Maybe inspired by The Adventures of Bear Grylls, some people in Texas started to recycle urine in order to fight drought. Big Spring, a town in Texas, has been going through the worst drinking water crisis lately, so, authorities decided to take advantage of every possible source of water to overcome this critical moment.
John Grant, district manager in Big Spring, said their plan is to collect wastewater, including urine, from 27,000 residents, purify it with the most advanced of techniques and then blend it with the city’s drinking water stream.
To master his thirst, the adventurer mentioned before, used somehow the same principle as NASA used in its last shuttle mission. The astronauts used a Forward Osmosis Bag that recycled their urine and sweat into drinkable water. Bear Grylls didn’t have such an Osmosis Bag so he used a dead snake to fill it with urine and then drank it. Maybe he knows better that desperate situations need extreme solutions.
Anyway, here in Big Spring sewage from homes will be directed to a creek and collected by a reprocessing plant that will turn it into clean water. According to meteorologists, this drought will last for a while because of those triple-digit temperatures that limited clouds in the sky.
For now, recycling wastewater and urine is the only option for people who live here. They seem to be satisfied with their water, whatever its origin or the process that purifies it. “I don’t think I could sell that one,” said John Grant.
