Regina Barber

That's why you have the cockroach.

And even if the water went through this whole cleaning process, just the mere idea that it had been contaminated at one point in time was enough for some people to say, nope, not drinking that.

Even if by the time they would be drinking it, it was completely clean.

Okay, okay.

I see where we're going here.

Yeah, you can kind of see where this is going.

And people who were more sensitive to the water being contaminated were also more likely to reject wastewater.

And we'll get into how lots of places have been successfully using recycled wastewater for decades.

But using recycled wastewater is not a new idea.

Yeah, it's not new.

Peter Annen is a journalist and the executive director of the Burke Center for Ecosystem Research up on Lake Superior in Wisconsin.

And he's a self-described water geek.

He wrote a book called Purified, How Recycled Sewage is Transforming Our Water.

That came out in 2023.

And then before that, he wrote a book on the Great Lakes Water Wars.

Yeah, first I just had him walk me through the recycling steps wastewater goes through once it's recollected before it's drinkable.

So it mixes with what's already in the aquifer and then it gets sent to customers.

It's a lot.

I mean, but that idea of treating wastewater isn't new, right?

So could you walk me through some earlier examples of people doing this?