Wastewater

What’s on Tap? Maybe One Day Your Wastewater

JoAnna Klein spoke with environmental historian Matthew Booker and engineer Francis de los Reyes about the problem of urban wastewater. The answer, it seems, is a lesson in history – and a call to challenge our assumptions about what we consider waste.

“What if we reimagine what toilets are? People reimagined what toilets were a century ago, when they adopted the water closet. How is that not possible for us to do now?”

– Matthew Booker, What’s on Tap? Maybe One Day Your Wastewater

Future Scenario: A New Water Culture

During the 2020s and 2030s an increase in the severity and number of droughts and floods across the US put pressure on society to rethink how it had seen water for the past century. Organically over twenty years, a new culture of water conservation emerged. Better technology, improved manufacturing and effective marketing made greywater systems and advanced and urine-diverting toilets appealing and affordable to all Americans. Early adoption in public buildings, businesses and homes, was incentivized in the first few years with Waste to Resource Certification and tax breaks. As people adopted greywater systems and toilets and learned more about them through marketing, social media and entertainment, the stigma of waste disappeared, replaced by an appreciation for re-use and a circular economy.  

Water Reuse

First Hurricane Helene in 2024, then the droughts of the 2030s: The demand for more reliable water systems, especially as infrastructure continued aging, put a lot of pressure on the US to rethink how it had seen water for more than a century. By the year 2050, a new culture had emerged around water, as people began learning about just how much water affects their daily life, their long-term health and the health of the environment. People became acutely aware of water: how much we use individually and together, how clean water is essential and how inequities in access to water services affect society as a whole. It started to click that water exists in a complex web – changes in one part influence the whole system. 

The change started small, with public buildings such as schools installing greywater systems in return for federal Waste to Resources (W2R) certification and tax breaks. Early adoption of greywater systems in single-family homes and multi-family buildings came next, encouraged by extending those incentives and by lower costs, especially in water-scarce areas. For businesses, it was not only good PR but also good for lowering costs. Now it’s hard to find a place without a greywater system.

People still get water from wells or municipal systems, but it’s only about 15 percent of what they use, mostly for drinking and cooking. The rest is recycled – treated, depending on its type and use – in refrigerator-sized units onsite, in basements and utility closets. Water used in tubs, washing machines and sinks is reused to flush toilets, wash clothes and water lawns and vegetable gardens. In some places – where water is scarce and houses aren’t connected to a centralized system – people even drink this used water. But only after sensors tell them that the advanced filtration and disinfection technologies in their water units did their job making  contaminated water safe. It’s called direct-potable-reuse. This converting wastewater to drinking water is done mostly in centralized systems, like municipal wastewater and drinking water treatment plants, not at individual homes.

Toilet Mania

Advances in technology, clever marketing and smart design have delivered next-generation toilets to nearly every bathroom in the United States. Now in the 2050s, urine and poop are fertilizer, as they were 150 years ago. Once a few companies started marketing these recycling toilets, demand and mass production followed. The toilets come in different colors and designs, with a range of features from simple to state-of-the-art. Like Toms or Bombas in the 2010s and 2020s, one company promotes BOGO deals. Buy one toilet, and another is donated. 

In 2032 another months-long drought was wrecking the entire country. But we made it through – thanks in part, to a toilet ad. The “Now That’s a Superbowl” commercial, a collaboration between American Komodes and the US Office of Water and Conservation, convinced hundreds of millions of football fans that the Wadda Waste Toilet would save water, money – and at just the last minute, maybe the losing team. (It did, it did, it didn’t). Toilet mania had officially begun. 

It had happened before. In the 1890s and early 1900s Americans rushed to commandeer the latest toilet models that could best protect them from germs, which had just been discovered to cause illness. About a century later, Japan adopted the bidet after learning it was cleaner to wash than wipe from brilliant marketing of the Toto Washlet. 

In the Communication Age, toilet mania rocketed to a whole new level. Some people paid lots of money for the most exclusive new models to impress house guests or attract visitors to their buildings. Influencers shared toilets on social media. Commercials featured male celebrities peeing sitting down. In New York City clean, public restrooms were once hard to find. But you can still judge a restaurant by its bathroom. Toilet Tours popped up, and entrepreneurs cashed in on the curiosity of tourists and locals alike. Home design programs featured greywater remodels. Documentaries followed sanitation workers. Reality shows pitted engineers, chemists, sanitation specialists and average Joes against each other in competitions for the best-tasting water or best fertilizer. It did a lot to reduce the stigma of “waste.” 

Now the hype has died down, and a toilet is just a toilet. You can purchase a urine diverting and advanced toilet for no more than an average toilet would have cost in the 2020s. They’re standard in new building projects.

Working in sanitation is a well-paid position of honor. Kids practice sanitation duty in school. Most homeowners manage their own water reuse and resource recovery systems, but wealthier ones hire personal sanitation managers. In large building complexes, some of these managers make as much as doctors. Their expertise varies from cleaning and removal to chemical and microbial analysis, treatment strategy, water reuse planning, and sensor technology and data analysis. Lately smart monitoring systems are gaining popularity, but they’re getting some pushback from the sanitation worker unions. 

Supporters of these AI-powered systems tout them as a game changer for safety and proper water reuse. Sensors track and manage chemicals, microbes and more goings-on inside your toilet, pipes and water treatment unit, so they’re practically self-cleaning. Plus, they’re programmable. You can customize the system for whatever reuse makes most sense for your home. If anything goes wrong, an AI-powered W2R assistant tells you step-by-step what to do to treat your water. You can also see just what’s going on, if you want, in any form you want – numbers, charts, graphs, pictures, stories – or simply let the assistant work its magic. 

Healthier Society

Smart toilets are now able to monitor your health by sampling your urine and stool. Bio- and chemical analysis methods using spectrophotometry, fluorescence, and other methods can measure your blood sugar, cholesterol and other markers of health and diseases. A few private companies offer continuous monitoring of your health data via your toilet. If you consent – and sometimes if you don’t – they’re able to share it with medical establishments, like your primary care physician, or your insurance. 

Toilet sampling and analysis is a routine part of public health surveillance for new viruses. State and federal health departments use data from wastewater monitoring to get ahead of potential pandemics. It also helps epidemiologists predict the emergence of new strains of common pathogens, like influenza. Despite constant debate about privacy and data ownership, for now, household and community wastewater surveillance data is in the hands of public agencies. 

Last year, the annual W2R report for North Carolina showed that Society Improvement Scores were up by 1.6 points from the previous year. Hospitalizations due to infectious agents in water are down 3%. In lower income areas, childhood growth rates have also improved. Fewer sick days were reported at places of employment and K-12 public schools. Measures of equity and general wellness continue to follow an upward trend.