Recycled Water Could Soon Be Coming to Arizona Taps: How to Tell If It’s Safe

As cities across Arizona consider Advanced Water Purification, it’s important to establish policies that ensure that water is safe—and plentiful.

You would think that if we are going to drink recycled wastewater, we should regulate it as much as possible.

But a slew of caveats and safeguards will do no good if they make it too expensive, complicated or impractical to use this renewable, relatively drought-resistant water source.

Fortunately, Arizona understands that both are needed — rigorous standards AND flexibility in how communities meet them — to make advanced water treatment technology feasible statewide.

Because that’s what we need: for this to become a viable option for communities across the state.

Water quality should meet high standards

In early 2022, the Department of Environmental Quality convened a group of researchers and industry experts to help find this critical balance.

The group reviewed the latest scientific and public health data to determine which pathogens and chemicals should be tested for, as well as when and at what stage in the treatment process this should be done.

Recently developed draft regulations specify how monitoring should be conducted and the results reported publicly, as well as how suppliers should respond when contaminants are detected in water.

The requirements are rigorous — and they should be — to protect public health.

However, the way suppliers meet these requirements is much more flexible.

This is important because the degree of water treatment to ultrapure drinking water standards can vary significantly depending on the quality and quantity of wastewater entering the treatment plant.

But suppliers need flexibility to achieve this

There are many technologies available to purify this water, including membrane filtration, reverse osmosis, and ozone and ultraviolet light treatment.

The water produced from these processes is typically purer than bottled water.

However, setting rigid standards for what technology is used and when it is used — as some states have done — could require some suppliers to do significantly more treatment than necessary to get water to these ultrapure standards, which would incur significantly higher costs than necessary.

Arizona Won’t Solve Its Water Problems: Until that changes

And that could easily make the solution impractical for smaller, rural water providers in Arizona, some of which are also considering an advanced water treatment plant as a potential future water source.

This is the last thing we want, especially for communities that are fully dependent on finite groundwater resources.

Capturing and recycling waste going into the sewer system, at a local or regional level, could make these communities much more sustainable than they are now.

Ultimately, Arizona wants clean, reliable water.

This doesn’t mean that everyone will eventually adopt advanced water purification technology, but it should be a practical tool in their toolbox.

Arizona is wise to recognize this and design its regulations to cover a wide range of providers, not just the big cities like Phoenix and Scottsdale that already have projects underway.

Does this mean that the state has managed to achieve the perfect balance between strict regulations and flexibility?

So no.

Some suppliers say proposed training requirements for some wastewater treatment workers are too stringent given the industry-wide labor shortage.

While others say flexibility is key, they will need government help in designing their systems because they lack the technical expertise to do it themselves.

However, everyone appreciates how hard the state is working to keep communities safe without taking additional steps that could increase costs while not significantly improving public health.

This is what it’s all about:

We are setting high but attainable standards so we can bring even more clean, safe and reliable water to Arizona’s taps.

Contact Allhands at [email protected]. On X, formerly Twitter: @joannaallhands.

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