e-Newsletter | 04/23/2024

Do you know where that water has been? As you get ready to drink that next glass, think about this.

We all take for granted the water that comes to our homes, clean and pure. We drink it. We bathe in it. We clean with it. The journey that drop of water takes to end up in our glass is fascinating and a bit unbelievable.

Water is a limited resource on this planet. As our population grows, we put increasingly more stress on this invaluable resource. What many people don't understand is that the water you're drinking today has already been in someone else's glass and stomach. Yes, there is no "pure" water. It is all recycled and reused. Who knows? George Washington may have put the same drop of water to his lips as the one you may have with dinner tonight!

In today's world of water management, there is always someone upstream. What does that mean? Follow the drop of water. It's taken out of a watershed and cleaned to a drinking water standard. We use it. Then, the drop is cleaned again to wastewater standards and discharged back into the same watershed. That water then flows downstream, nature cleans it even further, and the whole process starts over again at the next downstream user.

That is why we have separate treatment plants for our drinking water and for our wastewater. We have learned that we must try to mimic nature's cleansing processes with technologies. These technologies must do it faster so that our growing urban centers can continue to develop. Then, we can put the almost clean water back into the ecosystem.

As our population continues to grow, we have to find ways to squeeze that last drop out of that last drop. In parts of the United States, new technologies have been developed to allow us to take treated wastewater and send it directly back to a drinking water treatment plant for cleaning and reuse. Before you say, "Yuck," remember, we are doing it anyway. This is expensive and uses a lot of energy. That is why we have to learn to use that same water more efficiently, wasting less and caring for it more, while it is in the rivers and lakes.

So, think about this when you turn on the tap. When you see people out cleaning up a river or restoring a riverbank, stop and offer to help. Small steps go a long way.

Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District

260 W. Seeboth Street | Milwaukee, WI 53204