Singapore Water
Why, you ask, would an island with two monsoon seasons and two pre-monsoon rainy seasons per year need to recycle its water?
Because of a drought in 1967, or thereabouts, and the threat that it could always happen again.
Singapore uses a lot of water for both chip manufacturing (silicon chips, not potato) and general cleanliness. Until fairly recently most water was piped in from Malaysia. But Malaysian water supplies are not always reliable – what if the Malaysians want to keep their water for themselves? Not to mention the possibility that Malaysia could have a drought of its own. So Singapore has a several-pronged plan of attack to try to attain water self-sufficiency: reservoirs, recycling, and desalinization.
We went to the Marina Barrage, a neat big eco-building and park built at the terminus of the Singapore downtown marina, which now has a sea wall and is a gigantic reservoir. The Barrage has solar panels, grass roofs, and many many sprinklers and water features and pools to play in, which is really what you need in this climate. More reservoirs are under construction, and the plan is that eventually Singapore’s land area will be 2/3 reservoirs (leaving less land for buildings, which here are vertical rather than horizontal, and go underground for 3-4 floors as a matter of course). These are mostly rain catchment areas, but they also contain 2% recycled water.
The recycled water has its own brand, New Water. There are four New Water plants, and This being Singapore one of them is also a very nice visitor center, with fountains, water gardens and water sculptures galore, and free tours, which you can get to via a free shuttle bus from the MRT station. You go for the tour and see a lot of nice videos of important people from the U. N., U.S. universities and the Eurozone congratulating Singapore on its wisdom in recycling water. The water is microfiltered and subjected to reverse osmosis through screens with openings about .0001 microns in size (if I recall; I may be off by a decimal point), enough to stop all bacteria and viruses. Then it’s conditioned to a PH of 7 exactly, for use in the chemical and silicon businesses, where most of it goes. The rest goes to the reservoirs and into bottles distributed to the tourists by the New Water staff. They claim to have been drinking it happily for 5 years, since New Water opened, and not to be dead yet. And they stress several times in their presentation that we’re drinking water recycled from the age of the dinosaurs and before.
So they sneak it into the reservoirs and everyone gets to drink it without knowing! Apparently there’s a huge psychological barrier preventing most Singaporeans from trusting recycled water, and of course they’re not alone. (Although I have to say I have yet to hear of Singaporean nutcases who object to flouridation on the grounds that the government is trying to drug everyone into zombielike acquiescence. Of course that may only be because I can’t read the Chinese newspapers.) But it tasted fine to me, and I’m not dead yet, either. So here’s hoping that this example of actual public policy overcomes people’s initial resistance. And maybe finds some emulators in certain large, populous western United States we could mention.