They are talking about recycling sewage water in Australia. Many Australian's I know are a bit stand off-ish about the issue. What is your opinion, should we drink it?
probably not, because they'll likely use ten times the amount of chemicals to sterilize it. if you don't have any problem with profuse amounts of chemicals in your drinking water however, I'd say go for it, sounds like a good way to be saving water, which is quickly turning into a precious resource.
think about this: if you live in a river used for waterand you are not at the very mouth of it, you ARE drinking recycled water. There are very efficient and clean ways to get water ready for "retreatment" (whatever the system does with raw water) from muliple chamber digesters with wetlands attatched, to electrocharging (using silver, the name of the process escapes me) to simple treatment discharge into a (live, active ) lake (with plants) and reuse later.
do not listen to people who say there will be more chemicals in it. Like drumminmama says there are many different ways of recycling water. Alot of it is just filtration. even when they do add chemicals to it to clean it it is very simple to take those chemicals out. If there is water in something then you can take that pure water out of it. I am a chemists and actually water is what I work with the most, not recycling it but I do study it alot. drinking recycled sewer water is more of a phycological thing which is why it scares people. This is very simple solution to get around this. where I live all the drinking water goes to everything, but we should have separate pipes with different water going to different things, have the recycled sewer water going back into toilets or gardens instead of drinking it. Australia is doing some very interesting things with water right now. I just went to a lecture from Australia's top water expert (I cant remember his name) he talked about using rain water and recycled water.
my theory is that every household in Australia should have a HUGE tank full of water in the backyard. then we wouldnt need to worry so much about things like trickle fee and recycled sweage water n everything
Sewage treatment and recylcling is standard in the US, has been for years. In metropolitan areas it is standard for most individuals to contract for fresh water delivery for drinking, because the tap water is so vile after treatment. Technically it's safe, but if you've ever tried to make ice tea or anything else with it the after taste is obvious.
