Direct Drinking Water Recycling Could Prevent Floods

submitted by Samuel Bendett

Homeland Security News Wire - April 18, 2012

The use of a more streamlined process to recycle wastewater could have saved Brisbane from severe flooding in 2011 and mitigated recent flood risks in NSW, a leading water expert says

Direct potable reuse (DPR) of wastewater could free up billions of liters of water from reservoirs around Australia, giving cities a greater buffer to capture rainwater and control major flooding events, says Dr. Stuart Khan, an environmental engineer at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Water Research Center.

Current plans for water recycling in Australia generally involve Indirect Potable Reuse (IPR), in which reclaimed water is treated to a high standard and then returned to rivers, lakes and aquifers, where it mixes with environmental waters before being re-extracted for further treatment.

A UNSW release reports that Khan says that a better approach, which is more cost effective and less energy intensive, is to skip the dam altogether. With DPR, highly treated wastewater is introduced directly to drinking water treatment plants, without re-entering the natural environment along the way.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)