State Approves New Rules for Turning Sewage into Drinking Water, but ‘Toilet to Tap’ Still a Ways off for Santa Barbara

City Water Czar Says City Hall Not Likely to Pursue Expensive Water Treatment Infrastructure for at Least Another Decade

Joshua Haggmark at El Estero Water Resource Center. | Credit: Paul Wellman

The state of California may have just approved new historic guidelines — 10 years in the making — to allow water agencies to use highly treated and recycled sewage water, but it’s not an option the City of Santa Barbara will be pursuing anytime soon. The soonest City Hall will move in that direction, said city water czar Joshua Haggmark, is the mid-2030s.

According to senior water planner Dakota Corey, the city’s water department has conducted three in-depth studies on what’s called “direct potable re-use,” the first being in 2017, the second in 2020, and the last in 2022. The studies concluded the City of Santa Barbara could generate anywhere from 4,100 to 6,900 acre-feet of water a year by using highly treated and sewage water, but the infrastructure needed to treat and convey this water would be quite expensive.

The City of Ventura is poised to pursue such recycling project — dubbed “toilet to tap” by those less than enamored of the technology — at a cost estimated between $250 and $350 million. Santa Barbara has already invested massive sums into its desalination facility; one of the city’s three studies concluded it would be more cost effective to expand its desal capacity by 5,000 acre-feet a year given that much of the infrastructure needed has already been built, paid for, and installed. Desalination requires massive quantities of electricity to push salt water through semi-impermeable membranes; by contrast, the processes to make “direct potable re-use” water requires less electricity.

The city — and most South Coast agencies — already use reclaimed sewage water for large outdoor irrigation projects, but the quantities involved and the level of treatment pale in comparison to what the state will require. Activated carbon filters, reverse osmosis, and ultraviolet radiation will all be involved with “tripled redundancies” baked into the requirements in anticipation of the health risks involved.