PHOENIX — It’s been discussed and debated for decades.
But Arizona is finally at the point where cities and utilities will soon be able to get permits to deliver drinking water to faucets that just days earlier had been flushed down the toilet.
The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality on Monday took the required legal steps to publish the draft rules for what it’s calling “advanced water purification.” Randall Matas, the agency’s deputy director, said final approval could come by the end of the year, paving the way for water suppliers to construct the facilities.
Matas said the technology is good enough to actually produce water that is purer than treated groundwater or surface water now being delivered. He said it even removes chemicals that are not prohibited by the Safe Water Drinking Act.
But the question remains of whether Arizonans will accept it.
Put simply, there is a bit of an “ick factor” that, regardless of what people may understand about the chemistry and the process, may still seem to some as “toilet to tap.”
DEQ and even the state Department of Water Resources has worked for years to tamp down that phrase.
Still, it has been a process.
For some time it was being promoted by the more sanitized name of “direct potable reuse.”
Matas said rebranding it as advanced water purification was based, at least in part, on testing what is acceptable to consumers. But that, he said, is just a small part of the story.
“The main reason for the change is it just more accurately reflects what this purified water is,” Matas explained. He said that words like “re-use” and “recycling” have “meanings that don’t provide an insight into what’s happening.”
“We felt that ‘advanced water purification’ was a better description of what this is, that there’s an advanced treatment stream that purifies this water and provides that safe and healthy drinking water,” Matas said.
Yet, even with all that, there is not universal acceptance.
“ADEQ did two studies statewide to assess people’s thoughts on advanced water purification, water security and other issues,” he said. The result, said Matas, is 77% of those who answered the surveys were “not opposed to the technology or were in favor of the technology.”
Still, when asked whether they would be likely to drink AWP water, the feelings were divided.
A third said very likely. But 42% said “somewhat likely,” with 15% falling into the “somewhat unlikely” category and 10% saying there were unlikely to drink it at all.
Among those who fall into the unlikely category, 38% said they were skeptical about safety.
Matas said he believes some of that can be addressed by showing how the standards are being adopted can remove, in his words, 99.9999999999% of contaminants. He said that includes things ranging from viruses and opiates to antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Troy Hayes, water services director for the city of Phoenix, said it’s a question of education and socialization.
He said his city is revamping its Cave Creek treatment facility to meet the new standards. Once that happens, Hayes said, he envisions giving people tours to see what happens, show them it can treat water beyond what is now being delivered to homes from the Salt and Verde river systems — and taste the results.
Scottsdale already is doing that, with a plant that is treating sewage to drinking water standards. While that’s not yet being put into the pipes going to people’s homes — the city still needs a DEQ permit to do that — Scottsdale is showing off what can be produced by working with local breweries to produce beer.
And there’s something else: Educating consumers to understand they already are drinking recycled water.
“There isn’t new water on the planet,” Hayes said, saying it’s the same water that was around at the time of the dinosaurs.
The difference is that sewage is being put into the ground and then being filtered, as it were, through layers of rock and soil, only to be pumped out at some future point. This just replaces that natural process with technology and filters.
Even if people understand that intellectually, that doesn’t overcome opposition: Nearly one in five of those who told DEQ they were unlikely to drink AWP water cited what the survey said was the “yuck factor.”
There is another concern: Cost of all this technology that eventually will have to be passed on to consumers. None of this extra level of processing sewage is likely to come cheap.
“It will depend a lot on the specific utility,” Matas said.
“There is an economy-of-scale factor that is at play,” he said. “The more water you can get treated, the more efficient the process is.”
There’s also the fact DEQ is not telling utilities exactly what they need to build. Instead, the agency simply has detailed what has to come out at the other end to be used for drinking.
“We have written the rules in a way that it applies standards,” Matas said.
“It allows innovation in the actual treatment equipment utilized,” he continued. And as certain technologies become more popular, Matas expects the cost to come down.
Hayes said that, whatever the additional cost, it has to be seen through a different lens: There aren’t a lot of other options. And it starts with water from the Colorado River being “unreliable.”
“It’s completely over allocated, meaning that there is more legal demand on the system than there is physically coming down the river,” Hayes said, leaving desert cities like his with the threat of having to replace 40% of its drinking water. While costs will go up “it may be difficult to put a value on not having water, versus having these resources.”
Yet AWP could prove more efficient in the end that an alternative that had been pushed by former Gov. Doug Ducey: desalinating water from the Sea of Cortez.
Tom Buschatzke, director of the Department of Water Resources, had pegged construction costs at about $3 billion. And the cost of delivering water would approach $2,500 an acre-foot, the amount of water that, depending on usage, is needed to serve from two to four single-family homes.
That could make the cost of purified sewage a lot less than a possible $1,200 water bill per house for treated seawater.