Say it loud - toilet to tap ...

Excerpt from San Diego Union Tribune:

Hey, if you believe it, say it loud: toilet to tap

4 November 2007

Toilet to tap. Toilet to tap. Toilet to tap. Toilet to tap.

There, I've said it again. And it sure feels good.

When I last wrote about plans to pump recycled sewage water into our drinking reservoirs, my rendering of this phrase prompted a scalding e-mail.

A retired biology professor counted each use – “Seven times already!!!!!” – and declared that anyone who would brandish such foul terminology must be part of the “earth-is-flat, science-is-wrong” crowd.

Far from it. I count myself among the let's-call-a-spade-a-spade crowd.

And so should the toilet-to-tappers.

If they hope to convince us that drinking recycled sewage water is the best solution to our looming water shortage, they should stop running away from their own proposal. Say it loud, say it proud: Toilet to tap!

At the City Council meeting last week, the idea was discussed for nearly two hours. In the end, the council authorized a demonstration project that will involve pumping recycled sewage into a city reservoir like Lake Murray or Lake Miramar, or into a groundwater basin, sometime next year.

What did they call it? “Indirect potable reuse.”

And, on occasion, “reservoir augmentation.”

Those guys wouldn't say sewage if they had a mouthful.

There was one exception: Bruce Reznik, executive director of the environmental group San Diego Coastkeeper. He used the term “toilet to tap” twice in his remarks to the council.

I talked with Reznik later about his choice of words. He said that while other terms may be more technically correct than “toilet to tap,” they give the public “the impression that you're hiding something.”

“It looks like we're trying to use subterfuge and trying to obscure the real issue,” Reznik said. “Within the environmental community, there are differing opinions on whether to use the dreaded moniker 'toilet to tap.' My feeling is: Own it.”

Exactly.

Ten years ago, when water officials first proposed recycling sewage for our drinking pleasure, reasonable questions were raised about the program's science and economics.

But what doomed the proposal was the belief that city officials weren't being straight with us. This was during the mayorship of Susan Golding, when such notions were usually justified, and it didn't help that more than $400,000 had been spent to rally support under the euphemism “water repurification.”

When skeptics began calling the program “toilet to tap,” it was as though heavy bandages had been removed from San Diego's eyes.

This time around, the toilet-to-tappers are confident they have a compelling case for the program.

They say recycled sewage is actually cleaner than San Diego tap water, and some bottled water. They contend that as much as 18 percent of our trusted Colorado River water comes from sewage plants upstream that do not treat it to the high standards San Diego would.

“In the wintertime, when the snowmelt stops, most of what's in that river is treated sewage,” Councilman Jim Madaffer told me. “Yet everyone is bon appétit. They're good with it.”

Such arguments will be part of a city-sponsored public-education program next year. My suggestion for that campaign is a commitment by city officials to drink and serve only recycled sewer water next year – at home, at work, in the city box at Petco Park – to demonstrate their utter confidence in the product.

Instead, I fear, the campaign's early focus will be expunging the term “toilet to tap” from the civic vocabulary.

The phrase is not unique to San Diego, but our introduction to it likely occurred in July 1997, when The San Diego Union-Tribune published a graphic illustration titled, “From the toilet to the tap?”

In the proud tradition of such graphics as “How a bill becomes law,” it followed the path by which wastewater and raw sewage would be treated, filtered and returned to the water supply. The graphic artist, Paul Horn, was a decidedly nonpolitical fellow, but his progeny remains controversial to this day.

Toilet-to-tappers say the term is misleading because it omits the intermediary steps – ultrafiltration and reverse osmosis and the like – and suggests the city is building a pipe that leads directly from one's bathroom to one's kitchen sink.

But we're smarter than that. When someone tells us she drove from San Diego to Chicago, she doesn't name each city she drove through, and we don't assume she never made a stop.

In any case, toilet-to-tappers probably wouldn't like “toilet to reservoir” any better.

Or even “toilet to treatment plant to reservoir to tap.”

Their real problem is with that first part.

But frankly, you can't win the hearts and minds of a big city if you're afraid to say the word “toilet.”

Toilet to tap. Own it.

See - Toilet to tap - own it.