Colorado Springs Pioneers in Water Reuse

An important portion of our city’s water supply is provided by treating wastewater for irrigation of public and private properties with nonpotable water. SDS will enable us to make full use of our rights to water from the Arkansas River and will enable us to reuse even more water for drinking purposes by exchange as our city grows.

We pioneered the recycling of treated wastewater for irrigation in the early 1960s. We now have the second largest nonpotable-water system in Colorado. And we’ve been a leading advocate of recycling wastewater for irrigation and other purposes:

Recycling Treated Wastewater For Drinking

Although we’ve pioneered the recycling of wastewater for irrigation, there are both environmental and financial reasons why recycling wastewater directly into drinking water isn’t a good alternative to SDS.

Recycling wastewater into drinking water is energy intensive and, therefore, has a big carbon footprint. It also generates a large volume of solid waste. And it’s expensive – at least twice as expensive as our proposed alternative for SDS.

While preparing the Environmental Impact Statement for the Southern Delivery System, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation studied six options for recycling wastewater into drinking water and rejected all of them because of the cost – twice as much as a pipeline – and because it would be “less desirable from a standpoint of public health protection.”

Converting wastewater into drinking water involves a process called reverse osmosis – forcing the wastewater through a thick membrane to remove contaminants. The process is energy intensive, resulting in more greenhouse-gas emissions and a large carbon footprint.

It also generates a large volume of solid waste – the concentrated salts and other contaminants removed from the wastewater. This concentrated brine is too salty for potable use or crop irrigation and too salty to discharge into streams. It has to be stored in evaporation ponds and the resulting salt-laden solid waste eventually will end up in our landfills.

The day will come when recycling wastewater directly into drinking water will make sense for Colorado Springs. But, for now, it’s less efficient, more expensive and less environmentally desirable than using the water rights we already own to provide water for our future. It would be irresponsible of Colorado Springs to pursue this method of reuse at this time when there is a better, more effective way to provide the water we need for our future.