Pipe-Free Water and Waste Processing

Water is essential for all life on earth. It is a miraculous chemical, both compatible with our bodies and also a highly effective solvent for many substances. An adequate supply of pure drinking water is essential to a healthy life. Unfortunately, this is unavailable to a large fraction of the world's population due both to: Shortages, and Pollution, including arsenic poisoning, fecal contamination, and a host of other problems.

The sustainable community needs to provide water suitable for all the essential uses, yet not waste this valuable resource, nor pollute the source for other people, nor waste other resources in over processing the water. Even non-drinking water is essential, everything from irrigating crops to washing hands.

In modern communities water typically only comes in one version: drinking quality. It arrives in your homes in you water supply pipe (although you may also buy bottled water, but in many countries that is no better than water from the tap, and possibly even worse).

Once water is “used,” whether overflow from getting a drink, bathing, washing dishes, flushing the toilet, cleaning a cut, cleaning a paintbrush, or cleaning up a chemical spill, it is sent down the sewer system.

Thus all of the resources and energy used to bring your water to this pristine state are wasted when you get a drink, wash your hands, flush your toilet or water your garden. And worse the volume of demand for that pure water often overworks the supply and purification systems.

So the drinking water is not as clean as it should be, often with chlorine and the byproducts it produces, so even the drinking water is degraded.

Because all sources are mixed together, the waste water must be treated for the most challenging of these situations: bacterial and viral contamination, heavy metals, petroleum products, or worse.

This is a difficult and expensive process, and may be overwhelmed by the volume.

Often the effluent is dumped into streams, lakes, or ground water sources, poisoning fish and our food supply, polluting water supplies, causing algal blooms and a host of other problems.

There are several options for processing waste water:

1. Just dump it in the river and let whoever is downstream worry about it: not only is this unfair, but the people who are upstream from you are doing the same thing, so this doesn’t work even for you – “What goes around comes around.”

2. Dump it in a hole in the ground and hope nature cleans the mess up before it seeps into the ground water – do you want to live near one of the tens of thousands of Superfund sites?

3. Take all the waste water and give it the full treatment to attain drinking quality: this is capital intensive, expensive, and hard to manage – heavy rains often cause waste water overflows, (estimate of $88 billion to fix all the US systems so they only overflow once  every 5 years). This leads back to option 1. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives America’s wastewater infrastructure a D, and ¾ of the estimated $300 Billion needed over the next 20 years is for pipes.

4. Some water systems use various techniques to recycle their water: one technique is to reuse so called gray water; thus water that has only been used to wash dishes can be used to flush the toilet – it’s a start. One challenge is that this requires double the pipes, and worse, there are different levels of grey water, which affects the potential uses:

• Water used for cleaning has soap which is not compatible with gardens or farming but is fine for flushing the toilet;
• If the water is going to be used for washing clothes it does not have to be as pristine as that used for drinking; etc.
• It isn’t feasible to have different pipes for all these different uses, and the same sink can be used with and without soap and with varying types of contaminants.

5. The Autonomous Transportation System makes new options possible: what if we replaced a lot of those pipes with “buckets” which are moved automatically as needed. Then many different grades of water could be maintained and moved from a source to where it can be used next. We could optimize the whole process, and because Autonomous Vehicles are so flexible, the process can adapt as new techniques are developed – more roles for innovation.

• Real-time analysis of the water with autonomous sensors determines what use was made when creating this particular quantity of water.
• The buckets can have filtering and other processing built in, or take the water to an appropriate processing facility before taking it to the next use.

Here is a humorous view of a Pipe-free Water and Waste System.

One example of a related Autonomous Innovation is a recycling shower:

• Imagine being able to take a shower for as long as you want, even using water massage, without using extra water!
• The shower automatically senses when you need fresh water, but until then it keeps recycling the water you have been using.
• It can have many cycles, such as: initial washing, soaping, rinsing, and relaxing.
• A separate “bucket” arriving for each. 
• There is a pump and water heater to maintain pressure and temperature – these can be built into the shower, or the “buckets”, or arrive separately.
• Each “bucket” can have appropriate filtering, and then be sent off to the next appropriate use.
• So you enjoy getting clean without wasting water.

Benefits of the Recycling Shower:

• Reduce the overall quantity of water used through recycling (this is in addition to the reductions discussed before under toilets),
• Eliminate the need for redundant pipes,
• Treat the water just enough for each application,
• Reduce the energy and resources needed to process sewage into drinking water,
• Reduce the resources needed for the entire water and sewage systems,
• Provide a flexible system to incorporate new technologies as they are invented.

The Autonomous Vehicle system is ideally suited to manage all your water and waste needs. J Later I will discuss recycling, trash, garbage, and other types of waste. But next I want to present my ideas for an Integrated Heating & Refrigeration System.