Would you drink this water?

NEWater looks like any other glacier-clear bottled H20. Except it gushes from the toilets of Singapore instead of a bubbling spring.

By Corrie Pikul

Oct 22, 2004 | The promotional bottle for Singapore's NEWater looks like any other bottled water, right down to its snappy name and bright label. And it tastes the same as other premium bottled-water brands -- maybe even better, if you prefer the metallic edge of Evian to the airy sweetness of Poland Springs. But while NEWater is transparent, its story is not, and it's frankly not terribly appetizing.

NEWater is the product of Singapore's new water-treatment system, and it is wastewater that has been purified through advanced synthetic membranes called ZeeWeed. That's right: The crystal-clear NEWater that gushes through the country's faucets isn't gurgling from a mountain spring. Most recently, it was flushed from a toilet.

The water is first treated in a traditional water plant before going through a three-stage purification that uses high-quality ZeeWeed membranes, which filter out even the most microscopic bacteria. By the time it's processed, NEWater meets all the drinking-water standards specified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the World Health Organization.

Don't panic. There is no plan to bring NEWater -- or anything like it -- to the United States anytime soon. "It's unacceptable to [U.S.] consumers to drink their own waste stream," acknowledges Ashok Gadgil, an Indian-born environmental physicist who works at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (though he quickly points out that astronauts use the technology in long-term outer-space trips).

The great promise is that this and other new technologies can, in some way, help solve an increasingly dire global water crisis. Nearly 20 percent of the world (1.2 billion people) does not have easy access to clean water -- 400 children die every hour from water-borne causes, according to Gadgil. And even in developed countries like the United States, fear of tainted water is on the rise -- and not just the non-kosher copepods that sneaked through New York's filtration system this summer, worrying Orthodox Jews.

In the United States, sand filtration systems have traditionally been used to remove particles and sediment from our surface water, which is then treated with chemicals like chlorine. But some strains of bacteria, including Cryptosporidium, have started to develop immunity to chlorine. In 1993, the microscopic "crypto" parasites spread through the municipal water systems of southeastern Wisconsin, causing an outbreak of a flulike disease that affected more than 400,000 people and killed approximately 100. While the outbreak has been linked to the inadequate treatment of drinking water taken from Lake Michigan, no specific source of the Cryptosporidium was ever identified. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that in the past 20 years, crypto has become recognized as one of the most common causes of waterborne disease within humans in the United States.

While the CDC assures us that the American drinking-water supply is normally safe, and that it has been taking precautions to handle outbreaks like the one in Wisconsin, it issues a reminder on its Web site that disease that spreads through water is still a very real problem. Crypto may be found in drinking water and recreational water in every region of the United States and throughout the world.

Membrane technology may also help the United States protect itself from terrorist attacks on the nation's water supply. Some membranes could act as a reliable barrier to contaminants such as sarin and anthrax. However, membranes can screen only water that goes into the treatment plant. Once it leaves the plant on its way to individual homes, water again becomes vulnerable, which is why government researchers stress that a viable water-security strategy must consist of two parts: treatment and monitoring.

Next Page: Designer membranes worthy of a museum exhibit

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