Here’s a look at Tampa Bay’s reclaimed water, and the future of reuse
Experts say utilizing reclaimed water is a vital way to keep up with Tampa Bay’s growing population and water needs. Tampa Bay is rapidly growing, with estimates that the region's population will increase by nearly 1.5 million by 2050, and the region needs to provide more water for its drinking supply. The use of reclaimed water, which is highly treated wastewater, is typically used by residents to water their lawns or gardens and by businesses to cool equipment. However, some argue that it is a beneficial and cheaper option to supplement the area’s water supply, while others struggle to overcome the “ick factor.” Reclaimed water allows communities to meet both water supply and water quality needs, but it does not meet the standard for drinking water standards in Florida. The state has yet to establish standards for reclaimed water that can be used for public access to public drinking water.
نشرت : منذ 4 أسابيع بواسطة Michaela Mulligan في Environment
There are a couple of things we can agree on.
Tampa Bay is growing. Like a lot. By 2050, some estimates say the region’s population will swell by nearly 1.5 million people, adding to the roughly 5 million who are already here.
And all those people need water.
Tampa Bay is lucky. The area is sandwiched by water. What we drink comes from three sources: rivers, groundwater from wells and desalinated sea water.
But there is another resource parts of the region draw upon to relieve pressure on our drinking supply — reclaimed water.
It’s a highly treated wastewater that is typically used by residents to water their lawns or gardens, and by businesses to cool equipment.
While some believe reclaimed water is a beneficial and cheaper option to supplement the area’s water supply, others have trouble getting past the “ick factor.”
“If we can somehow reuse our wastewater, then that helps us to conserve some of our groundwater resources, and we really need to do that in Florida,” said Mary Lusk, an assistant professor of soil and water sciences at the University of Florida.
Across the region, access to reclaimed water runs from sprawling to sparse.
And even in areas where there is access to reclaimed water, millions of gallons of treated wastewater go unused each day. Where it ends up differs by municipality. In some, it ends up back in our waterways — an option that will be phased out by 2032 after a law passed in 2021 stipulating that treated wastewater must be discarded in other ways.
It has left local governments looking for ways to use the water. For some it could mean wetland renourishment, expanding access to reclaimed water, or perhaps, most innovative (and controversial for some), it could mean turning it into drinking water.
Here’s a look at the past and future of water reuse in Tampa Bay.
In the late 1970s and ‘80s, Florida passed legislation that set standards for wastewater discharge into Tampa Bay. Before that, the wastewater, which was treated to remove solids and bacteria but not nitrogen, was discarded into the bay and had killed off seagrass, which acts as a natural cleaner for water.
In response to the legislation, local governments (our wastewater utility operators) made different policy choices, said Maya Burke, the assistant director of the Tampa Bay Estuary Program, and co-facilitator for the Tampa Bay Nitrogen Management Consortium.
“It sort of put them on different paths,” she said.
In Tampa, for example, the city invested in advancing its wastewater treatment plant.
“When they are treating their wastewater ... not only are they taking out the harmful bacteria, and the solids — the gross things that we think about — but they’re also taking out a significant portion of the nitrogen,” Burke said.
On the other side of the bay, in St. Petersburg, wastewater is not treated to that higher standard. Instead, they built an extensive reclaimed water system, Burke said, which still has to meet a high standard set by Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection.
“What that means is they weren’t going to that advanced wastewater treatment standard, so they weren’t taking out as much nitrogen from their wastewater, but they really invested in distributing that water back and reusing it beneficially,” Burke said.
The city says it was the first in the country to develop a reclaimed water system to for residents to irrigate.
Reclaimed water allowed communities to meet two needs — water supply and water quality, said Lusk.
The use of reclaimed water avoids releasing treated wastewater back into surface bodies of water, and it offsets extracting drinking water for things like lawn-watering.
While reclaimed water goes through multiple treatments, it does not meet the standard for drinking water. The state has yet to establish standards for reclaimed water that becomes drinking water.
Florida’s southwest region, which is covered by the Southwest Florida Water Management District (including Tampa Bay), is one of the leading areas for water reuse in the state. Recycled water — used for public access — replaced the use of drinking water by nearly 200 million gallons per day in 2022. It’s the equivalent of about 300 Olympic sized swimming pools.
But Lusk warns that while reclaimed water is a valuable resource, it’s not without its drawbacks.
In St. Petersburg, for example, where the city does not have permits to discharge treated wastewater, the reclaimed water is higher in nutrients, like nitrogen.
When watering lawns, the soil has a large capacity to remove pollutants from reclaimed water, but if the water runs down sidewalks or streets it can reach bodies of water, causing complications like algal blooms.
“We absolutely need to use this water, but we need to understand how to use it wisely,” Lusk said.
Why reclaimed water access is not created equal
Cities and counties across the Tampa Bay area are largely responsible for receiving wastewater, treating it and ultimately delivering it back to its customers for their reclaimed water use.
Those who have access to reclaimed water and those who don’t mostly comes down to cost and population growth.
In Pasco County, about 20% of the county’s customers have access to reclaimed water. The areas with the most access are concentrated in newer communities like Wesley Chapel, where reclaimed water pipes were built in along with construction.
