Arizona 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 calls "advanced water purification.''
Final approval could come by the end of the year, paving the way for water suppliers to construct the facilities, saidΒ Randall Matas, the department's deputy director.
The technology is good enough to produce water purer than the treated groundwater or surface water now being delivered, Matas said. He said it even removes chemicals that aren't prohibited by the Safe Water Drinking Act.
But the question remains of whether Arizonans will accept it, even after it's been discussed and debated for decades.
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.''
ADEQ and the state Department of Water Resources have worked for years to tamp down that phrase.
For some time the idea was promoted by the more sanitized name of "direct potable reuse.''
The rebranding as advanced water purification or AWP was based, at least in part, on testing what is acceptable to consumers, Matas said. But he said that 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 said. Words like "re-use'' and "recycling'' have "meanings that don't provide an insight into what's happening," he said.
"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.
There is not universal acceptance.
"ADEQ did two studies statewide to assess people's thoughts on advanced water purification, water security and other issues,'' Matas said. The result is 77% of those who answered the surveys were "not opposed to the technology or were in favor of the technology.''
When asked whether they would be likely to drink advanced water purification water, the feelings were divided.
A third said very likely, 42% said "somewhat likely,'' 15% fell into the "somewhat unlikely'' category and 10% said they were unlikely to drink it at all.
Among those in 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 being adopted can remove, in his words, 99.9999999999% of contaminants. He said those range 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 Phoenix is revamping its Cave Creek treatment facility to meet the new standards. Once that happens, Hayes 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. And while that's not yet being put into the pipes going to people's homesΒ βΒ the city still needs an ADEQ permit to do thatΒ β Scottsdale is showing off what can be produced by working with local breweries to produce beer using the water.
There are also efforts to educate consumers to understand they're already 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.
But even if people understand that intellectually, that doesn't overcome opposition: Nearly one in five of those who told ADEQ 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 that ADEQ is not telling utilities exactly what they need to build. Instead, the department has detailed what has to come out of the plantsΒ 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."
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.
Water supplies from the Colorado River are "unreliable,'' he said.Β
"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. That's leaving desert cities like his with the threat of having to replace 40% of their drinking water.
And while costs will go up, "it may be difficult to put a value on not having water, versus having these resources,'' he said.Β
AWP could prove more efficient in the end than an alternative that had been pushed by former Gov. Doug Ducey: desalinating water from the Sea of Cortez.
Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, had pegged desalination 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.
Longtime Arizona Daily Star reporter Tony Davis talks about the viability of seawater desalination and wastewater treatment as alternatives to reliance on the Colorado River.
