Food waste costs North America $162 billion

Waste Management World: Food waste in America amounts to $162 billion and between 31% to 40% of American food supply goes to waste, primarily in homes, stores and restaurants, according to a new study. The findings, from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (CLF) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, were published in a report in the journal PLOS ONE.

Top food wasted, by weight, include fruit and vegetables yet nearly 75% of Americans believe that they waste less food than the national average, according to the findings.

Furthermore, as a result the food waste places a huge drain on the environment when approximately 30% of the fertiliser, 35% of the fresh water and 31% of the cropland in the US was used to grow food that was eventually wasted.

The first nationally representative consumer survey focused on wasted food sheds some light on factors affecting consumers’ waste. The survey, administered to 1,010 American consumers in April 2014, covered awareness, knowledge, attitudes and behaviors related to wasted food.

Despite the large environmental impacts related to wasted food, most survey respondents listed environmental concerns last when ranking reasons to reduce food waste, with just 10% calling them “very important.” Instead, respondents said that saving money and setting a positive example for children were the top motivators for wanting to throw out less food....

Wasted food, shot by Assianir, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license

Thailand totters towards waste crisis

Bangkok Post via AFP: A blaze at a vast rubbish dump home to six million tonnes of putrefying trash and toxic effluent has kindled fears that poor planning and lax law enforcement are tipping Thailand towards a waste crisis.

Locals had long pressed for the closure of the foul-smelling Praeksa landfill site, which is wedged between a cluster of industrial estates on the fringes of Bangkok. But a ferocious eight-day fire that cloaked the eastern suburbs of the capital in poisonous smoke earlier this year thrust Praeksa to the heart of a national debate over rubbish.

Bangkok produces around 10,000 tonnes of waste a day, a substantial portion of the 27 million tonnes generated each year across the kingdom. The ruling military regime has put waste disposal high on its to-do list, recognising that poorly regulated pits are filling quickly and prone to disaster.

Experts warn that dumps are time bombs for the environment and the increasing number of communities forced to live cheek-by-jowl with them. Open dumping "offers a quick and easy solution in the short run," the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and Pacific said in a study, warning of severe environmental problems and long-term health issues caused by contaminated water and land.

Of Thailand's 2,500 open rubbish pits, just a fifth are properly managed, according to the kingdom's Pollution Control Department. The rest are at the mercy of illegal dumping - including of hazardous waste - fires and seepage into nearby land and water systems....

A recycler buying trash door to door in Thailand, shot by Mattes, Wikimedia Commons, public domain 

Abandoned landfills polluting UK rivers

Alex Peel in the Guardian (UK) via the Natural Environment Research Council: Abandoned landfill sites throughout the UK routinely leach polluting chemicals into rivers, say scientists. At Port Meadow, on the outskirts of Oxford, about 27.5 tonnes of ammonium a year find way from landfill into the River Thames. The researchers say it could be happening at thousands of sites around the UK.

In water, ammonium breaks down into nitrogen. The extra nitrogen can trigger excessive plant growth and decay, damaging water quality and starving fish and other aquatic organisms of the oxygen they need to survive.

Scientists are most worried about so-called blue-green algal blooms, which can produce toxins capable of killing wild animals, livestock and domestic pets. In people, they can cause skin rashes, nausea, stomach pains, headaches and fever.

“We’ve been getting rid of waste for an awful long time,” says Dr Daren Gooddy, of NERC’s British Geological Survey, who led the study. “Since Victorian times, we’ve been putting it into landfill and ad-hoc waste dumps on the edge of our towns and cities, often on the fringes of floodplains.”

‘There are 11 landfill sites at Port Meadow alone. If you scale that up for the whole of the UK, then you’re probably talking about thousands of them.’...

A Port Meadow sunset, shot by OxOx, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Italy agrees to send in army against mafia dumps

Zee News via AFP: The Italian government agreed to send in the army to fight the mafia which it blames for illegally dumping tonnes of toxic garbage around Naples, in an area dubbed the "Triangle of Death".

The army can be deployed "to deal with in the most efficient manner the phenomenon of the environment mafia in the area between Naples and Caserta," said Defence Undersecretary Gioacchino Alfano yesterday.  Parliament is due to examine the decree but Alfano said that "for the first time, all political forces are in agreement to offer concrete solutions to resolve a specific problem".

