According the Burnt Orange Report, the city of Wichita Falls, Texas, is going to begin recycling its own wastewater because of the drought:

Nope, it’s not a two-weeks-late April Fools’ joke: The city will be recycling 5 million gallons of “potty water” into (hopefully) clean and (fingers-crossed) drinkable water.

The decision to reuse the wastewater comes after existing restrictions have reduces waster usage by half.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality tested the water for 41 days to ensure that it is safe.

My knowledge of water and wastewater treatment procedures is based solely on an Intro to Environmental Science class I took in the fall of 1996, but in that class we took field trips to get a fourth credit hour. We visited both a water treatment plant and a wastewater treatment plant. The city of Houston drew water from the Trinity River and treated it to make it potable. It treated its wastewater to remove the worst contaminants (poo, condoms, corpses, etc.) and dumped the decidedly non-potable water back into the Trinity River. The wastewater treatment plant was downstream from the water treatment plant, because otherwise Houstonians would be drinking the same water they peed in not too long ago.

Our professor told us how he had been saying for years that it would be a massive improvement in efficiency for the water and wastewater treatment plants to trade places, because then Houston would be better able to use the water that it needs consistently. As long as both plants do their job right, what’s the problem? It’s the same water we recently peed in, that’s what is the problem. (If you’re the city of Portland, Oregon, that’s a really big problem, apparently.)

Here’s the problem with the “That’s our toilet water” argument. Other towns get water from that river. Or from other rivers. Or lakes. Or reservoirs. Or aquifers. Other towns put their treated wastewater back into those water sources.

So the water Houston was drawing into its water treatment plant might’ve been another town’s treated wastewater. The same goes for Wichita Falls.

Water has been around for almost as long as the Earth. If you’re drinking anything as you read this, the water in your beverage might’ve once passed through the urinary tract of a dinosaur. It has almost undoubtedly had fecal contaminants of multiple species in it. If that grosses you out, ponder the fact that you’ve been drinking water your whole life up to this point, and get over it.

Photo credit: US Department of Agriculture [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.