How Australia turns wastewater into drinking water 

Ah yes I took Brilliant’s course on toilets as well

Must have taken a shit load of work ^_^

I can imagine. I'm guessing you had to sign a waiver of sorts? I know you said the recycled water didn't smell of anything, but what did the other parts of the plant smell like? For example, where you opened the lid to the tank with all the stuff that isn't poop water, I can't imagine that smelling pleasant. And by the way, what a waste of servo pies.

Would they not let you drink it pure? DI water isn't dangerous in small amounts only large ones (though I guess I don't know how many takes you did). Most water (in the US at least but I guess AUS too) doesn't get RO filtered before we drink it so I'd imagine it was safer than alot of tap water.

having worked for the water corp i am not surprised they were concerned lol

A little chocolate milk never hurt no one.

You just gotta make sure the intake is just barely up stream from the poop tube.

That was a genius rick roll

heres the time of it 0:47 wach it at slowest speed

How the hell did you notice that!! I had to rewatch at .25x like 3 times to see it...tho I am watching it on a phone.

It's under "N".

I noticed that the last line said "You wouldn't get this from any other guy", so I had to go back and check if the other lyrics were also in there.

It's not too clean to drink what? It just has no minerals in it. You can survive off distilled water you just need some salt and other irons in your daily life

​@@RekySaiNah, i think your cells don't enjoy destilled water

@@RekySai Now I'm no doctor but from my biology class I recall something about osmosis I think the reason why you don't want to drink pure clean water is because that water would leech out minerals from your body through osmosis

omg it is

Oh my God

The water loss in Advanced Water Recycling is concerning

?

i knew i wasn't the only one who caught that lol

To address the "what about the hormones caused by the dumping of expired or inadvertent disposal of medicine?" My brother in whatever, the aeration tanks have bacteria that do break down those hormones into harmless byproducts that don't interfere with your body. And with reverse osmosis done on them, picometer-sized holes are literally smaller than the hormones, bacteria and other pathogens that you worried so much. Things that affect your body are already tackled in the earlier processes and we overkill it by both filtering water through these filters and we also flashed ultraviolet light onto the water, so we are making so pure a water we have to add back the minerals into it. That means, we have the capacity to scale up and effectively treat water to a point it's good for even wafer manufacturing plants to use. And they needed pure water, like purer than your heart is.

When I first saw him on Tom Scott's, Tom joked James would replace him. Aged like wine

but?

@@awsomebot1 I see your point. I used "but" in the sense of "He's smart [and all] BUT [the greatest thing] is his production quality..."

Adding onto your point. I’m studying Waste Treatment Plants and this explains the process so well!

I'm still waiting for someone to point out the "grease" joke.

Lol yeah, repeated the gag every time oil came up too, he's dedicated to the bit. Grease also went to Greece too 🇬🇷

It's cinematography like that which made Good Eats with Alton Brown so great two decades ago, and I'm glad to see it used so wonderfully today!

yes, and it caught my attention better than sludge content

That's a pretty damn impressive achievement, and really suggests that he is a Big Brain. Things get very weird around the triple point, and water is weird enough even at more human-normal temperatures and pressures! Much respect for anyone that can spend time thinking about that sort of stuff without their brain saying 'Bugger this for a game of soldiers!' and just oozing out of their ears! 😵‍💫

Oh I love this. It's been a problem that we didn't know how to solve. Well, we still don't know how to practically do it, until we have the electrical energy situation figured out.

This one was harder to film than normal (only had a few hours to film the whole thing) so didn't have the chance to set up the shots in a way that works for tracking. Don't worry, I'm not abandoning it!

@@AtomicFrontier Makes sense. Also means that you have built yourself a STYLE brand! Which is cool...but also means you might need to be aware of that for the future and let people know when you have to leave the style for reasons like this.

@@feldamar2 I was okay with not having a style disclaimer at the beginning.

Great video James!

@@feldamar2no one needs to let anyone know know anything. If creators make decisions, they don’t need to explain themselves imho.

Yes!