The smoke-choked area north of Naples has been dubbed the "Triangle of Death" and it is a grim sight -- a short trip but a world away from the postcard images of the city's bay and its famous cuisine.

...Environmental groups say the toxic garbage could affect one and a half million people living in the Naples and Caserta provinces.  According to environment protection association Legambiente, 10 million tonnes of industrial waste were burnt or buried in the zone between 1991 and 2013, all trucked in at night.

Toxic waste has been buried in the area fo
r decades, ever since the local Camorra crime syndicate decided to branch out into the lucrative waste disposal business in the 1980s....

Photo by Michelangelo-36, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license 

'Superbugs' found breeding in sewage plants

Terra Daily via SPX: Tests at two wastewater treatment plants in northern China revealed antibiotic-resistant bacteria were not only escaping purification but also breeding and spreading their dangerous cargo. Joint research by scientists from Rice, Nankai and Tianjin universities found "superbugs" carrying New Delhi Metallo-beta-lactamase (NDM-1), a multidrug-resistant gene first identified in India in 2010, in wastewater disinfected by chlorination.

They found significant levels of NDM-1 in the effluent released to the environment and even higher levels in dewatered sludge applied to soils. The study, led by Rice University environmental engineer Pedro Alvarez, appeared this month in the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters. "It's scary," Alvarez said.

"There's no antibiotic that can kill them. We only realized they exist just a little while ago when a Swedish man got infected in India, in New Delhi. Now, people are beginning to realize that more and more tourists trying to go to the upper waters of the Ganges River are getting these infections that cannot be treated. "We often think about sewage treatment plants as a way to protect us, to get rid of all of these disease-causing constituents in wastewater.

But it turns out these microbes are growing. They're eating sewage, so they proliferate. In one wastewater treatment plant, we had four to five of these superbugs coming out for every one that came in." Antibiotic-resistant bacteria have been raising alarms for years, particularly in hospital environments where public health officials fear they can be transferred from patient to patient and are very difficult to treat....

A white blood cell interacting with MRSA bacteria (an antibiotic resistant strain of staphylococcus aurea), National Institutes of Health

Storms, flooding can unleash a toxic soup

Desmond Brown in IPS News: It’s a dirty, smelly business, but wastewater is gaining prominence across the Caribbean as countries from Jamaica in the west to Guyana in the south increasingly recognise its effects on the environment and the importance of improving its management.

Coordinator of the Guyana Wastewater Revolving Fund Marlon Daniels told IPS that with the advent of climate change, protecting the environment has become more of a challenge for countries of the region. He explained that climate change has resulted in unusual weather patterns, including more rainfall and flash flooding, and these have caused an increase in sewerage entering the sea.

“One of the effects of improving access to water, as required under Goal 7 of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, is that more people instead of using a pit latrine now use a flush toilet, so they have an on-site treatment in the form of a septic tank,” Daniels said.

“When you have a huge storm or heavy rain, you have a toxic soup. There is refuse from septic tanks, which is not as dirty as raw sewerage but it’s still rich in nutrients and pathogens. All of that wastewater ends up in the environment as floodwater and you have populations being exposed to that.”

Dr. Donna-May Sakura-Lemessy, deputy director at the Trinidad-based Institute of Marine Affairs (IMA), says while the Caribbean benefits tremendously from the tourism industry – last year visitors spent an estimated 26 billion dollars – tourism-dependent economies of small island Caribbean states suffer the most from untreated wastewater with the destruction of reefs and the pollution of beaches....

Wasted food is world's third-biggest carbon emitter after China and US

ABC News (Australia): The food the world wastes accounts for more greenhouse gas emissions than any country except for China and the United States, according to a United Nations report. It says every year about a third of all food for human consumption, around 1.3 billion tonnes, is wasted, along with all the energy, water and chemicals needed to produce it and dispose of it.

Almost 30 per cent of the world's farmland, and a volume of water equivalent to the annual discharge of Europe's River Volga, are in effect being used in vain. In its Food Wastage Footprint report, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimated the carbon footprint of wasted food was equivalent to 3.3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.

