Recycled Water

[donaldsc]

There was a post on the First Time Cruisers board about whether ship water was recycled water. I responded with a long post on water quality and recycled water. Since not everyone reads the New Cruiser board, I thought that it would be useful to repost it here.

 

Let me tell you a story about city recycled water. I live in Las Vegas which like many cities in the Southwest is dependent upon Colorado River water. The allotment of water between the states is determined by an agreement which was first done in the 1920's although it has been modified at least once since.

 

When the agreement was first worked out, the population of Las Vegas was about 10 (actually more like a couple of thousand) so we were not allotted much water. As I said, the agreement was recently redone but we still are not allotted enough water. All of the other cities that use Colorado River water have the same problem - not enough.

 

Compared to many of the other rivers in the United States, the Colorado is a small river. The most recent data for the Colorado River flow through the Grand Canyon is about 10,000 cubic feet per second. The flow rate for the Columbia River is about 264,000 cubic feet per second - 26 times the flow rate of the Colorado. The Mississippi River flows at at 593,000 cubic feet per second - 59 times the flow rate of the Colorado.

 

So all of us do recycling to get recycling credits. This means that if we, for example, are allotted 1,000,000 gallons of water and we return 800,000 gallons back into the river, we get recycle credits of 800,000 gallons and we to use 1,800,000 gallons instead of our allotted 1,000,000 gallons.

 

Guess where this recycled water comes from. It comes from lawn runoff. It comes from the water that goes down your sink. It comes from water that goes down your shower. It even comes from water that goes down your toilet.

 

I managed the wastewater treatment plant lab in Clark County, Las Vegas and one of the responsibilities of our lab was to ensure that the quality of the water we put back into the river met required EPA standards which it always did, even though some of it came from the maybe 1,000,000 toilets in Las Vegas. The water was totally drinkable.

 

The bottom line is that by the time the water got to Los Angeles, some of it had passed through toilets in every upstream city. Even though I knew that the water we discharged was totally safe, I always enjoyed the fact that the eco-freaks in California were drinking at least a little my toilet water.

 

I can assure you that water on a ship is not recycled. There is no reason to do it as there is lots of water in the ocean outside of the ship and enough available energy on the ship to desalinate or distill it to convert it to better potable water than you get out of your faucet at home. What the ships do with gray water or black water is to clean it up so it meets environmental standards and then dump the water back into the ocean at a sufficient distance off shore. The dilution factor takes care of any problems considering that the Atlantic Ocean contains about 17,543,940,979,332,434 gallons of water.

 

You may not like the taste of the water on the ship - that is a different issue as waters in different cities taste different because of low levels of inorganic impurities. New York City water is one of the best tasting big city waters in the country. Las Vegas water does not taste as good because of the higher but legal levels of TDS in the water.

 

Bottom line - the water you get on the ship is better than the water that comes out of your faucet at home unless you have an expensive RO and filtering system for your home water.

 

BTW - three guesses where the bottled water you buy comes from unless you buy the more expensive spring water. It comes directly from your city water and is purified by RO and ion exchange and then minerals are added to improve the taste. As this reference - http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2009/07...p-g-33331.html - indicates, the bottled water industry works under lower level of federal regulation than does your city water system. We got regularly inspected to ensure that our water met regulations and that we were following the approved federal analytical protocols. We got test samples that we had to analyze on a quarterly basis to prove that we were capable of performing good analyses. Although I as lab manager knew which samples were our federal audit samples, they were given to my staff as blind samples so they were treated and analyzed in exactly the same manner as the rest of the samples we ran. We were required by federal law to report ANY test results that were outside limits to our local EPA office. Our lab was certified. We reported the results of our tests to our business and home customers regularly. You may prefer the taste of bottled water but you have no guarantee that it was as clean and contaminant free as the water we supplied you at a much lower cost.

 

I will now get off my soap box.

 

DON

[EdmPair]

Thanks for the info. I think I knew the general idea of this but not the numbers. The Big Muddy is huge compared to what LV has to cope with.

[cb at sea]

Guess what? EVERY drop of water on earth is "recycled"! There is no "new" water being produced....rain comes from evaporated rain/ground water. It runs into the rivers which we use to drink and water lawns and flush....the remnants are put back into the river, which runs to the seas...and it evaporates and rains on us again.....over and over and over. Every drop of water we have today has been used MILLIONS and MILLIONS of times before.

 

Yep...even that expensive bottled water has been used before!

