The Politics of Wastewater Reuse
In “Industrial Terroir Takes on the Yuck Factor” (Issues, Summer 2024), Christy Spackman describes clever attempts to overcome the prevailing challenge of public skepticism toward the prospect of potable water reuse.
The effects of infrastructure have long been recognized by urban historians as profound and path dependent, albeit indeterminate. In the case of water reuse, once the initial water and sewers systems are laid, the accompanying social, economic, and cultural institutions serve to entrench a commitment to waterborne sanitation systems materially, culturally, and politically. Thus, in the United States and elsewhere, the flush toilet and the treatment-based approach to managing water quality results in investment in water purification technologies and, ultimately, finding beneficial uses for wastewater. In this regard, the “treat, treat, and treat again” industrial terroir supports the reasonableness, acceptability, and inevitability of reusing wastewater for drinking water.
By adapting to existing infrastructure, including political commitment to flush toilets and the removal of pollutants via centralized wastewater treatment, engineers apply new tools and new procedures to move a finite amount of water through higher levels of treatment.
For boosters of potable water reuse, purity and security are key discursive concepts. At the molecular level, treatment processes remove all markers of “place” from water, but as soon as we change our scale, as Spackman does, we understand that urban drinking water is an intimate and embodied experience. Further, water is geopolitical. Water infrastructures are, in essence, social arrangements. The focus on the molecular scale provides little opportunity to consider the inevitable changes in social power that accompany this shift. Who gains, who suffers, and who pays for this change?
By adapting to existing infrastructure, including political commitment to flush toilets and the removal of pollutants via centralized wastewater treatment, engineers apply new tools and new procedures to move a finite amount of water through higher levels of treatment. As a result, highly treated wastewater is seen as a solution to many of the growing challenges of urban water scarcity in many regions. Although purported as radical reorganization of water governance (by Spackman and others), potable water reuse is an approach that minimally disrupts the fundamental infrastructure and inertia of large sociotechnical systems. In this case, innovative new technologies have been designed to retrofit and protect outdated infrastructures in a process the political scientist Langdon Winner described as “reverse adaptation.” This preference to adapt to the established infrastructure has meant that alternative means of managing human bodily wastes have never realistically been considered.
The universal ideal of modern sanitation is not complete, nor is it necessarily stable. Cities across the globe are facing serious water, energy, and transportation challenges. The prospect of potable water reuse offers a unique opportunity to make connections, discover alternatives, and acknowledge that urban transition is inevitable. Water development aimed at providing greater water security with the least social disruption over the short term may be a maladaptation. The question is not solely if the public will accept that potable water reuse can be done safely, but if reuse will lend itself to a sustainable and just transition at the city and regional scale.
Kerri Jean Ormerod
Associate Professor, Department of Geography
University of Nevada, Reno
In a seminal lecture in Dallas in 1984, which would later get published as H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness, the philosopher, priest, and social critic Ivan Illich argued for a separation of water and H20. The latter, a modernist creation, was “stuff” produced by an industrial society and circulated through pipelines to deodorize and sanitize urban space. Devoid of social and spiritual meaning, H20 was reduced to the odorless and tasteless substance we became familiar with in school textbooks, but perhaps rarely encountered in our everyday lives.
Christy Spackman makes it clear that the struggle between water and H20 continues to animate contemporary concerns around “scarcity” and “reuse.” The scientific and technological labor that transformed water into H20 involved a two-step process. The first required the material reconstruction of water by removing “undesirable” salts, metals, and minerals, and purifying it by adding chlorine (and in many parts of the world “fortifying” it with fluoride). The second step involved reworking the sensorial and social script around H20 and resocializing it into potable water.
The acceptability of direct potable reuse of wastewater has to negotiate this challenge of resocialization. Recycled wastewater has to regain its place in society. It has to shed the history of its recent defilement by illustrating that what is being used to produce beer is not just engineered H20, but potable water.
Technologies can materially reconstitute H20 in myriad ways and claim it to be “just straight water,” but to users water quality remains a product of history.
Matter constitutes memory in water—where it has been (place), for how long (time). When we add and subtract matter in water, we reconstitute its relation to place and time. One might assume that since modern (and secular) water emerges out of a continual process of addition and subtraction, it should not be difficult to convince users to drink recycled water. The “yuck” factor that Spackman describes contradicts that logic. Technologies can materially reconstitute H20 in myriad ways and claim it to be “just straight water,” but to users water quality remains a product of history. The engineer can erase the material history of water, but the user will remember its past relationships with place and time. This shows up in Spackman’s discussion of the humorous expression “poop beer,” which refers to beer made with recycled water. Resocializing H20 as water, therefore, requires not only reconstituting matter in water but also the users’ memory of that water.
The author’s lively essay illustrates the continued contest of competing imaginations around water in Arizona. I cannot but wonder as to how memories will be reconstituted in Flint, Michigan, or Jackson, Mississippi, where water has the color of lead and the odor of racism. As place forcefully asserts its presence in water in these sites, it reminds us that increasing demand for recycling wastewater for potable reuse will soon have to contend not only with matters of taste but also with concerns of justice.
Amitangshu Acharya
Lecturer, Water Governance
IHE Delft Institute for Water Education
The Netherlands