Getting Over Yuck: Water Recycling (re-post)

Getting over yuck: moving from psychological to cultural and sociotechnical analyses of responses to water recycling
Volume 11 Number 1: Official Journal of the World Water Council
S. Russell and C. Lux

Written by TJ Dahlke

This article addressed the history of the public’s disgust towards recycling water. It started by going through the history of the public disgust or, “yuck,” factor. This has been proven through research of the public view of water recycling. It has been opposed to not only because of what has happened to the water before treatment, but due to the human emotion of not wanting to feel like an animal and using other sources of water. Another thing that goes with using recycled water is the thought that there may be pathogens and other transmissible diseases in it that could have potential to enter a person’s system and affect them. These reasons are the main points laid out in the paper toward public discourse.

Recycled water is a reality in many parts of the world due to shortages of fresh water for drinking. This forces them to use other sources of water for purposes that don’t involve eating or drinking, such as showering, toilet water and spigot water. In the U.S. it seems that people can’t get over using treated water for these purposes because of our phobia towards water that may have had excrement in it previously. This should not concern us seeing as treated water is as clean as most of the cities’ tap water that so many people ingest on a daily basis. Water used for these other sources would then simply be re-circulated within this system and have the water used for drinking and food purposes introduced into it.

The only real setback that I feel people would really oppose is the introduction of more piping into their homes. This could come at a significant cost to the individual, whether through taxation with city implementation, or having to pay for the installation of the pipes into their own home. This initially would be a large undertaking by the city due to placing new piping throughout the municipality and would result in closed streets and angered citizens. However, it should decrease the costs of water to the citizens and have less of a taxing on the water table in the community.

Once the work is complete the community would have less of an impact on the water table, and be able to reuse water rather than dump treated water into a nearby surface water source.