In case anyone is wondering, no, the tap water here in Singapore is not cloudy or discoloured nor does it have a chemical or off taste (that I can detect anyway). It is potable straight from the tap though depending on personal preference some people still choose to boil or filter it before drinking. On a personal note, I was a teenager when Newater was being introduced to the public and remember each student receiving a little bottle of the stuff in school one day. We dared each other to be the first to drink it. It was a bit of an anti-climax when it just tasted like, well, water. 😂 I went home and told my parents about the experience, become a organic part of the PR for Newater. Today, I'm just thankful to have a clean, relatively inexpensive and consistent source of H2O at the turn of a faucet. Thanks Asianometry for the video!
I did 6 months backpacking ASEAN last year and boy was it so nice reaching Singapore halfway through the trip where I could brush my teeth in the shower and rinse without worry of getting sick lmao. It's the small things in life!
I guess the psychological impact of seeing your water be "cleaned" is enough. Compared to industrial filters, a Brita filter is like an old fence with gaping holes in it.
Main problem you didnt talk about is hormones from birth-control pills. These are extremely difficult to filter out, so no one does it. Result are wierd creatures. Who are those poor creatures formerly known as strong_men drinking feminine hormones ?
We used RO water in our plant for high purity rinsing. I tasted it and it was kind of "flat" for lack of a better word. Good water has trace minerals in it. Not a lot, but some. RO water straight from the membrane stack has almost nothing at all in it. Not necessarily what you want. Also the minerals are good for you.
I studied environmental engineering and reverse osmosis. The main point isn't about saving water, but about saving energy. You could run seawater through RO membranes, but at a greater energy and maintainance cost. Treated wastewater has fewer dissolved salts which means less pressure and energy is needed to push the fluid through the nano pores in the membranes. Also, sometimes the water is so pure, it's corrosive to pipes, like deionized water, and so it's mixed with raw water 🤫. It still passes regulations though.
Very good points! Although whether it's for saving water or energy is somewhat location dependent. Not all places experiencing water shortage are near the ocean like Singapore :)
Wow, pure water can actually be corrosive? Thats a new one, always thought its was stuff in the water causing corrosion. Then again, maybe pure water has potential energy exactly because its not poluteed into a stable state. Feels like almost nothing in nature is both stable and pure.
@@termitreter6545 Im oversimplifying, but corrosion is basically oxidation of iron, and few things oxidise better than oxygen. You could think in untreated water there's plenty of other stuff for the oxygen to stick to but when you filter water to a high purity the oxygen has nothing to stick to except the pipe - causing corrosion. this is also a problem in regular treated water (not the high purity kind) so pipes often have a protective inner coating to prevent oxidation and also orthophosphates are mixed into the water to bind the oxygen and keep it away from the pipe. Incidentally, this was the reason for the flint water crisis, new management stopped adding orthophosphates to cut cost causing the lead pipe to corrode and leech lead into the water.
Whilst recycled water didn't catch on in most places in Australia it did end up being used in Perth the capital of Western Australia. The main reason it succeeded there was thanks to a large public information campaign to properly inform the public of how it works and why it's needed.
If 1 large farm shut down or switched to the recycled sewerage then they wouldn't need it! Agriculture and industry use immense quantities of fresh water but the public get stuck with the poo water, have to cut back on showers and get fined for watering the lawn on the wrong days...
The process was invented in Australia company is called memtec the really crazy thing they can’t sell it in Australia good old cultural cringe stupid politicians won’t buy it if it’s made here
Unless you knew about ultrapure water treatment, walking through the visitor centre is like going into a science museum (but water!). They had model and interactive displays of the main filtration techniques UF, RO, UV and you can even look into the treatment plant itself. Having kids go on school trips there does also help make it more normalised and acceptable in the younger generation, though we can always have the toilet water joke
I once visited a German water treatment plant for lake water => tap water. Probably far less impressive tech than here, but it was still pretty cool to see how things get made and (at least at this facility) how serious people take their job wrt water quality
I bet it gets expensive filtering out all the drugs left in the water. Many medications don't break down in the body. Or you could ignore it and hope the for best.
@@rexmann1984 i assume that after filtering and biological processing through bacteria and chemicals such as chlorine any big molecules in the water would be broken down
@@dreckman69 I'm pretty sure it won't breakdown estrogen from birth control pills. Nothing seems to get rid of it and it's so small RO can't catch it. I'm finishing up building one of these plants right now.
My buddy works for the primary wastewater treatment facility (WWTF) for a nearby county of 1.6 million people. His WWTF outputs water that is massively cleaner than the river it’s dumped into, and they monitor basically any factor you can think of when it comes to water quality. Now, we’re in California, so that’s probably part of why it’s so regulated, but I wouldn’t be afraid to drink what comes out of those outflows.
In previous years, we used to import a large percentage of our water from our neighbouring country - Malaysia. It was necessary as rainfall does not cover our residential and industrial needs, but a major source of tension. Certain Malaysia politicians often threaten to cut the water supply many times over the years, which would threaten our survival and basic needs, even though the water treaty is signed, and ratified at UN. Singaporeans are tired of the continous threatening words and saber rattling, diplomatic pressure. So we would rather accept this purified recycled water, than bow to their pressure. Gaining water supply independance is a necessary for a country survival
Ehh... It is a lot more complicated than that to be honest. The agreement also includes the clause that Singapore sells purified water back to Malaysia, something which many Malaysian politicians are not happy with... Because it is more expensive than the water that Singapore buys from Malaysia. Basically in their eyes, Singapore is running a scam and selling their water back to them at a higher price. This is despite the fact that Singapore is already selling the purified water at a fraction of the cost (as the technology, manpower and energy needed to purify the water do need money as well). Malaysia also feels like the water they are selling to Singapore is too cheap, and want to raise the price if possible (hence the threats to cut off the water supply). No matter how the two countries try to debate this, there is no compromise to be had. That's why Singapore didn't renew the agreement (the last agreement will only last until 2061), since both countries feel like they are making a loss and neither are happy about it.
@@mysteriousfox88 We have no issues with Malaysians. Many of us have and good friends over there, and we like the country. In fact, we wish Malaysia to do well, as it will be better for the entire region. It's just that certain Malaysian politicans use the issue to advance their own agenda. We are working towards self-sufficiency, and have reduced drastically the percentage of water from Malaysia, to meet our needs. This will be better for both countries, and healthier relationship, although it may be more costly for Singapore.
You still do though. The actual point of contention you conveniently left out is how you didn't want to renegotiate the import rate even as inflation goes on. It doesn't help that Malaysia's currency slumped after it withdrew from the mutual price pegs, due to its own doing. Having PUB's pipes becoming long no-go zones slicing up JB is also hampering JB's own development.
I've spent extended business trips to Singapore and Malaysia, and I would love to return now that I am retired. I had a great time there, and would love to share it with my wife.
My main concern about waste water becoming tap water directly boils down to whom is running the purification plant. Since in the video you did a parallel to the USA I point several failures that they had in recent years regarding water treatment (Flint's case comes to mind). If you can mismanage a fairly simple plant (compared to a plant that does R.O.) imagine the trouble for the public if a plant like newater starts putting out contaminated water!
It'd be a problem for municipal bodies like those in the US, but since this is Singapore PUB is a national government body and messing up the newater plants would immediately become a national matter.
That is true. Such a plant needs to be planned and funded well. As long as no politicians have the brilliant idea of cutting funds there should be no problems.
I get the feeling that people who freak out about recycled water believe that all the water going through their pipes is from some pristine river with water safe to drink.
@@mrniceguy7168 That is actually my point, I barely trust my water utility to treat water from a river nearby and deliver it to me safe to drink let alone treat my waste water and then return it to me again and again. The risks involving the first option are way less than the second option if you mess things up. Simpler in this case is better.
@@VMFRDah, but the difference is that because Singapore is a city state (a small place). I bet the people who manage it. Actually drink the water too. Or they got friends or family that drink it. So they have large incentive to manage it as best as they could. Edit: or even their politician boss family and friends drink it too.
They gave us bottles of NEWater in school, when I was less than 10 years old. You can taste a slightly more intense bitter-ish "dryness" than other bottled water brands, honestly I've come to associate NEWater as water that's purer than the portable water from our taps.
It tastes like that most likely because theres no salts or minerals in NEWater since the processes remove absolutely everything from the water, if I recall correctly, they add in a tiny amount of minerals back in the water after it has been cleaned
A healthy level of trust in institutions would help too, I imagine. The bad press only needs to remind people (or just enough of their reading audience) of their anxieties and distrust, and their own imagination handles the rest of the fud.
Yes. Though it's helps to have institutions that deserve that trust. (As an anecdote: when I reported my bike stolen a few months ago, the Singapore police not only cared, they actually got it back to me within a week. And it wasn't even a fancy bike. Of course, this being Singapore, no one actually steals bikes. It turned out that a moving company had accidentally moved it halfway through town.)
@ lucky for you, but there's still people who steal. There's a reason why Singapore police has a promo called "low crime doesn't mean no crime". It just takes the opportunity cost to have your stuff stolen.
you dont even need trust, thats why scientific studies are done, they literally prove that there is nothing wrong with UV blasted reverse osmosis, and that your faucet is probably dirtier than the entire facility.
as a singaporean who was taught about newater during schooling years, i say the campaign was highly effective. even though i knew that newater was treated sewage water, i trust the quality of its treatment process, and am willing to drink water from newater, even if they taste weird or if they hardly reach the consumer market in the first place.
We pronounced the abbreviation of PUB by it's individual letters. P.U.B. We don't call it "Pub" here. Though it does make for an interesting word play considering I can see how it's our national watering hole.
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I always pronounce our trains as 'm(e)rt'. But it hasn't caught on.
Exactly, living there since young my dad who was certified in plumbing told me, as someone not born in Singapore, how obsessive and wasteful it is to turn the waste water back to be practically no different from distilled water in composition. And how they could have reduced the layers by quite a fair share and still be perfectly safe to drink--making the overkill pointless if it's diluted back into the mains supply as it exits the plant. Not to mention how Singapore flushes its toilets. It uses the same freshwater mains as the taps you can drink from (in Hong Kong where he was born, there were saltwater mains drawing from the sea to the toilets. Separate set of challenges with corrosion and complexity of course). To him that is an incredible waste of potable water--all that money spent on turning pisswater back to distilled, only to flush it straight down again to be pisswater. We used to sometimes save up bathtub water for a day to flush the toilet with--not because we couldn't afford to flush, but because trying our best to reduce blatant wastage is a virtue.
