With water shortages poised to hit the United States as early as 2024, products like beer made from recycled wastewater could be on your shelves sooner rather than later.
Take Epic OneWater Brew, for example: a Kölsch beer made from purified shower, laundry and dishwashing water. It’s the brainchild of Epic Cleantec, a San Francisco-based water reuse technology company that grew out of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Reinvent the Toilet Challenge.
The company primarily makes wastewater reuse and treatment systems, not beer. Its four co-founders – Ilan Levy, Oded Halperin and father-son duo Igor and Aaron Tartakovsky – received grants from the Gates Foundation back in 2012 before officially launching the company in 2015.
Due to strict federal and state laws, Epic Cleantec is not allowed to sell its beer made in collaboration with Devil’s Canyon Brewing Company. But it may give away the beer for free to raise awareness and “demonstrate the untapped potential of water reuse,” Aaron Tartakovsky, the company’s CEO, tells CNBC Make It.
“Water is omnipresent in our lives. It produces the food we eat, we use it for bathing, cooking and cleaning… and yet we know so little about how water works, how it gets to our taps and where it comes from. “Wastewater goes away,” he says . “We’re trying to amplify the water story to tell it in a different way. And in this case, we’re using the medium of beer to tell that story.”
From shower drains to beer cans
Drinking a beverage made from recycled shower water may not sound appealing, but it’s safe, says Tartakovsky: “Just trust the science.”
To collect the water, Epic Cleantec passed wastewater from a 40-story apartment complex in San Francisco through a series of “ultrafiltration membranes,” each about 0.001% the diameter of a human hair.
Each membrane filtered contaminants from the water, which was then disinfected with ultraviolet light.
“We’re mimicking the kind of biology that happens in our human stomach,” Tartakovsky says. The final product is tested by a third-party laboratory and meets — or sometimes exceeds — federal drinking water quality standards, he adds.
Recycled wastewater drinks cannot be sold to the public, but Tartakovsky says that could soon change.
California, Colorado and Florida are formulating regulations to convert recycled wastewater into a drinking water system. Texas and Arizona have already legalized it in public taps. But it may take time to reassure lawmakers that commercial sales are safe enough.
“The use of recycled water for drinking purposes or the reuse of drinking water is actually already widespread,” says Tartakovsky. “Typically, however, this happens at the municipal level…We believe there is already regulatory momentum that will make this even more common in the coming years.”
Water conservation is not just a California issue
Epic Cleantec’s home state of California is no stranger to drought and water conservation efforts, which are increasingly a national – and global – problem.
Nearly half of the 204 freshwater basins in the United States may be unable to meet monthly water demands by 2071, found a 2019 study from Colorado State University published in the journal Earth’s Future.
Even if water shortages don’t feel dire yet, United Nations experts predict a global crisis is “imminent.” Only about 2.5% of the water on Earth is freshwater, and there are currently 7.9 billion people on the planet.
Water is omnipresent in our lives… and yet we know so little about how water works.
Aaron Tartakovsky
CEO and co-founder of Epic Cleantec
Expanding access to recycled wastewater could be helpful, especially given technological advances in the field over the past decade, Tartakovsky says. In the meantime, he has a few tips for anyone who wants to go beyond the standard “reduce, reuse and recycle” checklist to save water:
- Install more efficient equipment.
- Replace water-intensive plants with “more native species that use less water.”
- Contact your local authorities to learn more about their wastewater systems and your role in them.
“Many cities have rebate programs to, for example, replace old toilets that use several gallons per flush with a toilet that uses 1.2 gallons per flush,” Tartakovsky says. “It is critical that people be included in the conversation and tell our leaders that clean water and reliable sanitation are important to us.”
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