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and the city's mayor criticized the idea of adding recycled sewage to the city's water sup-
ply as too costly and an unnecessary risk to public health.
Inveighing against the “toilet-to-tap boondoggle,” opponents labeled recycled sewage
“an option of last resort” because “many uncertainties are associated with assessing the
potential health risks of drinking reclaimed water.”
Daniel Okun , distinguished professor of environmental engineering at the
University of North Carolina, told the NewYorkTimesMagazinethat treated sewage
water “may contain trace elements of contaminants. Reverse osmosis [filtering] and UV
disinfection are very good, but there are still uncertainties.” Mary Quartiano, a spokes-
woman for the Revolting Grandmas, a San Diego civic group, said she opposed the plan
because “I just look at what goes down my toilet.”
San Diego imports about 85 percent of its water. In 1999, and again in 2007, the
City Council promoted a $200 million sewage-reclamation project that would produce
21.2 million gallons of water a day. The city's two relatively new treatment plants (which
already transform wastewater into recycled water for irrigation and industrial use) work
at only one-quarter of their capacity and could easily produce potable water. While the
plan made sense on paper, public aversion to toilet-to-tap water overwhelmed the tech-
nical, fiscal, and environmental virtues of the initiative.
In 2007, when Bruce Henderson , a former city councilman, described water reclam-
ation as a form of “economic racism” that “the affluent … can opt out of. They can just
drink bottled water,” the initiative was killed.
In 2000, a similar public outcry forced Los Angeles to abandon a $55 million project
that would have provided enough water for 120,000 homes.
But David Spath , who once headed the California health department's drinking-wa-
ter division, said that while some concerns about using reclaimed water are legitim-
ate—treatment equipment can malfunction, for instance—the risks are “no greater, and
probably in some cases better, than in what people may be drinking from river systems
around the country.” Most California environmentalists, such as the San Diego Coast-
keeper, support the initiative. City planners have noted that in the long run, toilet-to-tap
water is going to be cheaper and have a smaller carbon footprint than pumping water
from hundreds of miles away.
THE TEST CASE
Orange County managed to avoid the yuck-factor trap by conducting extensive public
outreach—“a battle for minds”—before proposing its enhanced reclaimed-water system
on the grounds of Water Factory 21. The mission was led by Ron Wildermuth, a retired
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