It is important to remember that in many ecosystems, waste water is the main fresh water source for the area. Here in the San Francisco South Bay Area, the treated sewage we dump into the bay is critical to flushing old stagnant and polluted water out the Golden Gate and into the ocean. Without the significant flow of waste water the South Bay is a big bathtub. As the tide goes out, the water flows north, but not out the Golden Gate. When the tide comes back in, the same water flows back south. Back and forth, back and forth. During spring, summer and fall it is the waste water that pushes the stagnant water out to the mouth of the bay. Only during the winter rain do we any significant creek flow. Even then, creek water is minimal except during wet rain years. We have dams and ground water recharge basins to trap the rain water for the summer months. So yes, we can capture some waste water for irrigation or drinking water, but not too much else we risk turning the South Bay into a stinking, polluted lake.
I used to work in San Jose and Milpitas. While the Bay Area was pretty good at minimizing the obvious waste (trash, untreated water) entering the Bay's waters, there remain several unavoidable factors: #1) Landfill: Most people don't know that that the Bay is less than HALF its original size. Urbanization and industrialization claimed a lot of it, especially in the south, while even more was filled for agricultural development in the north and delta areas (Novato, Napa, Suisun, etc.) Who knows what was buried in this porous material over 170+ years that eventually leaches into the Bay. #2) Population and population distribution: The Bay Area has over 7.5 million residents, along with over 5,000 technology firms. If you use the entry to the Bay as the dividing line between north and south, roughly 3/4 of that population exists south of the Bay's entry. So, the issue of contaminants is correspondingly greater there. #3) Shallow waters in the south: Much of the south Bay is quite shallow, which limits the efficiency of a pulsating, tidal flow. It is so shallow that decades ago, a large chunk of the south Bay was used by the Leslie salt company for giant evaporation ponds. A tractor would just grade dirt to cordon off a few thousand acres of the Bay to enclose it and let it dry. If Leslie still exists today, it will be a small fraction of its original size due to the added landfill used to expand the size of Hayward, Newark and other towns. #4) Rivers: The south Bay has far less rivers of significant size flowing into it than the north Bay. So the south just has less natural flow to aid flushing Due to so much of the Bay Area's development being built on landfill, it poses a lot of problems both with regards to seismic events (liquefaction, amplified motion) as well as rising sea levels. I don't know how they'll be able to address the latter, but tens of $billions$ are being planned in attempts to do so.
I remember when there was a big debate here in Australia about using treated water. You even managed to pronounce Toowoomba correctly - I'm amazed. It is a town that's famous for not having the most cosmopolitan people - I guess you could compare Queensland to Florida in terms of how the rest of the nation looks at it. Perth built two huge desalination plants and has almost completed a third, but Western Australia is quite different to the rest of the nation. They are very against privatising any government assets and are a very, very rich state that invests a lot in infrastructure. It's one of the reasons why Australia has two gas markets - WA keeps a portion of the LNG it produces for its own consumption that keeps gas prices very low, whereas the Eastern states just privatise everything and end up paying a fortune for resources they produce themselves, as they have to buy it on the international market.
@@kokofan50 also despite its numerous influences and loanwords from various languages, modern English removed some letters/diphthongs from words and from its alphabet.
@@PainterVierax There's an interesting linguistic phenomenon in the English language, called, "The Great Vowel Shift." I implore you to search this up both, in here and on Google Search.
Singapore ran an effective campaign to overcome ignorance: easier when one has a well-educated population. Imagine dealing with a product of the Arkansas education system doing his/her "own research" on this.
no it's the lack of education of the media. they don't know anything about science or engineering . how many breakthrough stories do we get where they say we have cured cancer yet the truth is completely different when you find out about the details.
plenty of people in Arkansas cant read shit because they should have all coalesced in libraries and pubmed archives, but ended up listening to infowars podcasts thus the only conclusion you can draw is that they cant read shit
@@RK-cj4oc No trust in institutions -> The institutions can't work properly -> even less trust. It's a vicious circle, and it sucks not being able to trust in your local government. Of course I am not saying you to trust something untrustworthy. But I will say it as a warning to the people in countries where the trust in institutions is slowly decreasing: Do something about the problems instead of letting it get worse! PS: I have no idea about the Arkansas education system or other institutions, so I don't know whether distrust is justified or not there.
@@entcraft44 American governments have more in common with third world countries in regards to corruption and cover ups. Flint Michigan still doesn't have clean water and the federal attempt at brushing the Ohio toxic train event under the rug come to mind just regarding water.
There is a video here by Practical Engineering about the San Antonio water system has purple water piping for semi treated water that is ok for gardening etc but not clean enough to drink.
I think they pronounce it "TEMS" because that's how King George the First, who could not speak English well, pronounced it, and since what the King says it right, that how it's been pronounced since. In any event, this was a fascinating video. Thank you for posting it.
in French it's named "Tamise", which probably comes from the original native pronunciation.
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Colour me skeptical on that one.. Why would that only apply to the Thames, and not to 'ze' language in general? (Germans have a hard time pronouncing th, so they would pronounce 'the' as 'ze' or 'zee'.)
No, the pronunciation with a t is original. The spelling with "th" is later because scribes thought the word came from Greek and "corrected" the spelling.
Fun fact, when me and my Mom was on the process of being a Singapore citizen, you have to do a few activity and one of them was visiting the New water treatment plant.
Human perception is super interesting. We won’t drink filtered water but we’ll serve food using the same tongs that touched the raw steak a second ago. As long as we don’t understand, we’ll feel safe
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Some cultures eat raw meat just fine. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mett
@ raw meat that's edible has to come from freshly killed animals. Otherwise, things start growing in it. Not the stuff you get at the supermarket. As the wiki article states: "the German Lebensmittelhygiene-Verordnung ("food hygiene/health directive") permits mett to be sold only on the day of production."
As someone who's lived rural for almost his entire life, I'm reluctant to even go near town water that ISN'T from waste reclamation. Not when I've been blessed with good ol' fashioned rain water from the tank that I still boil before consuming. I'm even fortunate to live where there's quality bore water you can drink as well but regardless of all this I understand the importance of being able to reuse water and this is especially true for irrigation. Sure, I could argue that what Australia really needs is more dams, when all too often we see so much wasted potential every year when the vast majority of flood water goes straight out to sea. The desalination plant projects of the past sure were expensive lessons in idiocy, too, but as the years go by I find myself far more open to anything that can keep the tap running, so long as it's safe and cost effective. Same goes for a lot of things, though. Especially power.
I worked at an ice rink and it was there I learned just how effective simple treatment systems could be. Our facility collected rainwater into cisterns and treated it with a small reverse-osmosis system before filling a clean reservoir that was then heated and used to flood the ice rink. Every day we would take measurements with a basic TDS meter and aimed for a reading of 0ppm. We would send periodic samples to lab for testing and the results were far, far better than anything that came out of the tap. When I asked the technician if it was safe to drink the water, he explained that we actually used the same system to treat water for our concession stands, the only difference being those systems had a UV treatment step to kill any remaining virus or bacteria. Other than that, he said, it would be similar to de-ionized (which we used before we got the RO system) or distilled water in that most of the minerals get filtered out. I kind of realized at that point that water is just water. I always thought it was weird that public perception of "pure" water comes from a glacier or some freshwater spring in the mountains but I suppose that is a product of advertising. I think back to Coca-Cola's PR disaster when they attempted to launch Dasani in the UK. As someone who lives near some of the largest freshwater lakes in the world, I never considered the impact of desalination on the treatment of drinking water as I always assumed that treated wastewater would simply be reclaimed or stored in a freshwater reservoir for further treatment.
@@katrinabryce right, I was just making the point that advertising and marketing a product like water as somehow special or exotic is kind of silly. In Dasani's case, filtered tap water sold at a premium.
I live in San Antonio, Texas and I didn't realize recycled water wasn't used in more places. Here you can also buy compost and natgas that are also from the recycling process. Here in Texas the recycled water isn't sent directly to tap but it ends up there because it's used in farmland and golf courses which refill the underground reservoir. I guess that explains why our water is so cheap compared to other states despite not having as much nearby freshwater.
There are more uses for water, not only drinking water. And there are other waste sources, not only black water from toilets. Why use black water for drinking water (recycling the worst towards the best) I don't care for poo or pee. I care for recycling hormones and medicine. If you recycle them over and over the concentration rises. Hard to extract
@@JasperKlijndijk Makes sense, wasn't aware of the medicine but that does seem like a problem. I suppose that's why black water is used indirectly for drinking via commercial and industrial use that then refills the aquafer below.
@@JasperKlijndijk It is NOT a problem. Hormones and Medecine absolutely get filtered out when using reverse osmosis. That's just a common conspiracy nut theory
11:45 California should've owned "Toilet-to-tap". Come out and say that the refining process can turn toilet water cleaner than the water you get from your sink.
“There’s no proof that the water is free from all contaminants” Microscopes, light spectrums, and all other sorts of lab equipment: “Am I a joke to you ?”
Public trust is pretty easy to obtain, but potentially very expensive: offer members of the public the ability to come in at any time to test water from the public system at several infrastructure locations. This would cost a lot because you'd have to staff the locations 24/7 and make them attractive and safe for the public to enter. And if anyone's on-site testing reveals contamination over regulatory limits, there's a $5000 bounty for that person and a $500 local tax credit for every adult who has a residential address (an active lease or home owner) in the entire water district. The district has 3 days to get the water back below regulation before anyone else can claim on a test visit. At first you'll have a line out the door with every dirtbag BSer trying to play what amounts to a lottery ticket. There is of course no requirement to put visitors through quickly, so people could be waiting a dozen hours in line. You'll have tons of people trying to contaminate their own on-site tests. But after a while you'll get past this situation once everyone realizes the tests always come up under regulation and nobody can ever trigger the bounty. Eventually it'll just be the diehard wackos showing up every day. That said, I don't understand why the treated effluent can't be used exclusively for agriculture and industry, if it's clean enough to drink. Domestic water consumption is a tiny fraction of water use. Don't convince people; just route the treated wastewater around them.
