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San Francisco has been at the forefront of conserving water. A 2012 regulation set standards for reuse, and was updated in 2015 to require more than 250,000 square feet of new buildings to collect, treat and use greywater, a term for wastewater minus toilet waste.
Rafael Mandelman, member of the city’s Supervisory Board, suggested doubling the amount of water new buildings need to collect and reuse, including buildings of 100,000 square feet or larger.
An analysis from Austin, Texas, predicted that the number of water customers in the fast-growing state capital will quadruple within 100 years. To meet some of this demand, the city is offering incentives for developers to install reuse systems and plans to eventually make them mandatory.
“It’s a paradigm shift to see building owners bring their own water to the table, so to speak,” said Katherine Jashinski, an audit engineer focused on Austin’s onsite water reuse programs. “Companies moving here from California are concerned with sustainability and want to make sure there is a safe water source.”
The latest examples will include even more resource and energy savings. In San Francisco, a system that Epic Cleantec will install at a proposed 55-story mixed-use development called 10SVN will not only recycle black water, saving nearly $12 million in the first decade, but also converting solids from the waste stream into organic soil. . It will even recover and reuse the heat energy in the waste water.
“Wastewater is actually not waste at all,” said Mr. Tartakovsky of Epic Cleantec. “Clean water, organic, nutritious, energy we can redistribute, after all, there is no waste.”
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