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The City of Tomorrow Will Run on Your Toilet Water
Researchers are finding better ways to extract drinking water, compost, and even energy from wastewater. It’s not gross. It’s science.
Greenhouse gases scale sublinearly as a city grows, meaning at a slower rate than the population increases, due in part to efficiencies around things like public transportation. “I think that will be one of the things future societies think is most crazy about the last few hundred years, is that we just dumped wastewater into the ocean rather than pumping it back into the farmland,” says Santa Fe Institute theoretical physical biologist Chris Kempes, coauthor of the paper. In addition to using the waste solids as compost, like Epic Cleantec is experimenting with, Sharvelle notes that urban farms could benefit from using recycled wastewater that’s been disinfected for use on crops, but with the nitrogen and phosphorus left in.
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