Background Info:
Recent events and news about water scarcity got me thinking about this. So the question is essentially the title. Or am I missing something?
If you live anywhere that uses a sewer system rather than septic tanks, isn’t it already doing that?
In my area, the water company pulls in from the river, filters and processes it, and pipes it out to homes. It gets used in the homes, discharged into the sewer to a treatment plant, treated, and then pumped back into the river.
Even if your water company’s intake is before the sewage treatment plant, the next town’s intake is downstream. So if you’re not drinking your neighbor’s processed toilet water, you’re drinking that of the town upstream.
Is getting mixed with river water simply enough to “dilute” the ick-factor here, or is there something I’m missing?
Listen imma level with you bro, if they are genuinely calling it “toilet to tap”, and you dont get why people might find that a little off-putting, then i dont think this thread has anything for you.
Poor branding aside, it doesn’t really change anything, though. But yeah.
I at least appreciate the honesty in the naming rather than some marketing doublespeak. That said, I’d be okay with it if they called it “astronaut water” or something lol.
Poor branding aside, it doesn’t really change anything, though.
Branding is everything when it comes to the masses. Ideas live or die because of their marketing.
Lol, I hate that you’re right :sigh:
Anyone who’s passed 5th grade science would know that water is fine, but that’s asking too much of more people than I’d care to imagine.
Same reason I don’t go to the butchery to watch my sausage get made. Just do it and don’t tell me.
Cheap sausages here are commonly referred to as ‘lips and assholes’ or ‘hooves and sawdust’. We’re pretty blunt about these things.
Probably everywhere. Here in the NorthEast US, I’ve heard plenty of people describe hot dogs that way. I mean, come on, you throw all the leftover bits and pieces into the grinder to make sausage: what bit and pieces end up in the cheapest sausage?
It’s kinda like the question of “how big does the body of water have to be before you’re comfortable swimming with a corpse?” Like we all know that’s how it works, but making a direct correlation makes it much more uncomfortable.
You’re not missing anything, people are just weird about it.
Also the person who named it “toilet-to-tap” is an idiot. Reclaimed water is “toilet to tap” in the same way that a vegetable grown in compost is “garbage to garden.” There’s a host of sophisticated engineering processes in between the two, making the water just as clean as any other treated drinking water.
Mixing with river water or putting the water in a reservoir and then pumping it back out again simply makes people feel more comfortable about it and, like you said, reduces the “ick” factor.
My guess is they’re not idiots and knew exactly what they were doing… and being paid for by whoever it was that stands to lose money if reclaimed water became popular
More like it’s designed to sound disgusting in order to rub people’s noses in it when they have no choice but to go along with whatever this new plan is (for the planet).
They know we don’t have a choice, so it’s an opportunity for some sadistic person to maximize the discomfort of this unavoidable process.
And I don’t mean unavoidable physically. I mean unavoidable legally.
Water is water. Get the “not water” stuff out of it, and you have … water. Add back in some “stuff that probably should be in potable water,” like minerals and fluoride, and there’s no problem.
You can build a bush filter with grasses, rocks, sand, and charcoal from your campfire which will catch most of the particulate, then boil it to make sure you kill all the parasites. The only thing a municipal filtering station might add to that would be removal of heavy metals and actual testing.
Water has memory! And while the memory of a long-lost drop of onion juice seems infinite, it somehow forgets all the poo it’s had in it!
The number of people who believe in homeopathy after it’s explained to them is TOO DAMN HIGH.
I thought for the longest time that homeopathy was just a generic name for alternative medicines or something. Wasn’t for me regardless so I never gave it a second thought or dug into it.
Someone recently explained what it was to me and I just started laughing. Hilarious. Kinda. I had no clue.