Well if it's good enough for the Wafer fabs near my home in Singapore, it's good enough for drinking. Although Newater doesn't taste as good as tap water because, surprise surprise!!! There's less dissolved stuff like salt in it! Which is why a lot of it is dumped into the reservoirs for it to mix with rainwater catchment to get re-mineralised and for bacteria to get rid of any remaining impurities. Ironically, tap water is less pure than Newater. Having drank Newater, I can say that I prefer our tap water more. (Same reason I prefer Evian mineral water to other brands, lots of dissolved stuff.) I drink it direct from the tap or through a chlorine filter without boiling. That's how safe Singapore tap water is. There is NO reason to use another filter with Singapore tap water unless you want to remove the floride due to health reasons. The only reason you'd want to boil the water is to get rid of the chlorine, and also the bacteria & fungus that lives on the tap or faucet opening. This usually comes from cross-contamination when you wash your raw food and dishes in the sink. So yes, Newater is mostly accepted in Singapore because it's safe and it's better to be self-reliant.
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You might also want to boil water to get rid of dissolved gases. (When drinking water straight up, I prefer it from the tap, because of the dissolved gases. But someone else might have different taste preferences.) You might also want to 'filter' your water to change its pH. Changing the pH is not really a matter of filtering, but the domestic machines for fiddling with pH also filter the water. You might also want to make your water softer, because that changes how tea and coffee taste.
What a well informed video! It is rare to watch videos about Singapore that avoid common cliches, and sums-up with detail how smart the government can be at educating people about specific set of issues to ultimately bring something good.
In the early days lots called it Poo Water. Whatever Singapore sets out to do ... almost always gets done VERY well. World class airport and so on. It’s largely thanks to the leadership (legacy) of LKY and his focus on meritocracy.
@elfrjz I’ve lived & worked in Indonesia for 30+ years. My first time to Singapore was in 1979 and since then all my passports have by far mostly Singapore chops. As of my work taking me to so many places in I’sia I’ve heard from dozens of I’sian domestic workers that Singapore is far better than getting stuck in the Middle East. 15 years ago in Jordan I seen for myself an I’sian lady that was a virtually a slave. I wanted to report this and soon found out that could get me into hot soup.
Over 10 years ago my county in the Atlanta suburbs built a huge new sewer treatment plant. Odor control and biological filtration were emphasized. The plant manager announced to the press that any day they could visit the plant and he would drink a glass of the finished filtered water. Several years later we built a pipeline to return the water to the lake where we get our drinking water from. Tests prove that the return water is cleaner than the lake water. This was very helpful when there was a drought and lake levels were low.
Very interesting to see how P.U.B engaged with public relations before and during project exception. Quick correction, San Diego CA, is still going forward with their "Pure Water San Diego" project and has actively started construction. Thanks for you the video!
A key issue that wasn't discussed was Hormones and hormone disrupting chemicals. I have no doubt that the facilities can filter out human waste etc. to the point of it being indistinguishable from regular tap water. What concerns me is the hard to filter out stuff, like aforementioned hormones, medicines and other chemicals. Women on birth control, for example, have a massively increased amount of estrogen in their urine, which is extremely hard to filter out. That will just end up in the tap water again.
Like some other commenters have mentioned, is that hormones and other pharmaceuticals are relatively large molecules compared to H2O. So they are filtered by the reverse osmosis process.
4:21 - using treated waste water (non-potable) for irrigation hardly qualifies as "wasting" - in fact it saves "clean natural water" that can be used, with less expense and simpler processing for producing tap water, and secondly any phosphorus or nitrogen (its compounds) still present in the treated waste water can be used by plants - so double win. (After all, irrigating fields with crops is also necessary, and so is irrigating parks.) Also, I remember plans (in S'pore) from around '93-'94 about using sea water or treated post-industrial water for toilet flushing (it is quite wasteful to use tap water to flush out your poop and pee) but the trials decided it's too much trouble. You'd need not only separate water system (pipes) but also those pipes couldn't be made of typical materials like cast/ ductile iron as that water was pretty corrosive (as for water, that is) - so PVC or stainless steel only (PP "hot welded" piping wasn't really available back then). So, long story short, they gave it up back then, but who knows, it may resurface some day. However, a working "two waters system" - in US - is presented in the video "The Most Mindblowing Infrastructure in My City" (which is San Antonio, Texas) by Practical Engineering channel: ruclips.net/video/Y_729CQdG50/видео.html Also, for anyone more interested about details of water purification there's another video by this guy, "What Sewage Treatment and Brewing Have in Common", ruclips.net/video/sUoO_U_GWFo/видео.html And, finally, that "toilet to tap scenario" is IN FACT taking place in many places already, all over the world... Q: What Oxford and London have in common? Or Ingolstadt, Linz, Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest and Belgrade? A: Common rivers - Thames and Danube, respectively. Very good, me boy! So, where does the "effluent" from Oxford, or Linz, Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest (and so on) goes? And where those cities take their water from? Yes, the very same water they treat and pump as tap water? And where do they dump their (why, treated of course!) effluent? "Pass the water, please", eh? ;-)
Engineer in the water/wastewater industry here. I don't have specific figures to site, but one of the appeals of producing reclaimed wastewater rather than simply desalinating seawater is that, based on the parameters of how much dissolved and suspended solids are in either, wastewater is actually easier to treat than ocean water, requiring less energy through reverse osmosis. Specific figures for comparison are impossible to spitball because every community has vastly different wastewater characteristics. My main point though is that ocean water is often seen an a less attractive feed source than wastewater from an engineering perspective, hence these reuse projects.
This probably wouldn't work for everyone, but what sells me on recycled water is this kind of technology is absolutely critical to any hopes of long-term space exploration. I also think the process would be made infinitely easier with nuclear reactors that can effectively distill any water in the last stage using waste heat, though in practice that would likely lead to even more public opposition from people who don't understand how reactors work.
The purification process of waste water requires passing a mixture of waste water and raw water from the reservior through microfiltration and then reverse osmosis. Microfiltration can remove particles as small as bacteria but not virus. Dissolved substances and virus are removed during the reverse osmosis process. For most other countries, the drinking water do not go through reverse osmosis. Thus the dissolved chemical substances present in the raw water are not removed.
I remember the good ol days when Newater was first introduced to us in class (we were still young and relatively unlearnt in this tech). Most of us were disgusted by the thought of drinking (poo, pee etc). Personally never got past that barrier until some years later.
English guy here. Bazalgette is pronounced basil-jet, or basil jet. Sounds like 2 words basil (the herb) and jet. I assume from spelling has French origin, not sure how the the French would pronounce that surname.
It will be pronounced quite similarly in French (and yes it's a French name) except "basil" will be bazal (both "a" pronounced as simple /a/ vowels) and "jet" will be a simple /ʒ/ consonant, not the /dʒ/ diphthong. English likes to overcomplicate pronunciations.
Reverse osmosis cleans all the impurities out, so you are just left with water. Some say though the natural water is better for drinking because it has many trace elements which the body benefits from. Plants also benefit from these, known in agriculture as micronutrients.
What tipped the acceptance scales was a chip company needing ultra pure water was getting it from them as well. I would trust a company with my water if they had an ability to do that.
Well I spent two months there last year drinking the tap water and never had a clue, so I’d figure it’s perfectly fine from a taste and safety perspective
Simples, route the domestic/commercial treated water to industrial use. Route the treated industrial waste water to agriculture/hydroponics. Lastly make sure to have surplus agriculture water to flush the soil to avoid salinisation.
Using "dirty" water is so important. Also helping with the groundwater table. Nearby Darmstadt in germany there is a groundwater infiltration fertility. There they clean up water from the rhine river to a degree they can purposfully let the water sip into the groundwater table to replenish it. I feel like all water which was pumped from the ground must be cleaned up to a degree that we can pump it into the ground again. We need such circles.
> must be cleaned up to a degree that we can pump it into the ground again normal wastewater treatment is already that. we don't usually directly discharge into the ground but into the rivers. all depends on where you pull the raw water from. if it's from aquifers it makes sense to return it back down to recharge it.
Las Vegas, Nevada draws most of its water from the Lake Mead reservoir. All of its wastewater is treated and returned to the reservoir. I haven't verified this, but supposedly the water going back into Lake Mead is cleaner than the water they took out. Naturally some of that water is going to make its way back into the municipal water system, as well as anyone down river from Lake Mead.
We have been drinking our wastewater for years in Orange County in Southern California. They first put the osmotic flow into lakes, where it reaches the aquifer, and gets pumped up in wells that serve the cities. The recycled water is the cheapest option. We pay to import the water. We also pay to treat it, before it goes into the ocean. So we pay one more time, and we don't have to pay again to import some more.
You know, there's a problem in recycled water (I don't know the dimension nor how widespread it is): medicine metabolytes accumulation in the reservoirs. The person who told me about it is an specialist and notice that the subject was being researched at the time (2010s).
Wait, this is unusual? I live in three American Midwest, we know the treatment plant is putting clean water back into the system and grey water for whatever people want to use grey water for.
we started to recycle water here in melbourne Australia during the big long drought,very few houses in test suburbs got a purple tap to be used for watering the garden not drinking the whole thing fell out of favor when the drought broke ???
as a child visitor tourist to singapore around maybe 2 decades ago, i vaguely remember going through some sort of tunnel museum thing and being given bottles of water and as a small child, i didnt know what it was or what was so special about it and didnt understand what the place was about. i guess maybe it was some sort of place trying to convince people the treated wastewater was good
When your neighbours hold you ransom for decades over water supply issues to the point that you had to secretly standby your armies to secure the tap, it is not that difficult to convince your people that recycled water is more palatable than being held hostage or going to war.
Awesome video but slight correction. California does use its recycled water for drinking. They do it just like Singapore through blending. In California it's called indirect potable reuse.
I was in Singapore for a week and my hotel had a sign in the washroom saying tap water is drinkable and there's no need to buy additional water bottles. I was really shocked by how tasty the water was.
People seem to think that the water out of the tap hasn't already been been through thousands of guts and urine tracts before in the past 2-3 billion years. Reclaimed water is fine if done professionally.
50 years ago in London, I remember a radio programme saying that its water typically recycling around 13 times! And yet its water constantly scored very highly on its taste!
One time here in NZ, at the regional town of ~5000 I remember having poured water from the tap that tasted and smelt like sewerage, instead of using our pure aquifer for drinking its used for the now burgeoning avocado industry while the town geta recycled. I suppose its taste was especially stark compared to the rain water we had on the farm
LKY tasked early years, the permanent secretary "Mr. Lee Ek Tieng" and then Engineer "Tan Gwee Paw" to perform this special duty. As Lee Kuan Yew asserted, all policies must bow to the liquid of life.
Being a Malaysian, no wonder I am seeing less of the ultra nationalist Malay politicians threatening to cut off water supply to Singapore . As with wide adoption and acceptance of treated sewerage and industrial waste water coupled with desalination plants, it is possible to achieve self reliance on water without relying on supply from Malaysia. Kudos to Singapore effort over the years.
