Background Info:
Recent events and news about water scarcity got me thinking about this. So the question is essentially the title. Or am I missing something?
If you live anywhere that uses a sewer system rather than septic tanks, isn’t it already doing that?
In my area, the water company pulls in from the river, filters and processes it, and pipes it out to homes. It gets used in the homes, discharged into the sewer to a treatment plant, treated, and then pumped back into the river.
Even if your water company’s intake is before the sewage treatment plant, the next town’s intake is downstream. So if you’re not drinking your neighbor’s processed toilet water, you’re drinking that of the town upstream.
Is getting mixed with river water simply enough to “dilute” the ick-factor here, or is there something I’m missing?
The river dilutes enough of the sewage that people don’t think about it. There are also usually laws on minimum distance between sewage outlets and water inlets.
In contrast, reclaimed water isn’t diluting treated water, it is the treated water, generally without the plausible deniability in saying that nature helped clean it.
Usually the water that will become tap water is also not pumped directly from the river but is bank filtrate from nearby underground.