If you were to drink improperly recycled toilet water, it could really hurt you — but probably not in the way you’re thinking. Advanced purification technology so thoroughly cleans wastewater of feces and other contaminants that it also strips out natural minerals, which the treatment facility then has to add back in. If it didn’t, that purified water would imperil you by sucking those minerals out of your body as it moves through your internal plumbing.
So if it’s perfectly safe to consume recycled toilet water, why aren’t Americans living in parched western states drinking more of it?
A new report from researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Natural Resources Defense Council finds that seven western states that rely on the Colorado River are on average recycling just a quarter of their water, even as they fight each other and Indigenous tribes for access to the river amid worsening droughts. Populations are also booming in the Southwest, meaning there’s less water for more people.
The report finds that states are recycling wildly different proportions of their water. On the high end, Nevada reuses 85 percent, followed by Arizona at 52 percent. But other states lag far behind, including California (22 percent) and New Mexico (18 percent), with Colorado and Wyoming at less than 4 percent and Utah recycling next to nothing.
The report found that if the states other than high-achieving Nevada and Arizona increased their wastewater reuse to 50 percent, they’d boost water availability by 1.3 million acre-feet every year. Experts think that it’s not a question of whether states need to reuse more toilet water but how quickly they can build the infrastructure as droughts worsen and populations swell.
Since it’s just me, I don’t need to worry about pathogens for the simple reason that I can’t give myself any bacteria/parasites that I don’t already have. But I do share my food crops with others, so I’m being extra safe here.
I agree in that the vast majority of pathogens can’t survive for more than a few months in a compost bin (even a cold one), and aging it for a year is enough to be 95% safe. The only organisms that can survive for years in the compost/soil are parasite eggs (such as roundworm, and a few others I’m forgetting at the moment), so that is something you want to be careful about. Humanure Handbook has a useful chart for this.