I always noted with irony that many Malaysian politicians laugh at Singapore for drinking at our own piss and shit water, yet, water shortages are so common in KL and Selangor.
The new water is not used as potable water. Though it is very safe to drink. A pilot plant was built (400 Cubic meters /hour) For the first few years, the new water was used for the needs of a golf course near the plant and later mixed with a local reservoir. Scientists from many countries were asked to analyze the quality on-line and give out any recommendations. After a few more plants were built, the water is being sold to local FABS. This high quality (clean) water saves a lot of cost on filtration in these FABS. This water is not mixed with the PUB water, which only filters water coming from rivers of Malaysia. However, for those who want to taste the tasteless water, the bottled NEW water is available free of charge at a few government places. Regards.
When I first moved to Singapore, the other foreign students asked if it was ok to drink the tap water. The locals simply replied "the army drinks tap". If it's good enough for their army, should be good enough for us too.
Newater is ultrapure and piped directly to tge semi conductor plant. Its too pure for human consumption so it is first dumped into reservoirs then drawn from there
when I was younger I would drink the water when I would shower obviously it depends on the cleanliness of the pipes but all forms of tap water in singapore are exteremly safe to drink
Recycled waste water is used in tons of applications. Obviously more complex/expensive than some other methods, but it's interesting to see it done on such a large scale instead of say, a ship/ISS.
i remember in its early days seeing a poster with the distinctive silhoutte of the vodka bottle which is actually the rim of a squat toilet bowl viewed from above and the words "Absolute Newater" or similar 😂
I think the history of water rationing also did play a part in public acceptance towards NEWater. Both sides of the causeway echoed Singapore's dependency on imported water, and NEWater was necessary for the nation's survivability. The public accepted it was poo or die. Also it was part of the education syllabus and the water is actually discharged into the reservoir because it is thought to be "too clean (lacking minerals)" for direct consumption. Although an interesting follow up topic is the Hyflux fraud, a beloved Singaporean company who was in the business of wastewater treatment.
Isn’t the Orange County CA aquifer (purported to be among the world’s largest) partially recharged with reclaimed water injected into the cleansing water table? Also, isn’t its size due to being charged from the adjoining Pacific Ocean, as well as from San Gabriel/San Bernardino mountain range melts?
Many interesting videos on this channel. Thank you for making them. Throughout this video, you refer to "new water", but in multiple images it looks like the name is spelled "NEWater" as in "any water", which might be more appropriate given the context of the product.
Hi, Singaporean here. :) "NEWater" in Singapore is we pronounce is "new water". so yeah, he is pronouncing it right for this case... (But his pronunciation for PAP, PUB & WHO are off though. These 3 should not be pronounced as pap, pub & who, but the alphabets "P" "A" "P", "P" "U" "B" & "W" "H" "O")
And that 100% means 100%. There is no secondary system to release non potable water. The water compact requires the water released into the wash that goes to the lake to be clean enough to drink. Many places using a river or ground water aquifers are able to release a % of untreated water. Vegas has to treat it before it goes to the end user and treat it again before releasing it.
I can't speak for other countries but the water that leaves waste treatment plants is above the minimum drinking quality, it just doesn't taste nice. It would be interesting to know how the taste is improved, I guess it could be from natural filtering when it's reintroduced to water courses, or just the fact it's diluted with non waste water.
I've got to tell you about a misconception I had as a kid. For some reason, when I learned about wastewater treatment plants, I thought that essentially every city reused their own wastewater, and it simply got processed and then pumped into the freshwater pipes of the city. *Every city.* I don't know how I got that impression, but later in life when I learned that this was exceedingly rare and would make front page news if a city even proposed it, I thought everyone was over reacting. In my book, it was hard to imagine a world where cities drank fresh water, so it took me some time to unpack and think like a normal person!
Main problem you didnt talk about is hormones from birth-control pills. These are extremely difficult to filter out, so no one does it. Result are wierd creatures. Who are those poor creatures formerly known as strong_men drinking feminine hormones ?
@@gg.youlubeatube6249 This effect is more apparent in amphibians that are sensitive to changes in the water they live. Yes, like the "gay" frogs. I imagine it must have some effect in humans too just like microplastics
@@gg.youlubeatube6249 hormones are relatively large molecules compared to H2O. So what you mentioned is incorrect. Hormones, pharmaceuticals are removed. What you get from the NEWater process is effectively pure water.
You might be interested in the coffee-table book "Infrastructure", by Brian Hayes. That's where I first learned the details about water treatment and reclamation (it also, of-course, covers many other categories of infrastructure, which are also topical on this channel).
Yes. The "Yuck Factor" is a natural and understandable visceral response, and Community Acceptance and Support is critical for water recycling to work. @10:45 the role of the media (particularly a "tame" or co-opted media) is alluded to, and it is essential for community acceptance. And photos and videos of political leader knocking back NEWater helps (tho the cynical and skeptical might wonder if they were REALLY drinking NEWater or did they get re-labelled Dasani?) My point is that in Singapore where the media works with the govt (or else!) and the role of the media is to support the govt's message (as opposed to being "The Fourth (unelected) Estate", and check the Govt, the acceptance of Recycled Water was smoother. In a more free-wheeling media environment (like say, the US), it would be tempting for media organisations to play up the Yuck Factor and other visceral/ emotional responses from the public. In such an environment, it may well be that eventually, the rational and scientific view and the undeniable purity of the process would eventually win the day (Hooray for Free Speech!), but it would be a long convoluted back and forth of allaying visceral fears and debunking myths and reassuring the safety of recycled water before it is accepted. This is actually a case study in media and govt working together (Singapore style). Singapore cannot afford a free-wheeling Fourth Estate looking to trip up the govt or airing alternate viewpoints, just because.
Here in Israel we recycle about 80% of the waste water, it is all going to agriculture, it used only recycled water or catches rain water in special pools
1:55 The got these linguistic quirks from the french language in the hundred years before 1850. They purposely filled the english language with vocals and consonants that weren't pronounced. Just to give the language the "bit" extraness.
They've proved the science works on ISS and probably will be a critical thing in the future for potable water in the future on earth and deep space exploration.
great video as usual. just to point out though, PUB is pronounced as an initialism rather than an acronym; so P-U-B rather than "pub", which is a watering hole indeed but of a rather different nature xD
Really tried to not laugh at black water but the delivery forced me. My small town and the neighboring one work together to reclaim waste water, treat and distribute it. The sole reason is since the founding of our towns, people would drill into an aquifer (about half of the properties were over it) for wells and that's how they got their water.. Many decades ago (60's) radon and arsenic was found in some parts of the aquifer as well as evidence of the aquifer collapsing as it was slowly drained so a sort of zoning board (separate from construction zoning) determined prohibiting new wells in the aquifer was the only solution. Both towns funded a pretty sizable water treatment plant with the help of the state. All new construction above the aquifer was required to install town supplied water from the treatment plant as we don't have a suitable reservoir. Many wells were also replaced with town water. The plant and mains were finished in the mid 80's. 30 years later, the aquifer has not fully stabilized but the radon/arsenic problem was solved. Suffice it to say, the sinking of the ground due to the collapsing aquifer was stopped as early as the late '90's. We have had said treated waste water on tap since we've lived here and it's perfectly good water. Sometimes smells of chloramine. It's not as delicious as the aquifer water but it also doesn't have radioactive elements dissolved in it. The plant serves over 30k people today between the two towns. Public backlash doesn't mean much when the main problem with the water is being slowly poisoned. The alternative of reclaiming and purifying waste water and mixing it with watershed water was a no-brainer. Another benefit is the hardness of the water is regulated. The cost of running the plant and distro is collected by the town from its users. The price is about the same as it would be if you had well water, the electricity to pump it, the pump maintenance and septic maintenance. Yes. That means toilet water to tap. I've been to the plant and it reeks something fierce if you stumble into it as a kid running around in the woods where you probably shouldn't be. The tanks and plumbing are absolutely massive. I have no idea what methods they use but there has never been a problem since I was a kid. Another side benefit is fire response can be significantly faster because while the town installed water distro infrastructure, they also installed fire hydrants at regular intervals so firefighters have a nearly limitless supply right next to the houses and businesses should anything light up.
In case anyone is wondering, no, the tap water here in Singapore is not cloudy or discoloured nor does it have a chemical or off taste (that I can detect anyway). It is potable straight from the tap though depending on personal preference some people still choose to boil or filter it before drinking. On a personal note, I was a teenager when Newater was being introduced to the public and remember each student receiving a little bottle of the stuff in school one day. We dared each other to be the first to drink it. It was a bit of an anti-climax when it just tasted like, well, water. 😂 I went home and told my parents about the experience, become a organic part of the PR for Newater. Today, I'm just thankful to have a clean, relatively inexpensive and consistent source of H2O at the turn of a faucet. Thanks Asianometry for the video!
I did 6 months backpacking ASEAN last year and boy was it so nice reaching Singapore halfway through the trip where I could brush my teeth in the shower and rinse without worry of getting sick lmao. It's the small things in life!
I guess the psychological impact of seeing your water be "cleaned" is enough. Compared to industrial filters, a Brita filter is like an old fence with gaping holes in it.
Main problem you didnt talk about is hormones from birth-control pills. These are extremely difficult to filter out, so no one does it. Result are wierd creatures. Who are those poor creatures formerly known as strong_men drinking feminine hormones ?
Maybe you're just used to it. 😅
We used RO water in our plant for high purity rinsing. I tasted it and it was kind of "flat" for lack of a better word.
Good water has trace minerals in it. Not a lot, but some.
RO water straight from the membrane stack has almost nothing at all in it.
Not necessarily what you want. Also the minerals are good for you.
I studied environmental engineering and reverse osmosis. The main point isn't about saving water, but about saving energy. You could run seawater through RO membranes, but at a greater energy and maintainance cost. Treated wastewater has fewer dissolved salts which means less pressure and energy is needed to push the fluid through the nano pores in the membranes. Also, sometimes the water is so pure, it's corrosive to pipes, like deionized water, and so it's mixed with raw water 🤫. It still passes regulations though.
Very good points! Although whether it's for saving water or energy is somewhat location dependent. Not all places experiencing water shortage are near the ocean like Singapore :)
That second point about it being corrosive to some pipes because if it’s pureness is freaking cool!
Guess you learn something new everyday! Thank you for these insights.
