anywhere is not a comparison at all.
80 billion is a highly conservative number. Regardless of where that water comes from I am having some difficulty imagining that that much water would not make a significant difference in the situation there.
There are a few CA municipalities that reclaim sewage water and reuse it, and there are a number of plants being built across the state to increase that capacity. My guess is that within the next twenty years, most major cities in the state will be reclaiming most of their sewage water.
As for reusing the actual waste, there are also plants in CA to do that as well. For example, take the Hyperion Plant in Los Angeles:
This is more about your imagination than anything else. 80 billion sounds like a big number, but it may not be.
If agriculture uses 80% of the water, only 20% is non-ag. Of that 20%, maybe half is industrial, which leaves us 10%. Of that 10%, maybe a quarter or a third is toilet based usage, the remainder being cooking/cleaning/drinking/showers/baths/etc. Which means, at best, you’re fixing maybe 3% of California’s water usage, with a price tag based on whatever methodology you come up with to dispose of this waste. Waste, mind you, that has been the cause of much disease and suffering in days prior to modern sanitation.
I have an aerobic septic system that treats my poop etc on site and sprays the treated effluent out onto my trees and grass. Have to have solids pumped every three-four years. My water utility actually treats sewage and uses it for about 20% of the drinking water supply. Guess the joke’s on me.
What if new house construction included a tax credit for installing a urinal in the bathroom? For homes with at least one male, that could save multiple gallons per day. There’s some reluctance, no doubt, to moving a fixture most associated with public bathrooms into a private residence, but if I was paying for water, I’d consider it.
what would be the downside to pumping all the coastal cities’ sewage into artificially created wetlands in the California desert? The sewage slowly trickling down to become clean and replenish the groundwater.
CA uses about 43 million acre-feet of water per year. 83 billion gallons is about 250,000 acre-feet. So about 0.6%. Not totally trivial, but there are much easier efficiency gains to be had (involving agriculture).
