Texas is booming.
Our cities are growing, and the population is expected to almost double over the next
50 years.
The drought of 2011 has made Texans increasingly aware that we need to plan now to ensure plenty
of clean, safe drinking water for our future.
A growing trend to meet future water needs in Texas and throughout the world is for communities
to recycle their existing water supply.
For the Dallas-Fort Worth area, West Texas, and many other areas, water recycling is the
best option to provide a safe, drought-proof, cost-effective source of future drinking water.
There is no new water.
We're using the same water that's been here since the beginning of the earth, we just
recycle it through natural processes or man-made treatment.
School children learn that we humans today drink the same water the dinosaurs drink.
Natural processes filter and clean the earth's water, so too can humans.
The earth has the ability to biological treatment.
We can now mimic that inside of an engineered system and make it more compact and much faster.
Recycling begins with water that has been through a wastewater treatment plant, so it's
clean enough to be released into streams and rivers.
Recycled water is given additional treatment, either cleaned enough to put back into a city's
water supply lake, or in some cases purified sufficiently to be ready to drink.
Using water enough to put into a water supply lake involves removing nutrients that might
cause the lake to have algae blooms.
This can be done in a recycling facility that uses high-tech filters and other processes
designed to remove excess nutrients.
Another method uses special man-made wetlands, such as the beautiful East Fork Wetland at
the John Bunker Sands Wetland Center.
The East Fork Wetland project was designed to naturally filter water, native aquatic
plants that were planted in the wetland by hand.
Take out about 70% of nutrients, basically nitrogen, phosphorus, and ammonia.
The other part of the story is the bacteria that's hidden under the water surface.
The bacteria are actually using the waste products as their food as well, and that cleans
the water, the plants clean the water, and also the sunlight naturally filters the water
as well.
When reclaimed water is purified to safe drinking water standards and put directly back into
a city's water supply, it is called direct potable recycling.
Direct recycling utilizes two basic technologies, membrane filtration to remove bacteria and
viruses, and disinfection to kill any remaining organisms.
Membrane filtration, such as ultrafiltration and reverse osmosis, uses thousands of specially
designed membranes, often shaped like tiny straws.
Water is forced through microscopic pores into these straws, filtering out bacteria,
viruses, and other impurities.
Programming technology can produce an extremely high purity of water.
Disinfection consists of treating the water with ultraviolet light and other methods,
such as conventional chemicals to kill harmful organisms.
This combination of high-tech filters and disinfection can produce water so pure that
it can be put directly back into a city's water system.
The process is carefully monitored so it not only meets water quality standards, it exceeds
them.
I speak to groups of engineers, water operators, state regulatory agencies, CCPA, this is their
job to inspect water systems.
They didn't ask me about the safety of the water, it is very good and very safe.
We've had this technology for years, filtration, ultrafiltration, and reverse osmosis.
Those are the same things in the bottle water factories.
In order to ensure safety, water recycling facilities are required to both filter and
disinfect the water multiple times to produce water that is cleaner than most of what we
drink today.
This is referred to as using multiple barriers.
The real key is multiple barriers so that if there was some type of upset in one barrier
that you have these backup barriers, that's the key to having an exemplary safety record.
Additional technologies are emerging to facilitate water recycling.
Among them, ozone BAF, forward osmosis, and underground storage in aquifers.
The benefits of all methods of water recycling are far-reaching.
In many cases, water recycling is the lowest-cost source of additional water supply.
It eliminates the substantial cost of building new reservoirs and limits the distance water
must be piped.
Recycling also avoids the added water loss due to evaporation from a new reservoir.
Recycling has a much smaller environmental impact than building new reservoirs by avoiding
the need to flood productive agricultural land or wildlife habitats.
Advanced purification facilities using membrane filtration can be added onto existing wastewater
treatment plants, offering substantial cost savings and impacting only a few acres.
Large filtration sites also use less land than building new reservoirs.
For example, the East Fork Wetland covers 1,800 acres, yet it produces almost the same
amount of water as Lake Levant, which occupies 25,000 acres.
Another important part about this wetland, we're basically designed something that is
not only helping us, but I mean, you hear the wildlife around us, it's amazing.
We have 254 different bird species that we've seen, we have river otter that walk on the
boardwalk that we're on, bobcats that rest on the rail, multitude of amphibians.
We're helping nature to help man.
Water recycling gives cities the ability to efficiently reuse the water they already own.
Numerous studies predict drier times ahead and an increased probability of droughts lasting
a decade or more.
Water recycling is drought proof.
It takes the water that is already developed by our communities and purifies it so that
it can be safely reused again and again.
When the time comes for your city to decide on a new water supply option, consider the
benefits of water recycling.
Then choose a source that is safe, cost-effective, and drought-proof.
Thank you.