And as more communities are built, the possibility for a more robust reclaimed water system grows.
In older areas, where the county would have to dig up large paths to put in new piping, the benefit-to-cost ratio doesn’t justify the large expense of installing the new system said David Allen, Pasco County’s utility director.
The areas that have access, around Davis Island and westward, received it in the mid-2000s in what was supposed to be phase one of the city’s reclaimed water system.
Just 40% of customers who have access to the water source use it. Without customer buy in, the city says its not feasible to expand its reclaimed water.
“Given our lack of success here in the first phase, we just don’t want to necessarily waste money spreading this infrastructure out and not gain additional support,” said Rory Jones, the water department director for the city of Tampa.
The city is instead focusing on expanding its knowledge of what its customer want.
“Whether it be the ick factor... or it’s a little salty for their plants — it’s not good for the rose bushes ― there’s different mindsets and we’re just trying to understand that,” Jones said.
What to do with excess waste water
Treated waste water is processed each day at plants across the region, regardless of how much of it customers use.
Even in areas where usage of reclaimed water is high, Tampa Bay’s rainy season makes it so that watering in the summer months often isn’t needed.
So it begs the question: What to do with all that extra water?
In areas like Pasco, the water is used for irrigation and to recharge wetlands. When there is extra water, it goes into percolation ponds, which allows water to filter underground. In Hillsborough, the county uses recycled water to recharge a saltwater aquifer along the coast, which is designed to stop saltwater from contaminating freshwater. In St. Petersburg, the unused reclaimed water is injected about 1,000 feet underground through deep injection wells into a saltwater aquifer.
In Clearwater about 11 million gallons of highly treated wastewater are produced a day. About 5 million goes to customers for “public access reuse” (think lawn or golf course irrigation) and the other 6 million is discharged into surface water, like Old Tampa Bay and Stevenson Creek.
In Tampa, about 50 to 60 million gallons of processed water is not used by reclaimed water customers per day, and instead makes its way into Tampa Bay.
In Pinellas County, 45% of its annual treated wastewater goes to Joe’s Creek, a nearly 10-mile-long creek in Lealman and Kenneth City, which intersects with Cross Bayou and ultimately makes it to the Gulf of Mexico.
Burke said areas with permits to discharge the water take out much of the nitrogen, which is important because too much nitrogen in the water can lead to algal blooms that can block sunlight to underwater plants like seagrass.
“If you think about how fast our population has grown, and how much water we use every day ... that adds up,” Burke said. “So even when we do our best work when our population is growing, and we’re all using water, it still adds up to be quite a bit of nitrogen that is contributing to things like algae blooms.”
In 2021, a bill was passed that requires local governments to come up with plans to stop sending treated wastewater to surface water.
Water experts say that kind of planning can take years if not decades, and has put local governments on a time crunch to figure out what to do with their treated wastewater.
There are a number of options cities and counties can consider under the 2021 legislation. Treated wastewater can be used to replenish wetlands, stop saltwater intrusion and become drinking water.
The measure to turn reclaimed water to potable water was floated several times in Tampa, and shot down each time, despite experts saying the water is safe.
The 2021 bill legislation states that potable reuse is an option for using reclaimed water. The state, along with utilities, meet every two weeks to work on guidance for potable reuse that the state is aiming to complete by next year.
Jones, the Tampa water department director, acknowledged residents don’t have an appetite for turning reclaimed water into drinking water, and he’s abiding by that. It has left the city with little wiggle room to comply with the latest legislation.
“Obviously people are passionate about it, and felt strongly about it, and we are where we are because of it,” Jones said. “I think there’s some lessons learned that we’re taking away that maybe we didn’t do the proper messaging. Maybe we didn’t listen and ease some of those concerns ahead of time, and it became this topic.”
While the term “toilet to tap” is contentious in Tampa, it’s embraced in some places. In El Paso, Texas, for instance, residents wear t-shirts that say “your number two is my number one.” The town has spent decades informing residents about the water purification process and is set to have potable reuse available by the end of the decade.
Plant City is one of the few places in Tampa Bay considering turning reclaimed water into drinking water.
The town has already completed a 15-month demonstration pilot. The city picked a “full advanced treatment” and took thousands of samples, said Lynn Spivey, the town’s utility director. The process uses different membranes, reverse osmosis, multiple levels of filtration and ultraviolet disinfection.
“The water is basically so pure when it comes out of a membrane system that you actually have to add stuff back in it to be able to drink it, otherwise it would leach stuff out of your body,” Spivey said.
Spivey said school kids, officials and residents toured the plant to get an up-close look at the process. The owner of Keel Farms, a local brewer, was interested in the water and turned 500 gallons of it into beer and served it at an event in October, Spivey said. The beer was named “Deja Brew.”
“We had a lot of people that were still skeptical, but after coming to that event ... they felt a lot better about it,” Spivey said.
Spivey said transparency was key in getting the city on board. It was long talks, back and forth, to allow people to understand the process and to ease minds
Plant City is looking at a few options to continue on with potable reuse on a larger scale. Among hurdles, like public perception and lack of states rules, will be funding. A potable plant would cost up to $40 million, Spivey said. She hopes to receive funding from the state.
“What’s going to be the state of our water?” she said. “And can we really afford not to do this now?”