Nevada breaks ground on state's first wastewater-to-drinking-water plant

Nevada broke ground on its first wastewater-to-drinking-water plant last week, the culmination of over 15 years of research, teaching and planning. When completed, the plant will treat roughly two million gallons of wastewater a day to make it compliant with drinking-water standards. The facility aims to lessen Nevada’s reliance on the Truckee River: the snow water equivalent in the Truckee River basin, a measure of how much water the snowpack holds, hit its second-lowest level since 1986 this year.

Most advanced purified water facilities in the United States use reverse osmosis to filter their water, which forces water through a membrane to remove contaminants and produces a brine byproduct that coastal facilities can discharge into the ocean. As Nevada is landlocked, the water authority will instead “use an ozone biological activated carbon process. Rather than filtering contaminants out and concentrating them into waste, this method uses ozone gas and naturally occurring microbes to break contaminants down instead of just isolating them,” Piper Heath writes for the Nevada Independent. 

“Even after all that treatment, Nevada regulations still require the water to pass through what's called an "environmental buffer" before it can reach a tap. That means the water will get injected into a groundwater aquifer near Stead Airport, where it will sit for years while it filters further before the water authority pumps it back out and into the city's tap water,” the Nevada Independent reports.