Peter Annin

You know, you're never going to win long term on anger.

Orange County is tapped out.

It is turning 100 percent of its sewage into drinking water right now.

You know, it is kind of old news in some parts of the country.

And then Vindhuk, Namibia has been doing it since the 1960s.

So when you start to look internationally, it's even older and more common.

Sewage is too precious to waste anymore.

The first step is it goes to microfiltration.

And microfiltration takes out what I call the big small stuff.

So that's protozoa, bacteria, viruses.

We're talking about things like cryptosporidium and giardia and things like that.

And then step number two is the deep clean.

In many cases, that's reverse osmosis.

Reverse osmosis takes out chemicals, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, PFAS, and any viruses that might have slipped through the microfiltration process.

And so it is akin to distilled water.

And it is so pure that minerals need to be added back into it so that that pure water doesn't leach minerals from concrete conveyance pipes.

on the way to the faucet.

And then throughout the water recycling process, there's this real-time contaminant monitoring to make sure nothing slips through.

Then there's little tweaks and differences depending on the system.

But the next step is ultraviolet disinfection with hydrogen peroxide, which is an extra layer that's somewhat redundant with reverse osmosis.