If it were a country, it would be the world's third biggest emitter after China and the US, suggesting that more efficient food use could contribute substantially to global efforts to cut greenhouse gases to limit global warming.

In the industrialised world, much of the waste comes from consumers buying too much and throwing away what they do not eat. In developing countries, it is mainly the result of inefficient farming and a lack of proper storage facilities....

A dumpster full of bagels, shot by Sachi Yoshitsugu, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

World set to use much more wastewater

Alister Doyle in Reuters: The world is set to use far more treated wastewater to help irrigate crops and feed a rising population as fresh water supplies dry up, a team of U.N.-backed experts said on Thursday. A study led by Japan's Tottori University and U.N. University's Canadian-based Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) forecast "a rapid increase in the use of treated wastewater for farming and other purposes worldwide".

It did not forecast volumes, saying that many nations lack data on sewer and drain water. Of 181 nations studied, only 55 had information on wastewater generation, treatment and re-use. Many governments and companies have so far overlooked the economic potential of vast amounts of wastewater, UNU-INWEH director, Zafar Adeel, said.

North America generates about 85 cubic km (20 cubic miles) of wastewater every year, of which about 61 cubic km is treated, roughly the amount flowing over Niagara Falls, and only four percent of that is re-used.

Wastewater also often contained nutrients such as potash, nitrogen and phosphorus which saved fertilizer costs, the study published in the journal Agricultural Water Management said. "Properly treated, wastewater is a huge economic resource," Adeel told Reuters....

Recycled water overflow from Aquacycle thickener, shot by Peter Craven, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license 

Poland dumps old garbage system for greener setup

Terra Daily via AFP: With too many people chucking their garbage into neighbours' bins -- or worse, the woods -- to avoid paying for disposal, Poland has taken on a massive overhaul of its laissez-faire waste management system. The new greener setup, which enters into force in July, will lower the incentive to litter by requiring everyone to pay a municipal disposal tax for a service that up to now has been left up to each household to coordinate.

While Poland has a long way to go to catch up to green superstars like Austria or Germany -- which recycle or compost over 60 percent of their rubbish -- the new system should help bring Warsaw into line with EU norms. "It will be revolutionary," says Tadeusz Arkit, head of a parliamentary commission in charge of waste management for the EU member of 38 million people.

Present laws leave it up to each household and business to sign a contract with one of the many garbage collection companies, but the model has proven difficult to implement and oversee. The system is "fair in theory" because everyone pays for his own share, Arkit told AFP. "But it's not effective since there are many people who, to avoid paying, dump their trash into others' garbage bins or toss it outdoors."

Last year, the European Commission rapped Poland and 11 other eastern and southern EU members for lagging on the environmental front....

A garbabe can in Brynow, Poland, shot by Piotrus, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license 

Toxic waste sites cause healthy years of life lost

Terra Daily via SPX: Toxic waste sites with elevated levels of lead and chromium cause a high number of "healthy years of life lost" in individuals living near 373 sites located in India, Philippines and Indonesia, according to a study by a Mount Sinai researcher published online in Environmental Health Perspectives.

The study leader, Kevin Chatham-Stephens, MD, Pediatric Environmental Health Fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, presented the findings at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in Washington, DC.

"Lead and hexavalent chromium proved to be the most toxic chemicals and caused the majority of disease, disability and mortality among the individuals living near the sites," said Dr. Chatham-Stephens, first author. The study titled, "The Burden of Disease from Toxic Waste Sites in India, Indonesia, and the Philippines in 2010," was a joint research partnership between Mount Sinai and the Blacksmith Institute.

Eight chemicals were sampled and collected at the toxic waste sites in 2010. The samples were then measured for pollutant levels in the soil and water and then compared with the 8,629,750 individuals who were at risk of exposure around these sites in order to calculate the loss of years of equivalent full health.

Researchers calculated healthy years of life lost due to ill-health, disability or early death, in disability-adjusted life years (DALY), a measure of overall disease burden used by the World Health Organization. One DALY represents the loss of one year of equivalent full health. In this study, the total number of lost years of full health or DALYs was 828,722....

