recycled water?

"With technology advancing, the recycling of water should be always on the agenda as a realistic water supply option for communities." - Ken Matthews, chairman of the National Water Commission.

I got into a comparably serious discussion, compared to subjects we usually talk about, with some pals last night about our water crisis and recycled water. And then this appeared in today's Age.

I honestly have no problem at all with drinking recycled water. Obviously it is ideal if we can manage our dwindling supplies well enough so that we don't have to use it at all, but even a blind man could tell that really isn't a plausible option. The stark reality is that by this time next year there will be some major changes in place regarding where our water comes from.

My logic, however basic it may be, is that in a city of just under four million people, recycled water would not be made available if it hadn't been treated, tested and the process repeated several times before it came through our taps, and then filtered again by paranoid home owners who spend their hard earned on installing home filters just to be sure. If such a large scale project was going to go ahead, it wouldn't be implemented unless it was 100% safe.

I wonder what kind of approval rating it would have had there not been a media campaign to label it as "effluent" and "sewage". I mean, somewhere along the line people have gotten the idea that it contains human waste, how on earth could that have happened...

Surely the first logical step also is to use recycled water in industry initially (industry uses one-third of our drinking water supplies), and if our catchments and dams still can't handle the urban, household population then consider further recycling for domestic use.

If the pro-recycling water information was as easy to comprehend as the anti-recycling propaganda is to distribute, maybe approval levels would be higher. Does anyone actually realise how dire the situation is?