Wow, pure water can actually be corrosive? Thats a new one, always thought its was stuff in the water causing corrosion.
Then again, maybe pure water has potential energy exactly because its not poluteed into a stable state. Feels like almost nothing in nature is both stable and pure.
@@termitreter6545 Im oversimplifying, but corrosion is basically oxidation of iron, and few things oxidise better than oxygen. You could think in untreated water there's plenty of other stuff for the oxygen to stick to but when you filter water to a high purity the oxygen has nothing to stick to except the pipe - causing corrosion.
this is also a problem in regular treated water (not the high purity kind) so pipes often have a protective inner coating to prevent oxidation and also orthophosphates are mixed into the water to bind the oxygen and keep it away from the pipe. Incidentally, this was the reason for the flint water crisis, new management stopped adding orthophosphates to cut cost causing the lead pipe to corrode and leech lead into the water.
Whilst recycled water didn't catch on in most places in Australia it did end up being used in Perth the capital of Western Australia. The main reason it succeeded there was thanks to a large public information campaign to properly inform the public of how it works and why it's needed.
Did they use the same tactics as Singapore? Focus on the process, etc.
Interestingly Perth is also the easiest/ nearest major Australian city to travel to from Singapore
If 1 large farm shut down or switched to the recycled sewerage then they wouldn't need it! Agriculture and industry use immense quantities of fresh water but the public get stuck with the poo water, have to cut back on showers and get fined for watering the lawn on the wrong days...
@Xi Xi High mineral content.
The process was invented in Australia company is called memtec the really crazy thing they can’t sell it in Australia good old cultural cringe stupid politicians won’t buy it if it’s made here
Unless you knew about ultrapure water treatment, walking through the visitor centre is like going into a science museum (but water!). They had model and interactive displays of the main filtration techniques UF, RO, UV and you can even look into the treatment plant itself. Having kids go on school trips there does also help make it more normalised and acceptable in the younger generation, though we can always have the toilet water joke
I would love to visit that visitor center someday.
Well, I guess I know where I am going tomorrow. PS, I am a SG PR.
Oh yes I kinda very vaguely remember visiting the Newater center as a schoolkid. Probably 20 years ago.
I once visited a German water treatment plant for lake water => tap water. Probably far less impressive tech than here, but it was still pretty cool to see how things get made and (at least at this facility) how serious people take their job wrt water quality
Perhaps my inner chemist but drinking waste water doesn't gross me out at all assuming it's properly filtered and treated.
I bet it gets expensive filtering out all the drugs left in the water. Many medications don't break down in the body. Or you could ignore it and hope the for best.
Anyone who learned about the water cycle shouldn’t be.
@@rexmann1984 i assume that after filtering and biological processing through bacteria and chemicals such as chlorine any big molecules in the water would be broken down
@@dreckman69 I'm pretty sure it won't breakdown estrogen from birth control pills. Nothing seems to get rid of it and it's so small RO can't catch it. I'm finishing up building one of these plants right now.
My buddy works for the primary wastewater treatment facility (WWTF) for a nearby county of 1.6 million people. His WWTF outputs water that is massively cleaner than the river it’s dumped into, and they monitor basically any factor you can think of when it comes to water quality. Now, we’re in California, so that’s probably part of why it’s so regulated, but I wouldn’t be afraid to drink what comes out of those outflows.
Listen man you can't just hit me with "human poopoo and peepee" out of nowhere like that. Never thought I'd hear you say that lol
It came in like a slap in the face 😂
-eat- drink da poo poo
have you drank your human poopoo and peepee water?? just come to singapore and try it now!!
In previous years, we used to import a large percentage of our water from our neighbouring country - Malaysia. It was necessary as rainfall does not cover our residential and industrial needs, but a major source of tension. Certain Malaysia politicians often threaten to cut the water supply many times over the years, which would threaten our survival and basic needs, even though the water treaty is signed, and ratified at UN.
Singaporeans are tired of the continous threatening words and saber rattling, diplomatic pressure. So we would rather accept this purified recycled water, than bow to their pressure. Gaining water supply independance is a necessary for a country survival
the pipes are still the main supply of water, please respect your neighbours more with less denigration and xenophobia
Ehh... It is a lot more complicated than that to be honest. The agreement also includes the clause that Singapore sells purified water back to Malaysia, something which many Malaysian politicians are not happy with... Because it is more expensive than the water that Singapore buys from Malaysia. Basically in their eyes, Singapore is running a scam and selling their water back to them at a higher price. This is despite the fact that Singapore is already selling the purified water at a fraction of the cost (as the technology, manpower and energy needed to purify the water do need money as well). Malaysia also feels like the water they are selling to Singapore is too cheap, and want to raise the price if possible (hence the threats to cut off the water supply). No matter how the two countries try to debate this, there is no compromise to be had. That's why Singapore didn't renew the agreement (the last agreement will only last until 2061), since both countries feel like they are making a loss and neither are happy about it.
@@mysteriousfox88 We have no issues with Malaysians. Many of us have and good friends over there, and we like the country. In fact, we wish Malaysia to do well, as it will be better for the entire region.
It's just that certain Malaysian politicans use the issue to advance their own agenda.
We are working towards self-sufficiency, and have reduced drastically the percentage of water from Malaysia, to meet our needs.
This will be better for both countries, and healthier relationship, although it may be more costly for Singapore.
@@mysteriousfox88 Get richer faster lol
You still do though. The actual point of contention you conveniently left out is how you didn't want to renegotiate the import rate even as inflation goes on. It doesn't help that Malaysia's currency slumped after it withdrew from the mutual price pegs, due to its own doing.
Having PUB's pipes becoming long no-go zones slicing up JB is also hampering JB's own development.
I've spent extended business trips to Singapore and Malaysia, and I would love to return now that I am retired. I had a great time there, and would love to share it with my wife.
My main concern about waste water becoming tap water directly boils down to whom is running the purification plant. Since in the video you did a parallel to the USA I point several failures that they had in recent years regarding water treatment (Flint's case comes to mind). If you can mismanage a fairly simple plant (compared to a plant that does R.O.) imagine the trouble for the public if a plant like newater starts putting out contaminated water!
It'd be a problem for municipal bodies like those in the US, but since this is Singapore PUB is a national government body and messing up the newater plants would immediately become a national matter.
That is true. Such a plant needs to be planned and funded well. As long as no politicians have the brilliant idea of cutting funds there should be no problems.
I get the feeling that people who freak out about recycled water believe that all the water going through their pipes is from some pristine river with water safe to drink.
@@mrniceguy7168 That is actually my point, I barely trust my water utility to treat water from a river nearby and deliver it to me safe to drink let alone treat my waste water and then return it to me again and again. The risks involving the first option are way less than the second option if you mess things up. Simpler in this case is better.
@@VMFRDah, but the difference is that because Singapore is a city state (a small place). I bet the people who manage it. Actually drink the water too. Or they got friends or family that drink it. So they have large incentive to manage it as best as they could.
Edit: or even their politician boss family and friends drink it too.
They gave us bottles of NEWater in school, when I was less than 10 years old. You can taste a slightly more intense bitter-ish "dryness" than other bottled water brands, honestly I've come to associate NEWater as water that's purer than the portable water from our taps.
At least you can take portable water along with you.
Unlike fixed water.
It tastes like that most likely because theres no salts or minerals in NEWater since the processes remove absolutely everything from the water, if I recall correctly, they add in a tiny amount of minerals back in the water after it has been cleaned
A healthy level of trust in institutions would help too, I imagine. The bad press only needs to remind people (or just enough of their reading audience) of their anxieties and distrust, and their own imagination handles the rest of the fud.
A health distrust in government
Yes. Though it's helps to have institutions that deserve that trust.
(As an anecdote: when I reported my bike stolen a few months ago, the Singapore police not only cared, they actually got it back to me within a week. And it wasn't even a fancy bike.
Of course, this being Singapore, no one actually steals bikes. It turned out that a moving company had accidentally moved it halfway through town.)
@ It does
@ lucky for you, but there's still people who steal.
There's a reason why Singapore police has a promo called "low crime doesn't mean no crime".
It just takes the opportunity cost to have your stuff stolen.
you dont even need trust, thats why scientific studies are done, they literally prove that there is nothing wrong with UV blasted reverse osmosis, and that your faucet is probably dirtier than the entire facility.
as a singaporean who was taught about newater during schooling years, i say the campaign was highly effective. even though i knew that newater was treated sewage water, i trust the quality of its treatment process, and am willing to drink water from newater, even if they taste weird or if they hardly reach the consumer market in the first place.
We pronounced the abbreviation of PUB by it's individual letters. P.U.B. We don't call it "Pub" here. Though it does make for an interesting word play considering I can see how it's our national watering hole.
I always pronounce our trains as 'm(e)rt'. But it hasn't caught on.
he also pronounces W.H.O as who.. but didnt do the same with EPA
Exactly, living there since young my dad who was certified in plumbing told me, as someone not born in Singapore, how obsessive and wasteful it is to turn the waste water back to be practically no different from distilled water in composition. And how they could have reduced the layers by quite a fair share and still be perfectly safe to drink--making the overkill pointless if it's diluted back into the mains supply as it exits the plant.
Not to mention how Singapore flushes its toilets. It uses the same freshwater mains as the taps you can drink from (in Hong Kong where he was born, there were saltwater mains drawing from the sea to the toilets. Separate set of challenges with corrosion and complexity of course). To him that is an incredible waste of potable water--all that money spent on turning pisswater back to distilled, only to flush it straight down again to be pisswater.
We used to sometimes save up bathtub water for a day to flush the toilet with--not because we couldn't afford to flush, but because trying our best to reduce blatant wastage is a virtue.
It is important to remember that in many ecosystems, waste water is the main fresh water source for the area. Here in the San Francisco South Bay Area, the treated sewage we dump into the bay is critical to flushing old stagnant and polluted water out the Golden Gate and into the ocean. Without the significant flow of waste water the South Bay is a big bathtub. As the tide goes out, the water flows north, but not out the Golden Gate. When the tide comes back in, the same water flows back south. Back and forth, back and forth. During spring, summer and fall it is the waste water that pushes the stagnant water out to the mouth of the bay. Only during the winter rain do we any significant creek flow. Even then, creek water is minimal except during wet rain years. We have dams and ground water recharge basins to trap the rain water for the summer months.
So yes, we can capture some waste water for irrigation or drinking water, but not too much else we risk turning the South Bay into a stinking, polluted lake.
