this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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A brewery is making beer with recycled wastewater, purified using a process developed by NASA::The company relies on the same recycling methods that NASA uses to allow astronauts to drink water in space.

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[–] dojan@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean the technology has been around. There was talks about using it for California, but people would rather suffer through a drought than use purified wastewater.

[–] HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Some towns do use it, they just don't make it a big deal to their residents how they are getting their water.

[–] fkn@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The vast, vast, vast majority of Americans drink recycled wastewater today. The wastewater treatment plants dump their effluent into the river upstream from where the drinking water is sourced.

By doing this, legally the drinking water source is the river and the idiots who don't understand how water treatment get to drink their own purified urine without being told they are.

The problem is that it would be significantly more efficient to skip the step of putting it into the river, since American (and most other developed nations) wastewater effluent is usually significantly cleaner than the river it is being discharged into.

[–] HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, but there are cases where wastewater goes directly to treatment plants.

[–] fkn@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Yes, but my point still stands. Most Americans are drinking recycled wastewater.

[–] dojan@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh cool! I definitely think it's something that ought be adopted at a larger scale.

I live in Sweden, one of the countries with the most freshwater per capita in the world, and even so, for the past ten years or so we've had frequent droughts. There's not enough snowfall or rain to replenish our groundwater supply. Such is the world we made, and now we'd best adapt.

[–] fkn@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

As per my other comment you probably already are. With the exception of costal communities nearly all wastewater is recycled.

In countries with poor wastewater standards this leads to massive river pollution. You don't know about it because Sweden has strong wastewater regulations.