New words about wastewater

Regarding my post about WEF’s decision to change the term wastewater treatment plant into Water Ressource Recovery Facility (https://news.wef.org/changing-the-terms). Sascha asked:

Sascha Amarasinha: For us who care about clean water, but are not familiar with the terms, could you describe how changing the words would shift perceptions. i am genuinely interested in understanding more about this battle on words and what lies below.

I am happy with this questions, but my answer takes up more letters than allowed in a normal response on LinkedIn, hence this short article.

I am not sure that everybody would explain it in the same way, but my take would be as follows.

There is a philosophical side to it, where the idea of speaking of anything being waste or being wasted –especially water, but in principle anything – is an unhealthy, ’industrial time age’ way of thinking. When we speak of ’wastewater’, we casually subconsciously suggest that this water is wasted. In a sense, it has lost its grace /holiness/life and has been reduced to something ’yuck’-ish; something to be dispelled.

James Carse writes in his book on finite and infinite games about ’waste’ in a different but similar context:

‘Since a flourishing society will vigorously exploit its natural resources, it will produce correspondingly great quantities of trash, and quickly its uninhabited lands will overflow with waste, threatening to make the society’s own habitation into a wasteland. […]

A people does not become superfluous by itself, any more than natural waste creates itself. It is society that declares some persons to be waste. Human trash is not an unfortunate burden on a society, an indirect result of its proper conduct; it is its direct product. […]

European settlers in the American, African, and Asian continents did not happen to come upon populations of unwanted persons nature had thrust in their way; they made them superfluous by way of some of the most important and irreversible principles of their societies.”

Hence, another way to think of it, is that there is only this one earth. And unless we shoot our waste into outer space we are stuck with our ’waste’ forever. In natural systems, most, if not everything, is used and re-used forever. And this seems to be one foundational principle of sustainability.

Secondly, there is a technical side to it. For hundred years plus, we have expended a lot of energy on destroying the resource available in wastewater. By means of mechanical, chemical and biological methods we have separated the unwanted parts of wastewater from the reasonably clean water enough so that nature could take care of the remainder (at least some place and in principle).

When instead speaking of a ’resource recovery facility’, there are several resources being recovered. First of all, the water is recovered - obviously. Secondly and more surprisingly, the later decades and especially the later years have seen new inventions of how to make use of the organic fraction in wastewater as either a source of energy and/or materials such as construction material, bioplastics and agricultural fertiliser. Though fantastic progress has been made in this area, there seems still to be some distance to go to reach the point of a ’circular economy’ on this and there are many obstacles on the way – economically, technically and environmentally. But applying the new term points out a direction and an aspiration.

Interestingly, the decision to switch terms is from 2012 – and I was not aware of this until now, five years later. The reason that I found out was that I was chair on a session on the IWA-ICA conference (Instrumentation, Control and Instrumentation). And this term ’WRRF’ was in the title of two of the papers of my session. Hence in my preparation for the session, I looked it up and found the above explanation. In a way, I think that it is quite remarkable that the term has – at least partially – been changed so fast as to be used in papers today. However, when the international water community is speaking of it, it feels a bit like impossible ’newspeak’ and the idea of not saying wastewater anymore is probably a few decades ahead of us. But I believe it might be worth the effort.

Even so, I find the word resource still to not be quite as reverend as it ought to be. Perhaps, from an even more respectful point of view it would be more appropriate to speak of water as an (indestructible) source (of life)? This would in a sense restore the grace of this water from waste to resource to source.