I used to work in San Jose and Milpitas. While the Bay Area was pretty good at minimizing the obvious waste (trash, untreated water) entering the Bay's waters, there remain several unavoidable factors:
#1) Landfill: Most people don't know that that the Bay is less than HALF its original size. Urbanization and industrialization claimed a lot of it, especially in the south, while even more was filled for agricultural development in the north and delta areas (Novato, Napa, Suisun, etc.) Who knows what was buried in this porous material over 170+ years that eventually leaches into the Bay.
#2) Population and population distribution: The Bay Area has over 7.5 million residents, along with over 5,000 technology firms. If you use the entry to the Bay as the dividing line between north and south, roughly 3/4 of that population exists south of the Bay's entry. So, the issue of contaminants is correspondingly greater there.
#3) Shallow waters in the south: Much of the south Bay is quite shallow, which limits the efficiency of a pulsating, tidal flow. It is so shallow that decades ago, a large chunk of the south Bay was used by the Leslie salt company for giant evaporation ponds. A tractor would just grade dirt to cordon off a few thousand acres of the Bay to enclose it and let it dry. If Leslie still exists today, it will be a small fraction of its original size due to the added landfill used to expand the size of Hayward, Newark and other towns.
#4) Rivers: The south Bay has far less rivers of significant size flowing into it than the north Bay. So the south just has less natural flow to aid flushing
Due to so much of the Bay Area's development being built on landfill, it poses a lot of problems both with regards to seismic events (liquefaction, amplified motion) as well as rising sea levels. I don't know how they'll be able to address the latter, but tens of $billions$ are being planned in attempts to do so.
I remember when there was a big debate here in Australia about using treated water. You even managed to pronounce Toowoomba correctly - I'm amazed. It is a town that's famous for not having the most cosmopolitan people - I guess you could compare Queensland to Florida in terms of how the rest of the nation looks at it. Perth built two huge desalination plants and has almost completed a third, but Western Australia is quite different to the rest of the nation. They are very against privatising any government assets and are a very, very rich state that invests a lot in infrastructure. It's one of the reasons why Australia has two gas markets - WA keeps a portion of the LNG it produces for its own consumption that keeps gas prices very low, whereas the Eastern states just privatise everything and end up paying a fortune for resources they produce themselves, as they have to buy it on the international market.
Thames: English placename pronunciation is even more irregular than the actual language
Bazalgette: Bazzle-Jet
That’s because a lot of them at Celtic, Latinized Celtic and Old Norse.
@@kokofan50 also despite its numerous influences and loanwords from various languages, modern English removed some letters/diphthongs from words and from its alphabet.
@@PainterVierax There's an interesting linguistic phenomenon in the English language, called, "The Great Vowel Shift." I implore you to search this up both, in here and on Google Search.
To add on, (I think) most Singapore primary school organise learning trips to the new water visitor centres! It does help with the education part
Yea I still remember that one trip to the sewage treatment plant back during primary school
Singapore ran an effective campaign to overcome ignorance: easier when one has a well-educated population. Imagine dealing with a product of the Arkansas education system doing his/her "own research" on this.
no it's the lack of education of the media. they don't know anything about science or engineering . how many breakthrough stories do we get where they say we have cured cancer yet the truth is completely different when you find out about the details.
Plenty of people in Arkansas have reason not to trust their goverment and local institution about this.
plenty of people in Arkansas cant read shit because they should have all coalesced in libraries and pubmed archives, but ended up listening to infowars podcasts
thus the only conclusion you can draw is that they cant read shit
@@RK-cj4oc No trust in institutions -> The institutions can't work properly -> even less trust. It's a vicious circle, and it sucks not being able to trust in your local government. Of course I am not saying you to trust something untrustworthy. But I will say it as a warning to the people in countries where the trust in institutions is slowly decreasing: Do something about the problems instead of letting it get worse!
PS: I have no idea about the Arkansas education system or other institutions, so I don't know whether distrust is justified or not there.
@@entcraft44 American governments have more in common with third world countries in regards to corruption and cover ups. Flint Michigan still doesn't have clean water and the federal attempt at brushing the Ohio toxic train event under the rug come to mind just regarding water.
There is a video here by Practical Engineering about the San Antonio water system has purple water piping for semi treated water that is ok for gardening etc but not clean enough to drink.
I think they pronounce it "TEMS" because that's how King George the First, who could not speak English well, pronounced it, and since what the King says it right, that how it's been pronounced since.
In any event, this was a fascinating video. Thank you for posting it.
in French it's named "Tamise", which probably comes from the original native pronunciation.
Colour me skeptical on that one..
Why would that only apply to the Thames, and not to 'ze' language in general? (Germans have a hard time pronouncing th, so they would pronounce 'the' as 'ze' or 'zee'.)
No, the pronunciation with a t is original. The spelling with "th" is later because scribes thought the word came from Greek and "corrected" the spelling.
Fun fact, when me and my Mom was on the process of being a Singapore citizen, you have to do a few activity and one of them was visiting the New water treatment plant.
Human perception is super interesting. We won’t drink filtered water but we’ll serve food using the same tongs that touched the raw steak a second ago. As long as we don’t understand, we’ll feel safe
Some cultures eat raw meat just fine. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mett
That's an FDA violation. Gordon Ramsay would instantly 86 that place if he finds out.
@ raw meat that's edible has to come from freshly killed animals. Otherwise, things start growing in it. Not the stuff you get at the supermarket. As the wiki article states:
"the German Lebensmittelhygiene-Verordnung ("food hygiene/health directive") permits mett to be sold only on the day of production."
Hearing you say poopoo and peepee absolutely demolished my brain. Never in a million years would I have expected this. 2:45
As someone who's lived rural for almost his entire life, I'm reluctant to even go near town water that ISN'T from waste reclamation. Not when I've been blessed with good ol' fashioned rain water from the tank that I still boil before consuming. I'm even fortunate to live where there's quality bore water you can drink as well but regardless of all this I understand the importance of being able to reuse water and this is especially true for irrigation. Sure, I could argue that what Australia really needs is more dams, when all too often we see so much wasted potential every year when the vast majority of flood water goes straight out to sea. The desalination plant projects of the past sure were expensive lessons in idiocy, too, but as the years go by I find myself far more open to anything that can keep the tap running, so long as it's safe and cost effective. Same goes for a lot of things, though. Especially power.
I worked at an ice rink and it was there I learned just how effective simple treatment systems could be. Our facility collected rainwater into cisterns and treated it with a small reverse-osmosis system before filling a clean reservoir that was then heated and used to flood the ice rink. Every day we would take measurements with a basic TDS meter and aimed for a reading of 0ppm. We would send periodic samples to lab for testing and the results were far, far better than anything that came out of the tap. When I asked the technician if it was safe to drink the water, he explained that we actually used the same system to treat water for our concession stands, the only difference being those systems had a UV treatment step to kill any remaining virus or bacteria. Other than that, he said, it would be similar to de-ionized (which we used before we got the RO system) or distilled water in that most of the minerals get filtered out. I kind of realized at that point that water is just water.
I always thought it was weird that public perception of "pure" water comes from a glacier or some freshwater spring in the mountains but I suppose that is a product of advertising. I think back to Coca-Cola's PR disaster when they attempted to launch Dasani in the UK.
As someone who lives near some of the largest freshwater lakes in the world, I never considered the impact of desalination on the treatment of drinking water as I always assumed that treated wastewater would simply be reclaimed or stored in a freshwater reservoir for further treatment.
The problem with Dasani was that it was regular tap water with added contaminants sold at a huge markup.
@@katrinabryce right, I was just making the point that advertising and marketing a product like water as somehow special or exotic is kind of silly. In Dasani's case, filtered tap water sold at a premium.
I live in San Antonio, Texas and I didn't realize recycled water wasn't used in more places. Here you can also buy compost and natgas that are also from the recycling process. Here in Texas the recycled water isn't sent directly to tap but it ends up there because it's used in farmland and golf courses which refill the underground reservoir. I guess that explains why our water is so cheap compared to other states despite not having as much nearby freshwater.
There are more uses for water, not only drinking water. And there are other waste sources, not only black water from toilets. Why use black water for drinking water (recycling the worst towards the best)
I don't care for poo or pee. I care for recycling hormones and medicine. If you recycle them over and over the concentration rises. Hard to extract
@@JasperKlijndijk Makes sense, wasn't aware of the medicine but that does seem like a problem. I suppose that's why black water is used indirectly for drinking via commercial and industrial use that then refills the aquafer below.
@@SmileyBMM don't buy that 'hormones' misinformation. Waste water treatment remove hormones too
All waste water will eventually refill the reservoir
@@JasperKlijndijk It is NOT a problem. Hormones and Medecine absolutely get filtered out when using reverse osmosis. That's just a common conspiracy nut theory
11:45 California should've owned "Toilet-to-tap". Come out and say that the refining process can turn toilet water cleaner than the water you get from your sink.
“There’s no proof that the water is free from all contaminants”
Microscopes, light spectrums, and all other sorts of lab equipment: “Am I a joke to you ?”
Public trust is pretty easy to obtain, but potentially very expensive: offer members of the public the ability to come in at any time to test water from the public system at several infrastructure locations. This would cost a lot because you'd have to staff the locations 24/7 and make them attractive and safe for the public to enter. And if anyone's on-site testing reveals contamination over regulatory limits, there's a $5000 bounty for that person and a $500 local tax credit for every adult who has a residential address (an active lease or home owner) in the entire water district. The district has 3 days to get the water back below regulation before anyone else can claim on a test visit.
At first you'll have a line out the door with every dirtbag BSer trying to play what amounts to a lottery ticket. There is of course no requirement to put visitors through quickly, so people could be waiting a dozen hours in line. You'll have tons of people trying to contaminate their own on-site tests. But after a while you'll get past this situation once everyone realizes the tests always come up under regulation and nobody can ever trigger the bounty. Eventually it'll just be the diehard wackos showing up every day.
That said, I don't understand why the treated effluent can't be used exclusively for agriculture and industry, if it's clean enough to drink. Domestic water consumption is a tiny fraction of water use. Don't convince people; just route the treated wastewater around them.
Well if it's good enough for the Wafer fabs near my home in Singapore, it's good enough for drinking. Although Newater doesn't taste as good as tap water because, surprise surprise!!! There's less dissolved stuff like salt in it! Which is why a lot of it is dumped into the reservoirs for it to mix with rainwater catchment to get re-mineralised and for bacteria to get rid of any remaining impurities.