Edited June 28, 2014 by cb at sea

[navybankerteacher]

Guess what? EVERY drop of water on earth is "recycled"! There is no "new" water being produced....rain comes from evaporated rain/ground water. It runs into the rivers which we use to drink and water lawns and flush....the remnants are put back into the river, which runs to the seas...and it evaporates and rains on us again.....over and over and over. Every drop of water we have today has been used MILLIONS and MILLIONS of times before.

 

Yep...even that expensive bottled water has been used before!

 

Yes, but there is at least a strong psychological perception difference between water recycled by the process of evaporation into the atmosphere followed by condensation as rain and by the process of filtering water from someone else's toilet.

 

Referring to a "drop" of water is appropriate to the result of re-cycling - but not in the context of evaporation and condensation as rain - there the unit is a molecule of water.

 

Additionally, there are some impurities, such as estrogen-like compounds which cannot be removed by even the most sophisticated filtration plant.

[donaldsc]

 

Additionally, there are some impurities, such as estrogen-like compounds which cannot be removed by even the most sophisticated filtration plant.

 

Not true. While you may not be able top get rid of some organics by filtration, there are expensive options that get rid of pretty much everything.

 

Check this out

 

http://www.thermoscientific.com/en/product/barnstead-genpure-xcad-plus.html

 

or this

 

http://www.elgalabwater.com/water-quality-en.html?gclid=CjgKEAjwz7mdBRDS46_ipNqqsEQSJAC4rrGk9r3L704Xg-NNoIaI65jAIHZJ6F7OJrGMPU6otMUlm_D_BwE

 

DON

Edited June 28, 2014 by donaldsc

[YubaSutter]

In the county where I once lived, they tried to establish a gray water filtration system. It did not proceed when the residents started to call it the crap to tap program.

[navybankerteacher]

Not true. While you may not be able top get rid of some organics by filtration, there are expensive options that get rid of pretty much everything.

 

 

 

DON

 

We are discussing the difference between recycled water as provided by municipal and other utilities and rain-sourced reservoir or deep well water. I am sure there are "expensive options that get rid of pretty much everything" - but do municipal plants opt for expensive options?

 

Anyway, rain-sourced has to be a lot closer to pure (essentially distilled) water than what emerges from municipal recycling.

 

I'm sure that with continued population growth more and more of our public supply will ultimately have to be recycled - but for the time being, in the rain rich northeast we are not yet being served other people's pass through.

[CPT Trips]

What do the Astronauts mix with their Tang on the ISS?

 

Crap to tap ;). Reminds me of when a big ski resort expanded their snowmaking system . . . The affluent skied on the effluent.

[navybankerteacher]

What do the Astronauts mix with their Tang on the ISS?

 

Crap to tap ;). Reminds me of when a big ski resort expanded their snowmaking system . . . The affluent skied on the effluent.

 

At least the astronauts get either distilled water or water regenerated on a molecular level. Both very different processes from the filtration performed by municipal water and sewer departments.

[boogs]

At least the astronauts get either distilled water or water regenerated on a molecular level. Both very different processes from the filtration performed by municipal water and sewer departments.

 

Every drop of water, every bead of sweat, every ounce of urine is recycled on board the space station. Water is heavy and expensive to launch into orbit. Astronauts have been recycling their waste water since 2010, now using about 93% of their waste water from all available sources.

 

http://www.universetoday.com/101775/an-inside-look-at-the-waterurine-recycling-system-on-the-space-station/

 

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=4858780

Edited June 28, 2014 by boogs

[EdmPair]

It is not just the water. Remember Carl Sagan pointed out we are made of star stuff. All the atoms heavier than about lithium are made in stars and only escape when that star blows apart in a nova. The gas cloud then condenses back to planets and here we are.

 

If you take up the science, water is firstly made biologically clean. This is the stage it can not cause disease as any virus, bacteria or protozoa is killed even if not removed. Water is then 'safe' to drink but except for some survivalists including military personnel drink this kind of water. It is often far from appetizing but is safe. (I tried some once. Yuck with a capital YUCK.)

 

Most of the posters here want chemically pure which you get by distillation (or even evaporators which do the same thing) or reverse osmosis (RO). Both take real energy and only evaporators can keep up with the needs of a cruise ship. The process is so good you have to add back salts after to get the taste people want. Alas, it is not the balance of salts you have at home so it does taste different.

 

As has been said, cruise ships pull in ocean water to evaporate to get new water instead of using the grey water stream. I suspect this is as much for public relations issues as plumbing issues.

 

My 3 cents Canadian,

M