A lead bead, shot by Jurii, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Reducing waste of food: A key element in feeding billions more people

Seed Daily via SPX: Families can be key players in a revolution needed to feed the world, and could save money by helping to cut food losses now occurring from field to fork to trash bin, an expert said. He described that often-invisible waste in food - 4 out of every 10 pounds produced in the United States alone - and the challenges of feeding a global population of 9 billion in a keynote talk at the 245th National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society.

"We will need another 'Green Revolution' to feed the world by 2050," said John Floros, Ph.D., referring to the development of high-yield, disease-resistant breeds of grain and other agricultural innovations that took root in the 1960s. "That will mean scientific innovations, such as new strains of the big three grains - rice, wheat and corn - adapted for a changing climate and other conditions. It also will require action to reduce a terrible waste of food that gets too little attention."

Floros cited estimates that in many developing countries up to half of the food harvested from farmers' fields is lost before reaching consumers. He is dean of the College of Agriculture at Kansas State University. That waste can occur due to spoilage from improper storage of grain during transportation or from pests. Rats and mice alone eat or spoil 20 percent of the world's food supply due to contamination with their urine and feces.

"A different kind of waste occurs in the United States and some other developed countries," Floros said. "Developed countries have much more efficient systems for preserving, storing, transporting and protecting food from spoilage and pests. But as a nation - households, supermarkets, restaurants, other food-service providers - we throw away about 4 out of every 10 pounds of food produced each year."...

Banquet food going to waste, shot by Celiafung, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Kenya’s waste management challenge

Lisa Akinyi May in IRIN: As the urban population in Nairobi and elsewhere in East Africa grows, so does the solid waste management burden - a situation worsened by poor funding for urban sanitation departments and a lack of enforcement of sanitation regulations.  At least 100 million people in East Africa lack access to improved sanitation, according to UN sources.

“Due to budgetary deficiencies, solid waste management is not a priority of the town authorities. In addition, insufficient public awareness and enforcement of legislation is also a hindrance,” Andre Dzikus, coordinator of the urban basic services section of the UN Human Settlement Programme (UN-HABITAT), told IRIN.

In Nairobi, a large percentage of solid waste is managed by the private sector and NGOs because the city council lacks adequate capacity, says Dzikus.  The city council’s solid waste department, like those in Kampala and Dar es Salaam, is not well equipped, with transport vehicles few and often poorly serviced, despite increasing waste quantities due to rapid urbanization, he added.

Understaffing and a lack of skilled staff in waste management is also a challenge.  Without proper controls, solid waste is often dumped in abandoned quarries or similar sites. In Nairobi, for example, municipal waste is taken to the Dandora dumping site, a former quarry some 25km east....

The Kibera district in Nairobi, shot by Blazej Mikula, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

UK's Carbon Trust launches scheme to tackle water waste

Mark Kinver in the BBC: An international standard on water reduction has been launched in an effort to order to encourage businesses to use water more sustainably. The UK's Carbon Trust, which developed the scheme, said many business leaders did not see the issue as a priority.

The Water Standard will require firms to measure water use and demonstrate efforts taken to reduce consumption. It is estimated that more than 60% of Europe's largest cities consume water faster than it can be replenished.

UN data shows that 70% of global freshwater use is for irrigation, 22% is used by industry and 8% is used in homes. Water use is forecast to increase in developing nations by 50% by 2025 and by 18% in developed nations.

"We know that most businesses that are very big users of water don't really have a handle on [water stewardship]," explained Carbon Trust chief executive Tom Delay. "Very few measure it, even fewer have targets to reduce consumption. So even if there is not a significant cost penalty for water use, there is a very significant business risk."...

A World War II poster from the US National Archives

Cutting food waste crucial to ensuring food security

Isaiah Esipisu in AlertNet: Sticking to what’s written on your shopping list, checking food expiry dates, cooking just enough but no more and a few other simple practices can help curb global food waste, which amounts to 1.3 billion tonnes of food every year, experts say. This is vital at a time when climate change and population growth are reducing the availability of food for millions of vulnerable people around the world, they add.

“With the World Bank warning of the possibility of a four-degrees-centigrade temperature rise by the end of the decade and an expected world population of nine billion by 2050, global food production and supply is going to be highly affected,” Dennis Garrity, United Nations drylands ambassador and senior fellow at the World Agroforestry Centre told AlertNet in Nairobi. “The time to act is now.”

