When Janet Cruz lost an April election for a Tampa City Council seat, she became a political casualty of an increasingly high-stakes debate over recycled water.

During her time within the Florida Legislature, Cruz had supported a latest law allowing the usage of treated wastewater in local water systems. But many Tampa residents were staunchly against a plan by their water utility to do exactly that, and Cruz was forced to backtrack, together with her spokesperson asserting she had never favored the kind of complete water reuse often known as “toilet to tap.” She lost anyway, and the water plan has been canceled.

Tampa’s showdown could also be a harbinger of things to return as climate change and drought cause water shortages in lots of parts of the country. With few alternatives for expanding supply, cities and states are rapidly adding recycled water to their portfolios and expanding the ways during which it might probably be used. Researchers say it’s secure — and that it’s essential to maneuver past the twentieth century notion that wastewater must stay flushed.

“There isn’t a reason to only use water once,” said Peter Fiske, director of the National Alliance for Water Innovation on the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “We have to be more clever with the water we have got.”

But proponents are still fighting an uphill battle to beat the “yuck” factor. A recent study found that reused water will not be only secure but that it’s actually cleaner than conventionally sourced water — yet acceptance is “hindered by perceptions of poor water quality and potential health threats.”

Several projects were canceled in California within the Nineties due to such worries. In San Gabriel, Miller Brewing Company opposed a water reclamation project when people began joking about “beer aged in porcelain.”

“You will have to have a variety of education in a community to say why [recycled water] is required” and what experts are doing to make sure the security of the water, said Noelle George, the Texas managing director for the trade association WateReuse.

Many types of water reuse have long been routine. Water from yard sprinklers, for instance, soaks into the groundwater. Or, whether it is processed in a treatment plant, it goes right into a river or lake, where it’s used again. Municipalities and others often treat a type of wastewater often known as gray water to make use of for irrigation.

But on the earth of water reuse, the gold standard is often known as direct potable reuse — cleansing wastewater, including sewage, to drinking water standards.

With DPR systems, the water from showers, sinks, and toilets first goes to a traditional treatment plant, where it’s disinfected with chemicals and aeration. Then it gets a second scrubbing in a multistage process that first uses a bioreactor to interrupt down nitrogen compounds, then employs microfiltration to wash out particles and reverse osmosis to remove viruses, bacteria, and salts. Finally, hydrogen peroxide is added and the water goes through an ultraviolet light processing, which is purported to kill any contaminants which might be left.

Experts say the water that emerges at the tip of this process is so clean it has no taste, and that minerals have to be added to provide the water flavor. It is also freed from a little-known health hazard; chlorine, often used to disinfect conventional water, can react with organic material within the water to create chloroform, exposure to which may cause negative health effects.

Big Spring, Texas, is the one place within the country with a DPR municipal water system, during which all wastewater is treated and sent back to the faucet. One other notable DPR system is the Changi Water Reclamation Plant in Singapore, which cleans 237 million gallons every day.

In Tampa, intense opposition focused on the high cost of the water treatment and the possible presence of pharmaceuticals, hormones, and so-called eternally chemicals, often known as PFAS.

“We’ve never thought that it was obligatory to drink wastewater,” said Gary Gibbons, the vice chair of the Tampa Bay Sierra Club, in September 2022. He said the project, which town referred to by the acronym PURE, would end in contaminants within the drinking water and the groundwater aquifer.

Experts reject these concerns as uninformed and say properly treated wastewater is safer than a variety of conventional drinking water sources.

“I might almost reasonably have a sophisticated treatment plant of the kind used for potable water recycling than water that comes from a river that has several cities and farms and industries upstream which might be discharging into it,” said David L. Sedlak, an authority on potable reuse on the University of California-Berkeley.

With higher temperatures and long-term pressure on water sources including aquifers and mountain snowpacks, quite a bit more water reuse is coming.

In Texas, the state permits DPR plants on a case-by-case basis, and town of El Paso is constructing one which’s slated to be online by 2026. Colorado last yr began allowing DPR. In California, regulations spelling out the approach to DPR ought to be ready by the tip of this yr, with some cities setting goals of recycling all water by 2035. Florida and Arizona are also moving to expand direct potable reuse.

There’s also a variety of activity around what’s often known as indirect potable reuse. Orange County, California, has the world’s largest IPR facility, which cleans 130 million gallons of water a day to irrigation standards, passes it through advanced purification, and eventually injects it into groundwater, which serves as an environmental buffer. The water is then piped to all municipal users.

San Francisco is pioneering one other approach. Since 2015, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which operates the dams, reservoirs, and aqueducts that deliver water from the Sierra Nevada to town, has required all buildings over 100,000 square feet be equipped for recycling gray water. The downtown Salesforce Tower has its own recycling plant: Sinks, laundry machines, and showers drain into the basement recycling system, and the water is then reused for flushing toilets and irrigation, saving about 30,000 gallons a day.

“We need not flush toilets with drinking water,” said Fiske, noting that toilets make up about 30% of all water use.

San Francisco water officials are studying the feasibility and safety of cleansing all wastewater to potable standards on the constructing level. The headquarters of the water utility has a blackwater system called the Living Machine that uses engineered wetlands within the sidewalks across the constructing to treat wastewater, cutting water use by two-thirds. (Blackwater systems recycle water from toilets; gray water systems reuse water from all other drains.)

Some experts see a day when buildings is not going to need to be attached to external sewer and water systems in any respect, with advanced recycling systems augmented by rainwater. For the moment, though, educational campaigns are still needed to bring recycled water into the mainstream.

Epic Cleantec, which created a recycling system for a latest San Francisco apartment tower, thought beer might help. The corporate last yr teamed up with an area brewery to supply beer from recycled water. The Epic OneWater Brew by Devil’s Canyon Brewing is not sold; reasonably, it’s an illustration product, given away and served at events.

While people may not need to drink recycled water, they are going to often try the beer.

“We made beer out of recycled water, because we’re trying to vary the conversation,” said Aaron Tartakovsky, CEO of Epic Cleantec. “We’re fundamentally attempting to help people rethink how our communities handle water.”