The Water Information Program

Colorado Springs residents won’t have to drink recycled wastewater when the city expands its water system, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation has decided. Recycling was a possibility if the federal government decided to include reuse as an alternative to Colorado Springs Utilities’ Southern Delivery System proposal to pipe water from Pueblo Reservoir. The bureau spent the past 10 months studying six reuse options but rejected all of them because of the cost, which would be twice as much as a pipeline. It also determined that reuse is “less desirable from a standpoint of public health protection,” according to the bureau’s report, issued in late December. “From our perspective, reuse is extraordinarily high cost,” said Utilities planning and permitting manager Keith Riley, noting that reuse is rarely used until a city exhausts other supplies. “Reuse will make sense for Colorado Springs at some point, but right now we have more cost-effective options with Southern Delivery,” he said. Reuse is expensive because it demands a lot of power to push water through a dense membrane, he said. In addition, the process results in a 15 percent waste stream — 15 gallons for every 100 gallons processed — that requires elaborate evaporation and condensing operations before the waste is landfilled.

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