New reuse system turns wastewater at San Francisco high-rise into clean water, soil, energy

[hunter]

Like many older cities, San Francisco collects sewage and storm water runoff in the same pipes. In the bad old days all this water was simply dumped in the ocean.

Then San Francisco built sewage treatment plants, but these were simply bypassed whenever it rained. Now underground caverns have been built to hold excess water for later treatment but these too are overwhelmed about ten times a year in heavy rains.

Projects like the one in the video reduce the amount of sewage that ends up in the ocean and possibly make the city more resistant to drought. It would be more efficient to have separate storm and sewage lines and treat the collected water in one place but you have to work with what you've got.

In my dream world San Francisco would no longer be dependent on water from Hetch Hetchy and the O'Shaughnessy Dam dam could be removed. NNadir has some ideas about that. Nuclear powered supercritical water desalinization could make it so.

Before dam:



After dam: