Day Six: Water Reclamation, OK?

Something you should know about me: as a Great Lakes gal, I get really geeked out about water. The opportunity to spend 4 hours at the Deer Island water reclamation plant with an EXTREMELY knowledgeable tour guide? Yeah, I've been dreaming about this for a long time. And today was the day! I took about 15 pages of notes, but I won't bore you with every minute engineering detail and piece of historical context. However, here's what stuck with me the most:

• The Boston area produces an average of 350 million gallons of sewerage per day, and can produce up to 1.3 billion gallons on days with heavy rainfall. Like Chicago, they have combined sewers (meaning that stormwater and sewage go into the same sewer), but Boston is nearing completion of sewer separation projects that will prevent combined sewer overflows (which only happen at 5 or 6 sites now, and very rarely).
  
  
• This new facility has made great strides towards greater energy efficiency and sustainability by using energy produced from methane gas (from the 3 million gallon, egg-shaped digesters - SO COOL!), wind turbines (which produce 25+ MW of electricity, which is roughly the equivalent of 850 homes), and solar installations. In Chicago, some basic calculations have shown that for every gallon of water used (starting from when it's removed from Lake Michigan and ending with the effluent dumping in the Chicago River), 1.65 pounds of CO2e are released into the atmosphere. I wonder how Boston compares given their efficient technology.
  
  
• Upgrades in the treatment methods (and in methods nation-wide) were spurred on by the Clean Water Act in 1970. This created a unified set of standards for water quality, preventing industry from flocking to the communities with the lowest standards. When we inquired about whether or not there is any current motivation to improve treatment standards, we were told in no uncertain terms that the Metropolitan Water Reclamation Authority (MWRA), as the entity in charge of operations at this treatment facility, is NOT an advocacy group, but is only responsible for following the law. If they went above and beyond (which often costs more money), the tax payers would certainly object. So, unless the EPA forces them to remove more than 50% of the toxic bacteria from the effluent (the "clean" water dumped 9 miles off-shore), it won't be happening any time soon.
  
  
• This VERY new facility is ALREADY running at capacity. This SHOCKS me. Every climate change report I've ever seen has suggested that an important adaptation strategy is to prepare for more sudden, large storms. Even assuming that they do successfully split out all of their sewers, what about population growth? It seems very short-sighted to me that they only built for what they would need to handle in the near future. When I asked if the current facility could be expanded, the response was less than encouraging. So, was the Deer Island facility a $3.5 billion stop-gap measure? EEK!
  

Quotable quotes:

Regarding reuse of effluent (instead of dumping it into the ocean):
"We could, but why would we?"

Key questions:

• How does Chicago's water reclamation process (e.g., energy use, effluent disinfection) compare to Boston's?
• Even though Chicago is diverting water from Lake Michigan, Boston is also diverting water from their drinking source (everything gets dumped in the ocean where it is no longer freshwater). Are there any estimates on the recharge rates and/or when that supply might run out? Is that a concern that no one mentioned?
• Which other countries reuse their effluent, and how?