They are reclaiming water and routing it into an aquifer, where it may indirectly contribute to water supply, but they are doing it in a very “gross” way, throwing a whole lot of money and energy at a problem that could be addressed in inherently more efficient ways. The vast majority of water use is non-potable, so does not require fully potable water, rather just pathogenicly safe water — e.g., toilet flushing, irrigation, cooling towers, many commercial or industrial processes, even laundry. These uses are widely dispersed over the area served by the conventional centralized wastewater system. Rather than continue to expend lots of energy and a large majority of the cost of the system on the pipes and lift stations that do nothing but move pollution from place to place, they could instead highly distribute the treatment system — at the building scale, the “campus” scale, the neighborhood scale — and focus the money instead on producing water of a quality appropriate for these non-potable demands, which can be done with robust, inherently stable — some may call them “low-tech” — treatment units that will consistently and reliably produce a high quality effluent with minimal oversight; thus the multiplicity of treatment plants would not be an untenable O&M problem. All the reclaimed water produced would defray water demands, pretty much on a gallon for gallon basis, rather than having it run through an aquifer, where some portion of the hard-won water would be lost to leakage, etc. This strategy, of course, requires a wholesale reorganization of the “waste” water system, but this is something we have to get on with in any case. It will be a generational change. I predict that this sort of close-to-the-source water management strategy — where “waste” water and stormwater are integrated with water supply, where water is viewed holistically as a resource, not solely as a nuisance to be made to “go away”, and only when it comes out of the treatment plant discharge pipe does it suddenly become recognized as a resource — will become as commonly accepted as, say, curbside recycling — unknown a generation ago — is today. We must do this all across society if we are to approach water resources sustainability.

Now THAT, not this high-tech, high carbon footprint monster touted above, is clean technology and sustainable development. What you’ve reviewed above is really just lipstick on a pig. A dead-end pig.