Magic in a Bottle: Orange County Launches Recycled Water Giveaway.
Today, after an investment of some $600 million, the district’s Groundwater Replenishment System is the world’s largest producer of purified wastewater.
To find out, Water Deeply recently spoke with Denis Bilodeau, who has served on the Orange County Water District board of directors for 17 years and is its current president.
Water Deeply: Why is Orange County Water District bottling its recycled wastewater?
But we didn’t, because before we built our plant we went to the streets and educated the public about what we needed to do and why.
Distilled water has very low mineral content, whereas if you buy bottled drinking water, there are minerals added for taste.
And it’s cheaper than importing water from the Sacramento Bay-Delta and the Colorado River, because it’s so energy-intensive to move that water across the state.
It’s about one-third of our water now.
And we’ve invested now, I think, $600 million into our recycling program and that’s the public’s money.
And we want to undertake the final expansion of the project, which would bring it up to 130 million gallons per day.