Ironically, tap water is less pure than Newater. Having drank Newater, I can say that I prefer our tap water more. (Same reason I prefer Evian mineral water to other brands, lots of dissolved stuff.)
I drink it direct from the tap or through a chlorine filter without boiling. That's how safe Singapore tap water is. There is NO reason to use another filter with Singapore tap water unless you want to remove the floride due to health reasons.
The only reason you'd want to boil the water is to get rid of the chlorine, and also the bacteria & fungus that lives on the tap or faucet opening. This usually comes from cross-contamination when you wash your raw food and dishes in the sink.
So yes, Newater is mostly accepted in Singapore because it's safe and it's better to be self-reliant.
You might also want to boil water to get rid of dissolved gases.
(When drinking water straight up, I prefer it from the tap, because of the dissolved gases. But someone else might have different taste preferences.)
You might also want to 'filter' your water to change its pH. Changing the pH is not really a matter of filtering, but the domestic machines for fiddling with pH also filter the water.
You might also want to make your water softer, because that changes how tea and coffee taste.
@Zaydan Alfariz it's to give people choice.
To me, one big lesson from Singapore NEWater is to build really good communication and confidence to the public
a realistic use for the reclaimed toilet water is irrigation and outdoor cleaning..
just that, it would require a parallel water delivery system....
2:50 best part
What a well informed video! It is rare to watch videos about Singapore that avoid common cliches, and sums-up with detail how smart the government can be at educating people about specific set of issues to ultimately bring something good.
In the early days lots called it Poo Water. Whatever Singapore sets out to do ... almost always gets done VERY well. World class airport and so on. It’s largely thanks to the leadership (legacy) of LKY and his focus on meritocracy.
@elfrjz I’ve lived & worked in Indonesia for 30+ years. My first time to Singapore was in 1979 and since then all my passports have by far mostly Singapore chops. As of my work taking me to so many places in I’sia I’ve heard from dozens of I’sian domestic workers that Singapore is far better than getting stuck in the Middle East. 15 years ago in Jordan I seen for myself an I’sian lady that was a virtually a slave. I wanted to report this and soon found out that could get me into hot soup.
Over 10 years ago my county in the Atlanta suburbs built a huge new sewer treatment plant. Odor control and biological filtration were emphasized. The plant manager announced to the press that any day they could visit the plant and he would drink a glass of the finished filtered water. Several years later we built a pipeline to return the water to the lake where we get our drinking water from. Tests prove that the return water is cleaner than the lake water. This was very helpful when there was a drought and lake levels were low.
Very interesting to see how P.U.B engaged with public relations before and during project exception.
Quick correction, San Diego CA, is still going forward with their "Pure Water San Diego" project and has actively started construction. Thanks for you the video!
Dude im so hyped to see this channel growing so much asianometry is sooooo good
A key issue that wasn't discussed was Hormones and hormone disrupting chemicals.
I have no doubt that the facilities can filter out human waste etc. to the point of it being indistinguishable from regular tap water. What concerns me is the hard to filter out stuff, like aforementioned hormones, medicines and other chemicals. Women on birth control, for example, have a massively increased amount of estrogen in their urine, which is extremely hard to filter out. That will just end up in the tap water again.
Like some other commenters have mentioned, is that hormones and other pharmaceuticals are relatively large molecules compared to H2O. So they are filtered by the reverse osmosis process.
4:21 - using treated waste water (non-potable) for irrigation hardly qualifies as "wasting" - in fact it saves "clean natural water" that can be used, with less expense and simpler processing for producing tap water, and secondly any phosphorus or nitrogen (its compounds) still present in the treated waste water can be used by plants - so double win. (After all, irrigating fields with crops is also necessary, and so is irrigating parks.)
Also, I remember plans (in S'pore) from around '93-'94 about using sea water or treated post-industrial water for toilet flushing (it is quite wasteful to use tap water to flush out your poop and pee) but the trials decided it's too much trouble. You'd need not only separate water system (pipes) but also those pipes couldn't be made of typical materials like cast/ ductile iron as that water was pretty corrosive (as for water, that is) - so PVC or stainless steel only (PP "hot welded" piping wasn't really available back then).
So, long story short, they gave it up back then, but who knows, it may resurface some day. However, a working "two waters system" - in US - is presented in the video "The Most Mindblowing Infrastructure in My City" (which is San Antonio, Texas) by Practical Engineering channel: ruclips.net/video/Y_729CQdG50/видео.html
Also, for anyone more interested about details of water purification there's another video by this guy, "What Sewage Treatment and Brewing Have in Common", ruclips.net/video/sUoO_U_GWFo/видео.html
And, finally, that "toilet to tap scenario" is IN FACT taking place in many places already, all over the world...
Q: What Oxford and London have in common? Or Ingolstadt, Linz, Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest and Belgrade?
A: Common rivers - Thames and Danube, respectively.
Very good, me boy! So, where does the "effluent" from Oxford, or Linz, Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest (and so on) goes? And where those cities take their water from? Yes, the very same water they treat and pump as tap water? And where do they dump their (why, treated of course!) effluent?
"Pass the water, please", eh? ;-)
Engineer in the water/wastewater industry here. I don't have specific figures to site, but one of the appeals of producing reclaimed wastewater rather than simply desalinating seawater is that, based on the parameters of how much dissolved and suspended solids are in either, wastewater is actually easier to treat than ocean water, requiring less energy through reverse osmosis. Specific figures for comparison are impossible to spitball because every community has vastly different wastewater characteristics. My main point though is that ocean water is often seen an a less attractive feed source than wastewater from an engineering perspective, hence these reuse projects.
This probably wouldn't work for everyone, but what sells me on recycled water is this kind of technology is absolutely critical to any hopes of long-term space exploration. I also think the process would be made infinitely easier with nuclear reactors that can effectively distill any water in the last stage using waste heat, though in practice that would likely lead to even more public opposition from people who don't understand how reactors work.
I used to work in the office at our local wastewater treatment plant. Our unifficial slogan was 'your shit is our bread and butter'.
The purification process of waste water requires passing a mixture of waste water and raw water from the reservior through microfiltration and then reverse osmosis. Microfiltration can remove particles as small as bacteria but not virus. Dissolved substances and virus are removed during the reverse osmosis process.
For most other countries, the drinking water do not go through reverse osmosis. Thus the dissolved chemical substances present in the raw water are not removed.
I remember the good ol days when Newater was first introduced to us in class (we were still young and relatively unlearnt in this tech). Most of us were disgusted by the thought of drinking (poo, pee etc). Personally never got past that barrier until some years later.
English guy here. Bazalgette is pronounced basil-jet, or basil jet. Sounds like 2 words basil (the herb) and jet. I assume from spelling has French origin, not sure how the the French would pronounce that surname.
It will be pronounced quite similarly in French (and yes it's a French name) except "basil" will be bazal (both "a" pronounced as simple /a/ vowels) and "jet" will be a simple /ʒ/ consonant, not the /dʒ/ diphthong. English likes to overcomplicate pronunciations.
Reverse osmosis cleans all the impurities out, so you are just left with water. Some say though the natural water is better for drinking because it has many trace elements which the body benefits from. Plants also benefit from these, known in agriculture as micronutrients.
What tipped the acceptance scales was a chip company needing ultra pure water was getting it from them as well. I would trust a company with my water if they had an ability to do that.
I’m gushing with delight that you have flooded this video with water puns spilling everywhere.
Well I spent two months there last year drinking the tap water and never had a clue, so I’d figure it’s perfectly fine from a taste and safety perspective
Simples, route the domestic/commercial treated water to industrial use. Route the treated industrial waste water to agriculture/hydroponics. Lastly make sure to have surplus agriculture water to flush the soil to avoid salinisation.
Using "dirty" water is so important.
Also helping with the groundwater table.
Nearby Darmstadt in germany there is a groundwater infiltration fertility. There they clean up water from the rhine river to a degree they can purposfully let the water sip into the groundwater table to replenish it.
I feel like all water which was pumped from the ground must be cleaned up to a degree that we can pump it into the ground again. We need such circles.
> must be cleaned up to a degree that we can pump it into the ground again
normal wastewater treatment is already that. we don't usually directly discharge into the ground but into the rivers. all depends on where you pull the raw water from. if it's from aquifers it makes sense to return it back down to recharge it.
@@mfaizsyahmi > this isn't 4chan
Stop commenting on everything and go outside 😂🤡
Las Vegas, Nevada draws most of its water from the Lake Mead reservoir. All of its wastewater is treated and returned to the reservoir. I haven't verified this, but supposedly the water going back into Lake Mead is cleaner than the water they took out. Naturally some of that water is going to make its way back into the municipal water system, as well as anyone down river from Lake Mead.
"Riveting stuff."
Oh god the delivery. I love you more and more with each vid.
We have been drinking our wastewater for years in Orange County in Southern California. They first put the osmotic flow into lakes, where it reaches the aquifer, and gets pumped up in wells that serve the cities.
The recycled water is the cheapest option. We pay to import the water. We also pay to treat it, before it goes into the ocean. So we pay one more time, and we don't have to pay again to import some more.
You know, there's a problem in recycled water (I don't know the dimension nor how widespread it is): medicine metabolytes accumulation in the reservoirs. The person who told me about it is an specialist and notice that the subject was being researched at the time (2010s).
Consider adding a link to the other Singapore water video in the desc
Wait, this is unusual? I live in three American Midwest, we know the treatment plant is putting clean water back into the system and grey water for whatever people want to use grey water for.
we started to recycle water here in melbourne Australia during the big long drought,very few houses in test suburbs got a purple tap to be used for watering the garden not drinking the whole thing fell out of favor when the drought broke ???
as a child visitor tourist to singapore around maybe 2 decades ago, i vaguely remember going through some sort of tunnel museum thing and being given bottles of water and as a small child, i didnt know what it was or what was so special about it and didnt understand what the place was about. i guess maybe it was some sort of place trying to convince people the treated wastewater was good
When your neighbours hold you ransom for decades over water supply issues to the point that you had to secretly standby your armies to secure the tap, it is not that difficult to convince your people that recycled water is more palatable than being held hostage or going to war.
Awesome video but slight correction. California does use its recycled water for drinking. They do it just like Singapore through blending. In California it's called indirect potable reuse.
I was in Singapore for a week and my hotel had a sign in the washroom saying tap water is drinkable and there's no need to buy additional water bottles.
I was really shocked by how tasty the water was.
People seem to think that the water out of the tap hasn't already been been through thousands of guts and urine tracts before in the past 2-3 billion years. Reclaimed water is fine if done professionally.
