Photo: Epic Cleantec-
Metropolis Desk-
You wouldn’t notice if you tasted Epic OneWater Brew, but it contains a unique ingredient: recycled water from a residential building’s sinks, showers, and washing machines.
The beer is intended to raise awareness of the subject of water scarcity and reuse. It is safe to drink thanks to several processing steps that include microfiltration and UV radiation.
According to Aaron Tartakovsky, CEO and co-founder of Epic Cleantec, the San Francisco-based water treatment business that created the beer in partnership with a local brewery, “Buildings globally use 14% of all potable water.” “We’re trying to change the fact that hardly any buildings reuse that water.”
The beer, a Kölsch-style ale, a crisp, light-bodied beverage with German origins, was created using recycled graywater from San Francisco’s Fifteen Fifty, a 40-story luxury apartment complex. However, it cannot be purchased because it is against the law to use recovered wastewater in commercial beverages. at least right now.
Epic Cleantec equips buildings with its water recycling system, eliminating the need to discharge wastewater into a sewer to transport it to a remote treatment facility. The system recycles up to 95% of wastewater, according to the company — either what is known as blackwater, which comes from toilets, or gray water, which comes from sinks, washing machines, bathtubs, and showers.
It does so by first using biological treatment to remove organic matter, then microfiltration via membranes just 0.04 microns thick (about 0.05% of the thickness of a human hair), and finally disinfection by ultraviolet light and chlorine, which makes the water safe for reuse in non-potable applications like toilet and urinal flushing, irrigation and laundry. The system installed in Fifteen Fifty is designed to recycle 7,500 gallons of water per day, or up to 2.75 million gallons per year.
“What we’ve done is just take a lot of the existing principles in the wastewater world and design it for single buildings instead,” Tartakovsky explained. We shift away from a singular reliance on massive, centralized infrastructure, just like solar did for electricity.
Other advantages, according to Epic Cleantec, include the ability to pre-heat domestic hot water using recovered heat from the wastewater, which lowers heating costs, and the use of wastewater’s organic matter to create natural soil products for use in parks, gardens, and landscaping.
On average, an installation takes up a few parking spaces, but the cost can range from a few hundred thousand dollars to millions of dollars, depending on the size of the structure. By reducing utility costs, Tartakovsky claims that it pays for itself in just a few years.
Since 2015, San Francisco has mandated that all new structures larger than 100,000 square feet include an on-site water recycling system; Epic Cleantec is in charge of five of the few dozen that are now in place.
It makes perfect sense. Why do our IT personnel in downtown San Francisco still have to flush their toilets with pure drinking water from our national parks? Asks Tartakovsky. Scientifically, this water frequently satisfies or even exceeds requirements for drinking water.
To serve guests at a conference on sustainable building technology, Epic Cleantec launched its beer project in late 2022. Using 2,000 gallons of reclaimed water, we eventually produced slightly over 7,000 cans—not as a commercial product, but rather as an instructional initiative, according to Tartakovsky. It was intended to present the water reuse narrative in a novel way. But to be honest, we weren’t prepared for the overwhelming response we got.
While the Epic Cleantec system isn’t meant to provide drinking water, many US states, including Texas and California, have regulations that permit the drinkable reuse of wastewater. More states are changing their water reuse regulations, including Arizona, Colorado, Florida, New Mexico, and Washington.
“Recycled water is already being used as a source of drinking water in places like Southern California, Singapore, and Australia,” says David Sedlak, director of the Berkeley Water Center at the University of California, Berkeley. “All of those operations rely upon recycling plants that are associated with sewage treatment plants. Building-scale water recycling systems offer an opportunity for cities to reduce their reliance on water from rivers, lakes, and reservoirs — sources that are vulnerable to climate change. It also offers opportunities to save energy and reduce the amount of pollutants that cities release to the environment.”
Sedlak, who is not involved in Epic Cleantec, says the water recycling system developed by the company has proven its technology to be a viable means of recycling water within buildings. “It is clean enough to use to produce a tasty beer and it is certainly clean enough to use for toilet flushing and landscape irrigation,” he adds.
For local events in 2017, two California-based brewers created limited-edition beers using recycled water. At the University of Southern California, Daniel McCurry, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, gave one a try. “I drank it with no reservations, but it was brewed with water from a municipal potable reuse project in San Diego,” he claims.
Reverse osmosis and UV/advanced oxidation processes, according to McCurry, can remove chemical contaminants like industrial solvents and pharmaceuticals “to a much greater extent than by ultrafiltration, UV, and chlorine alone.” Municipal systems for potable reuse typically include two more steps than Epic Cleantec’s.
Beer and other beverages manufactured with this water could be sold, but it would require another regulatory step, according to Tartakovsky. The general public “was just not ready for recycled water,” he says, which was a common refrain at the time he entered the water industry.
“In the business, we refer to it as the ‘yuck’ factor. Recycled water is perceived as being less pure than other sources of water. But I frequently point out to people that the water on this planet is recycled. The water that the dinosaurs drank millions of years ago is the same water that humans drink today.
He continues by saying that despite not being its primary objective, Epic Cleantec is currently in discussions with some of the biggest brewers in the world. Many people are requesting more of it, he says, not only because it is an intriguing environmental tale but also because the beer itself is delicious. You’re going to start hearing a lot more about the use of recycled water in a variety of different businesses. I believe that there is no end to what we can do.
Source- CNN