There are 870 million hungry people in the world today, experts estimate, but droughts, floods, storms and climate-related plant diseases, among many other factors, continually reduce access to food. Now experts say that cutting the amount of food that goes to waste, both in the developed and developing world, is key to addressing this.

One of Africa’s food waste hotspots is the Dandora rubbish dump on the outskirts of Nairobi. The 30-acre piece of land receives 2,000 tonnes of solid waste every day, an uncertain share of it food waste. The presence of pigs, marabou storks, dogs and other animals – as well as human scavengers - indicates there is plenty to eat, however....

A landfill in Guatemala, shot by Surizar, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Half of all food 'wasted' report claims

BBC: As much as half of the world's food, amounting to two billion tonnes worth, is wasted, a UK-based report has claimed. The Institution of Mechanical Engineers said the waste was being caused by poor storage, strict sell-by dates, bulk offers and consumer fussiness.

The study also found that up to 30% of vegetables in the UK were not harvested because of their physical appearance. The institution's Dr Tim Fox said the level of waste was "staggering".

The report said that between 30% and 50% of the four billion tonnes of food produced around the world each year went to waste. It suggested that half the food bought in Europe and the US was thrown away.

Dr Fox, head of energy and environment at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, said: "The amount of food wasted and lost around the world is staggering. This is food that could be used to feed the world's growing population - as well as those in hunger today. Food waste is a subject that people get very incensed about. But this report, while re-iterating the scale of the problem, doesn't really advance the story.

The Institution of Mechanical Engineers review draws heavily on work carried out over a number of years for the Food and Agriculture Organisation of UN. However one expert in the field suggested that there was no absolutely reliable global data on the level of waste. One of the boldest claims in the report is that "30% of the UK vegetable crop is never harvested."...

Food waste photographed by Muu-karhu, Wikimedia Commons,  under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

To drought-proof city’s water supply, Sydney proposes a second set of pipes

Brett Walton in Circle of Blue:  The City of Sydney, one of 38 political subdivisions in Australia’s largest metropolitan region of the same name, is in the final stage of preparing an ambitious master plan that seeks to refashion its water infrastructure to meet the constraints of a water-scarce future.

One of the oldest sections of Australia’s 224-year-old hub, the City – which includes the central business district and is home to 185,000 of the 4.6 million people in greater Sydney – envisions a second water-distribution network that would provide water for purposes other than drinking. This parallel system would tap into new sources like salty water, purified by waste heat from power plants, as well as existing sources, such as recycled wastewater and rainwater, which are typically flushed out to sea.

“For a major urban centre to have two networks — one delivering potable water and another delivering non-potable water — it would be ground breaking in Australia,” Monique Retamal wrote in an email to Circle of Blue. Retamal, a researcher at the Sydney-based Institute for Sustainable Futures, helped to develop the City’s water plan. “As far as I am aware, there are no other similar plans elsewhere in the world.”

The city council not only wants to adapt its obsolete infrastructure to a changing climate, said Bhakti Devi, the city’s manager for water strategy. Because cities worldwide will soon be confronting the same problems, the City also wants to be a pioneer for urban water solutions globally....

Sydney and Sydney Harbour Bridge taken from North Shore, 19 March 1932. Shot by E.W. Searle

Food waste, climate change top agenda at FAO Near East Conference

FAO Media Centre: Measures to improve regional food security by cutting food losses and waste and by mitigating and adapting to climate change will be considered by FAO's Regional Conference for the Near East.    

Land and water constraints severely limit the potential for increased food production to feed a Near Eastern population set to grow from 380 million to 520 million in 2030. In addition to improving land and water management, lower food losses and waste would help provide the extra food without putting additional pressure on limited land and water resources.

Annual losses in grains are estimated at more than 16  million tonnes across the region. Some 15 percent of vegetables and legumes and more than 30 percent of perishable foods such as fruit, vegetables, dairy products, meat and fish are also wasted annually in the region. The Conference, from 14 to 18 May at FAO headquarters, is also due to discuss the creation of a Regional Trust Fund for agricultural development to supplement existing international funding.

Reasons for food losses and waste include poor storage facilities and limited cold storage. As for animal-source foods, losses during handling, storage, processing, packing, distribution and consumption are significantly higher than losses during production...

