In the course of my just-published podcast with Chuck Gordon, the CEO of Siemens Water Technologies, we cover a lot of ground about the ways that companies are measuring and managing their water use.
Water is obviously a huge topic at GreenBiz.com, and something I increasingly feel obligated to label the "new carbon." But during our conversation, one thread that struck me as very interesting -- but very tangential to the larger issue of how businesses address their water footprint -- was the idea of recycling wastewater for municipal reuse.
You can dress it up in as fancy of terms as you like, but what it comes down to is that, as the world's water supply is increasingly pinched, reuse is going to become an ever more common solution. Not to put too fine a point on it, but what you flush down your toilet or what goes down the shower drain will eventually and by necessity come back out your tap.
MW: This is a little bit of an off-the-wall question, but I’m curious about the challenges in reusing waste water, specifically in municipalities, but I think in industry as well -- just the kind of marketing or perceptional challenges that companies have.
CG: I think the challenges are actually a lot less in industry. In industry, typically the industry that -- each industry knows the specification that’s required to reuse water back in the different areas of its plant. And so it becomes just more of a scientific exercise; can you meet those specifications? I think with -- on the municipal side, it’s a much more emotional topic. But interestingly enough, the two areas of the world or the two major cities in the world that indirectly recycle water are Orange County and Singapore.
So if you step back from that, you have two very advanced, industrialized cities, very developed, and they’ve both been able to overcome the emotion of indirectly recycling their municipal waste water. And those are probably the two best examples of indirect water reuse and recycle in the world.
And I know in both cases, there was significant marketing and promotion done to help overcome the stigma of, “Oh, gee, I’m gonna be -- you know, I’m gonna be drinking or showering in waste water!” That’s not true. Water is all H2O, and what’s in it is different, but once you remove the contaminants, you’re back to water.
The full podcast, minus this fascinating conversational detour, has just been published. You can read a full transcript and listen along here: The State of the Art for Water Management.
Photos CC-licensed by Flickr users digitalpimp and goodsurfers2009.