50 years ago in London, I remember a radio programme saying that its water typically recycling around 13 times! And yet its water constantly scored very highly on its taste!
One time here in NZ, at the regional town of ~5000 I remember having poured water from the tap that tasted and smelt like sewerage, instead of using our pure aquifer for drinking its used for the now burgeoning avocado industry while the town geta recycled. I suppose its taste was especially stark compared to the rain water we had on the farm
LKY tasked early years, the permanent secretary "Mr. Lee Ek Tieng" and then Engineer "Tan Gwee Paw" to perform this special duty. As Lee Kuan Yew asserted, all policies must bow to the liquid of life.
Being a Malaysian, no wonder I am seeing less of the ultra nationalist Malay politicians threatening to cut off water supply to Singapore . As with wide adoption and acceptance of treated sewerage and industrial waste water coupled with desalination plants, it is possible to achieve self reliance on water without relying on supply from Malaysia. Kudos to Singapore effort over the years.
I always noted with irony that many Malaysian politicians laugh at Singapore for drinking at our own piss and shit water, yet, water shortages are so common in KL and Selangor.
The new water is not used as potable water. Though it is very safe to drink. A pilot plant was built (400 Cubic meters /hour) For the first few years, the new water was used for the needs of a golf course near the plant and later mixed with a local reservoir. Scientists from many countries were asked to analyze the quality on-line and give out any recommendations. After a few more plants were built, the water is being sold to local FABS. This high quality (clean) water saves a lot of cost on filtration in these FABS. This water is not mixed with the PUB water, which only filters water coming from rivers of Malaysia. However, for those who want to taste the tasteless water, the bottled NEW water is available free of charge at a few government places. Regards.
very interesting from both the technical and public perception angles. thank you for the work and then sharing.
13:45 "geyser of engagement......communication dribbles on"
When I first moved to Singapore, the other foreign students asked if it was ok to drink the tap water. The locals simply replied "the army drinks tap". If it's good enough for their army, should be good enough for us too.
…the US army handled Agent Orange without PPE…
Newater is ultrapure and piped directly to tge semi conductor plant. Its too pure for human consumption so it is first dumped into reservoirs then drawn from there
when I was younger I would drink the water when I would shower obviously it depends on the cleanliness of the pipes but all forms of tap water in singapore are exteremly safe to drink
Recycled waste water is used in tons of applications. Obviously more complex/expensive than some other methods, but it's interesting to see it done on such a large scale instead of say, a ship/ISS.
Thanks for covering this! Locally, we read "PUB" by each alphabet "P-U-B" instead of "pub" the drinking place.
i remember in its early days seeing a poster with the distinctive silhoutte of the vodka bottle which is actually the rim of a squat toilet bowl viewed from above and the words "Absolute Newater" or similar 😂
I think the history of water rationing also did play a part in public acceptance towards NEWater. Both sides of the causeway echoed Singapore's dependency on imported water, and NEWater was necessary for the nation's survivability. The public accepted it was poo or die. Also it was part of the education syllabus and the water is actually discharged into the reservoir because it is thought to be "too clean (lacking minerals)" for direct consumption.
Although an interesting follow up topic is the Hyflux fraud, a beloved Singaporean company who was in the business of wastewater treatment.
Belgium is been doing this for a few decades now without telling anybody.
Isn’t the Orange County CA aquifer (purported to be among the world’s largest) partially recharged with reclaimed water injected into the cleansing water table? Also, isn’t its size due to being charged from the adjoining Pacific Ocean, as well as from San Gabriel/San Bernardino mountain range melts?
Many interesting videos on this channel. Thank you for making them.
Throughout this video, you refer to "new water", but in multiple images it looks like the name is spelled "NEWater" as in "any water", which might be more appropriate given the context of the product.
Hi, Singaporean here. :) "NEWater" in Singapore is we pronounce is "new water". so yeah, he is pronouncing it right for this case... (But his pronunciation for PAP, PUB & WHO are off though. These 3 should not be pronounced as pap, pub & who, but the alphabets "P" "A" "P", "P" "U" "B" & "W" "H" "O")
"Poo poo and pee pee" My 9 year old laughed out loud and demanded I replay that part of the video.
Las Vegas treats 100% waste water and puts it back in lake mead. Thats also the water supply.
And that 100% means 100%. There is no secondary system to release non potable water. The water compact requires the water released into the wash that goes to the lake to be clean enough to drink.
Many places using a river or ground water aquifers are able to release a % of untreated water. Vegas has to treat it before it goes to the end user and treat it again before releasing it.
Now that I know why Boracay Island, the famous resort island in the Philippines, was ordered to be closed for a year (before the pandemic).
I can't speak for other countries but the water that leaves waste treatment plants is above the minimum drinking quality, it just doesn't taste nice. It would be interesting to know how the taste is improved, I guess it could be from natural filtering when it's reintroduced to water courses, or just the fact it's diluted with non waste water.
I've got to tell you about a misconception I had as a kid. For some reason, when I learned about wastewater treatment plants, I thought that essentially every city reused their own wastewater, and it simply got processed and then pumped into the freshwater pipes of the city. *Every city.* I don't know how I got that impression, but later in life when I learned that this was exceedingly rare and would make front page news if a city even proposed it, I thought everyone was over reacting. In my book, it was hard to imagine a world where cities drank fresh water, so it took me some time to unpack and think like a normal person!
0:31 god that meme format. its been ages.
Curious if Pharmaceuticals get removed in this process - if anyone knows. Another great video thank you.
Main problem you didnt talk about is hormones from birth-control pills. These are extremely difficult to filter out, so no one does it. Result are wierd creatures. Who are those poor creatures formerly known as strong_men drinking feminine hormones ?
@@gg.youlubeatube6249 This effect is more apparent in amphibians that are sensitive to changes in the water they live. Yes, like the "gay" frogs. I imagine it must have some effect in humans too just like microplastics
Yes, hormones are removed. Reverse osmosis removes everything that isn't H2O.
@@gg.youlubeatube6249 hormones are relatively large molecules compared to H2O. So what you mentioned is incorrect. Hormones, pharmaceuticals are removed. What you get from the NEWater process is effectively pure water.
reverse osmosis does filter those out.
I think Windhoek in Namibia pretty much runs on reclaimed water.
Just the phrase 'used water' makes my mind so much more at ease. Incredible campaign.
You might be interested in the coffee-table book "Infrastructure", by Brian Hayes. That's where I first learned the details about water treatment and reclamation (it also, of-course, covers many other categories of infrastructure, which are also topical on this channel).
Yes. The "Yuck Factor" is a natural and understandable visceral response, and Community Acceptance and Support is critical for water recycling to work. @10:45 the role of the media (particularly a "tame" or co-opted media) is alluded to, and it is essential for community acceptance. And photos and videos of political leader knocking back NEWater helps (tho the cynical and skeptical might wonder if they were REALLY drinking NEWater or did they get re-labelled Dasani?)
My point is that in Singapore where the media works with the govt (or else!) and the role of the media is to support the govt's message (as opposed to being "The Fourth (unelected) Estate", and check the Govt, the acceptance of Recycled Water was smoother. In a more free-wheeling media environment (like say, the US), it would be tempting for media organisations to play up the Yuck Factor and other visceral/ emotional responses from the public. In such an environment, it may well be that eventually, the rational and scientific view and the undeniable purity of the process would eventually win the day (Hooray for Free Speech!), but it would be a long convoluted back and forth of allaying visceral fears and debunking myths and reassuring the safety of recycled water before it is accepted.
This is actually a case study in media and govt working together (Singapore style). Singapore cannot afford a free-wheeling Fourth Estate looking to trip up the govt or airing alternate viewpoints, just because.
Nice
Here in Israel we recycle about 80% of the waste water, it is all going to agriculture, it used only recycled water or catches rain water in special pools
1:55 The got these linguistic quirks from the french language in the hundred years before 1850. They purposely filled the english language with vocals and consonants that weren't pronounced. Just to give the language the "bit" extraness.
They've proved the science works on ISS and probably will be a critical thing in the future for potable water in the future on earth and deep space exploration.
"Good enough for astronauts to drink" sounds like a good persuasion slogan actually.
great video as usual.
just to point out though, PUB is pronounced as an initialism rather than an acronym; so P-U-B rather than "pub", which is a watering hole indeed but of a rather different nature xD
Haha this bothered me so much. Thanks.
Really tried to not laugh at black water but the delivery forced me. My small town and the neighboring one work together to reclaim waste water, treat and distribute it. The sole reason is since the founding of our towns, people would drill into an aquifer (about half of the properties were over it) for wells and that's how they got their water.. Many decades ago (60's) radon and arsenic was found in some parts of the aquifer as well as evidence of the aquifer collapsing as it was slowly drained so a sort of zoning board (separate from construction zoning) determined prohibiting new wells in the aquifer was the only solution. Both towns funded a pretty sizable water treatment plant with the help of the state. All new construction above the aquifer was required to install town supplied water from the treatment plant as we don't have a suitable reservoir. Many wells were also replaced with town water. The plant and mains were finished in the mid 80's. 30 years later, the aquifer has not fully stabilized but the radon/arsenic problem was solved. Suffice it to say, the sinking of the ground due to the collapsing aquifer was stopped as early as the late '90's. We have had said treated waste water on tap since we've lived here and it's perfectly good water. Sometimes smells of chloramine. It's not as delicious as the aquifer water but it also doesn't have radioactive elements dissolved in it. The plant serves over 30k people today between the two towns.
Public backlash doesn't mean much when the main problem with the water is being slowly poisoned. The alternative of reclaiming and purifying waste water and mixing it with watershed water was a no-brainer. Another benefit is the hardness of the water is regulated. The cost of running the plant and distro is collected by the town from its users. The price is about the same as it would be if you had well water, the electricity to pump it, the pump maintenance and septic maintenance. Yes. That means toilet water to tap. I've been to the plant and it reeks something fierce if you stumble into it as a kid running around in the woods where you probably shouldn't be. The tanks and plumbing are absolutely massive. I have no idea what methods they use but there has never been a problem since I was a kid. Another side benefit is fire response can be significantly faster because while the town installed water distro infrastructure, they also installed fire hydrants at regular intervals so firefighters have a nearly limitless supply right next to the houses and businesses should anything light up.
Just shows that the measure of how good an idea is, is how well you can sell it.
9:04 Any else see the water reclamation pant and think of Star Trek Voyager and the elder grounds keeper?
9:00 better illustrates the point. I could swear I've seen it in Voyager and DS9.