Leaky pipes in the UK drought

Hannah Furness in the Telegraph (UK): Figures from regulator Ofwat show 11 companies will not be required to prevent any further leaks from their pipes and systems according to targets set for the period. Of these, eight have not been expected to reduce the amount of water lost through leakage since 2010, with the same consistent target set every year.

These include Yorkshire Water, which was required to spent £33m on leak repairs after failing to meet its 2010-11 targets. The figures have been revealed just weeks after companies imposed hosepipe bans on their customers, in a bid to limit the damage of the worst drought in 25 years.

The water shortage, which has stemmed from two dry winters, has affected an estimated 20 million homes, the majority of which are in the south and east of England. The hosepipe ban is expected to remain in place at least until the end of this summer, as even the wettest April ever recorded failed to replenish reservoirs and water stocks.

The water industry has already been criticised for losing a significant amount of water through leakage, with Ofwat statistics showing 3,365 megalitres lost per day in 2010-11. Their targets, set out in a year-by-year schedule until 2015, aim to bring about a loss of 3,245 ml/d - a reduction of 3.3 per cent in five years....

Leaky aqueduct over disused railway. When this railway was built circa 1917 it was obviously felt that it was important that this river continued on its path. In modern times it now leaks down the left hand column in the picture. Photo by Barry Hunter, Wikimedia Commons via Geograph UK, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Nanocrystal-coated fibers might reduce wasted energy

Purdue University: Researchers are developing a technique that uses nanotechnology to harvest energy from hot pipes or engine components to potentially recover energy wasted in factories, power plants and cars. "The ugly truth is that 58 percent of the energy generated in the United States is wasted as heat," said Yue Wu, a Purdue University assistant professor of chemical engineering. "If we could get just 10 percent back that would allow us to reduce energy consumption and power plant emissions considerably."

Researchers have coated glass fibers with a new "thermoelectric" material they developed. When thermoelectric materials are heated on one side electrons flow to the cooler side, generating an electrical current.

Coated fibers also could be used to create a solid-state cooling technology that does not require compressors and chemical refrigerants. The fibers might be woven into a fabric to make cooling garments. The glass fibers are dipped in a solution containing nanocrystals of lead telluride and then exposed to heat in a process called annealing to fuse the crystals together.

Such fibers could be wrapped around industrial pipes in factories and power plants, as well as on car engines and automotive exhaust systems, to recapture much of the wasted energy. The "energy harvesting" technology might dramatically reduce how much heat is lost, Wu said....

This image shows glass fibers coated with a thermoelectric material that generates electrical current when exposed to heat. The technology might be used to harvest energy from hot pipes or engine components, possibly representing a way to recover energy wasted in factories, power plants and cars. (Purdue University photo/Scott W. Finefrock)

Reuse of municipal wastewater has potential to augment future drinking water supplies

Terra Daily via SPX: With recent advances in technology and design, treating municipal wastewater and reusing it for drinking water, irrigation, industry, and other applications could significantly increase the nation's total available water resources, particularly in coastal areas facing water shortages, says a new report from the National Research Council.

It adds that the reuse of treated wastewater, also known as reclaimed water, to augment drinking water supplies has significant potential for helping meet future needs. Moreover, new analyses suggest that the possible health risks of exposure to chemical contaminants and disease-causing microbes from wastewater reuse do not exceed, and in some cases may be significantly lower than, the risks of existing water supplies.

"Wastewater reuse is poised to become a legitimate part of the nation's water supply portfolio given recent improvements to treatment processes," said R. Rhodes Trussell, chair of the committee that wrote the report and president of Trussell Technologies, Pasadena, Calif. "Although reuse is not a panacea, wastewater discharged to the environment is of such quantity that it could measurably complement water from other sources and management strategies."

The report examines a wide range of reuse applications, including potable water, non-potable urban and industrial uses, irrigation, groundwater recharge, and ecological enhancement. The committee found that many communities have already implemented water reuse projects - such as irrigating golf courses and parks or providing industrial cooling water in locations near wastewater reclamation plants - that are well-established and generally accepted....

A wastewater treatment plant, shot by Fanghong, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license