Southern California is in trouble. There's not nearly enough water to go around. Even though the region sits right by the Pacific Ocean, turning that ocean water into something usable costs way too much.
Meanwhile, the entire area sends 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater out to sea every day. you One place has a solution for both of those problems. This is a gigantic scientific instrument. It's a manufacturing plant that manufactures drinking water on a massive scale. Six miles from the shore of the Pacific is Orange County's groundwater replenishment system, a half-billion-dollar facility that takes water run down the drain or flows into the water.
flush down a toilet, cleans it, distills it, and returns it to the local water supply. The project today produces 70 million gallons a day of crystal clear, fresh drinking water that we serve to the 2.4 million people in Orange County. Orange County didn't choose to recycle its wastewater because it seemed like a neat idea.
It did it because it had to. Orange County Water District was formed about 80 years ago. There was 36,000 people here then. Today there are about 3 million. Something has to give, either more conservation, less usage, or that in combination with what we're trying to do is find another source of water.
That new source, wastewater, goes through a battery of filters and purifiers to remove anything that isn't hydrogen or oxygen. The first step is called microfiltration. So they act like a straw in the respect that they're there to pull or suck the water out of the individual basins that we see, but strain it through a hole that's small enough so that we can remove the larger particles. Those holes are about two microns in size, or about 1,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair.
After microfiltration, the water is filtered again using reverse osmosis. take the water and force it through a solid plastic membrane at the molecular level such that bacteria, viruses, chemicals are all left behind. And the only thing that's able to penetrate that solid plastic membrane are the hydrogen and oxygen molecules, which reform into a drop of water. By now, the water should be pure.
But just to be extra safe, there's a third stage. We put it through ultraviolet light. In this case, we use it as an additional layer of protection.
Ultraviolet light would destroy any organic molecule that may have escaped. Whatever is left, this will catch it. By early 2015, this plant will deliver an additional 30 million gallons per day of clear, fresh drinking water.
Critics of water recycling have called the process toilet to tap. To reassure the public, Orange County has an on-site lab that continually monitors water quality. All of which is fine, but what matters most is that Orange County's residents feel comfortable drinking this water. There's really only one way to find out. Bottoms up.
It tastes like water. When you think about it, all water that we drink today has always been recycled. There is no new water. It's the same water that's been here forever. Talk to people about water recycling, and it's easy to walk away with two seemingly incompatible, yet paired reactions.
optimism and frustration. The optimism comes from seeing that the science and technology behind water recycling simply works. The frustration comes from seeing the lack of political will in some communities to address their water needs with sensible solutions like this one.
Sure, Orange County's project costs a lot of money, but it's actually less expensive than many of the alternatives, and it's certainly less expensive than doing nothing at all. In that case, eventually, all that water would be gone.