“But there are places where there is water scarcity, so what is the next option? You use the resources available.” “If you have fresh water, if you have the rainfall and you have somewhere to store it, that is the best option and the cheapest option,” she says. “I find it very progressive, very enlightening, the idea of using all the resources you have,” says Tortajada. What I do know is that I can turn on the tap, stick my head under it like a cartoon, and drink whatever comes out of it.
When you grow up surrounded by constant ambient rhetoric about water scarcity, even in a hyper-efficient capitalistic wet dream like Singapore, recycled drinking water is just fine. I do remember, though, the jokes and outright disgust expressed at the time NEWater rolled out, but more importantly, how quickly everyone accepted it and moved on. I couldn’t tell you whether NEWater tastes noticeably different from “normal” water, even with the preexisting knowledge of its origins, because 16 years later, I don’t care.
and this is how they found out that scarcity was a concern of people.” “And they would take notes of anything that referred to water and then bring it back to the planning table and to the policy table. “The PUB (Public Utilities Board), for many decades, sat down in meetings that are organized in community centers,” says Cecilia Tortajada, an adjunct senior research fellow at Singapore’s Institute of Water Policy who has advised numerous international environmental organizations and is currently based at the University of Glasgow.
Most Singaporeans grow up acutely conscious of the fact that half the country’s potable water supply comes from an agreement with Malaysia that expires in 2061. I first tried drinking recycled sewage water in 2005, two years after the Singapore government introduced NEWater to the population the idea of recycling municipal wastewater has been around since the 1970s when it was clear that the country didn’t have enough clean water sources of its own.
It’s time to destigmatize recycled piss water.ĭune review: a movie that puts an epic franchise ahead of its epic story My umbrage with the new Dune is far more basic: removing a real-life sustainable solution from a pioneering work of climate fiction is peepeepoopoo erasure, especially when our disintegrating planet has so little left to give us. I’m usually a simple moviegoer with simple needs. “It’s recycled water from the tent,” he says, “sweat and tears.”Ī few criticisms of Villeneuve’s movie have been that it was too flat, too beige, too sanitized, and didn’t seize the opportunity to get sufficiently weird with the source material. Inside the mask you’ll find a tube to allow you to drink the recycled water.” In a later scene, after Paul and Jessica have a cathartic family cry in their Fremen tent - an efficient structure that works similarly to the stillsuit - Paul urges his mother to drink. “It cools the body and recycles the water lost to sweat. Liet Kynes (played by Sharon Duncan-Brewster), the Imperial Ecologist tasked to work with House Atreides. “A stillsuit is a high-efficiency filtration system,” explains Dr. In 2021, it appears that Denis Villeneuve is not a fan of drinking recycled pee. In the original 1965 novel by Frank Herbert, the stillsuit is full-body attire that recycles potable water from literally every drop of moisture produced by the wearer, including sweat, tears, feces, urine, and even breath (it would also theoretically work as a period-recycling apparatus). Nearly an hour into the new Dune film, our favorite colonizing scamps, the Atreides boys, are introduced to a Fremen technology staple that allows them to survive Arrakis’ harsh desert environment.