Nice to be home!

the best solution I've heard of is hydrothermal processing, which can even break down fluorocarbons. It can even be net energy positive and makes recovering phosphates, potassium, and nitrates much easier. it's mostly a question of implementation and infrastructure cost.

I dont understand - the last few steps of highly scaled filtration and RO in this video were specifically so potent in removing even something as small as chlorine ions, resulting in water so unnaturally pure you couldnt drink it. What kind of hormones or pharmaceutical compound is smaller than ions it couldn't be removed? The water produced in these plants are so pure it couldnt even be called treated sewage anymore. Its much closer to pharmaceutical grade water than even tap water. In fact, its analytical grade - even purer than pharmaceutical since it doesnt even have ions - so pure it couldnt even be drank directly without dehydrating you (sounds weird but true - such purity doesnt exist in nature). I get disgust over drinking treated sewage, but i hate when people pull in scare mongering tactics like this. All water is treated sewage. The only difference is just how obvious does the water originate from sewage. You have much higher chance of drinking oh so scary estrogens that makes the frogs gay from reservoir treated water - the water is less completely treated, and more contaminants can end up in a reservoir from trash and farm effluents (potentially illegally) dumped in - as you yourself said. If you are so worried about such contaminant, you should be championing this sewage treatment system - the disgust of sewage actually resulted in an overkill purification that you don't see in any other normal water treatment plants.

@dannyteo5630 I'm not disgusted by the thought of drinking processed waste water. It isn't necessary where I live since we have some of the largest fresh water reserves, but it could be a critical advancement for arid countries with the money to process waste water, like Austria, Israel, Saudi, UAE, etc. In the video, the water he is drinking is probably safe from those pharmaceuticals. RO systems, ozonation, and similar can remove it. But the issue is scale, those systems are much less efficient than standard water treatment, requiring expensive systems with a large footprint and huge power consumption for a relatively small amount of water compared to the standard ones we use. It might be suitable for a wealthy region with a water shortage, but it's just not scalable to the point where it could be used as a main source of water globally. Don't get me wrong, I'm excited for these systems and I think they have many good applications, but until there is a big breakthrough in it, it's going to struggle to be brought to a major scale.

you clearly don't know chemistry, their process to clean the water is so pure that the h2o becomes corrosive, that's why he had to dilute it for drinking, check your facts before coming out into the public and spewing garbage

Doubt it's much if a problem when it's diluted in the aquifer

i've seen a guy on youtube who was off-grid and treated his own water then siphoned off the methane from the sewage to power his home.

Always gonna Beenyup never gonna Beenydown

how was the tornado?

Insane, lucky it didn't hit where I live. First time I remember anything like that happening in Bunbury

Bunbury actually has their own water company and aren't supplied by water corp

Some of the pipes remove smell, so normally it wouldn't smell too bad actually! That said, the morning we were there they had a power cut so their normal "smell remove pipes" weren't quite up to their normal capacity.

@@AtomicFrontier Unfortunate timing! When (roughly) was this filmed, anyway?

@@DrBunnyMedicinal Late January 2024. Takes me ages to edit them

@@AtomicFrontier that’s amazingly quick in my books… for such high quality content!!

@@AtomicFrontier Given the quality and extent of the editing in each video I can't say as I'm surprised in the slightest! Late January this year was a bit toasty, though not as bad as it was once Bunuru actually kicked in (and then stayed, and stayed, and stayed...).

No, just need lot of engineering. thats it

Interesting to read, best of luck mate 🤙

Moth pulling an Anchorman. "I love lamp!"

The humour sets this channel apart from countless other AI generated “educational” channels with robotic voices and soulless content.

Had you watched the video in its entirety? They used the methane collected from the anaerobic digesters as fuel to offset the energy required to make this whole plant working. These digesters break down the solid waste that was scooped up from the sedimentation tank by the same bacteria that is found in your intestines to turn these wastes into fertilizers.

@@FiredAndIced Only 1/4 is offset, but yes

@@FiredAndIced Yes I know, but that doesn't mean it doesn't require a huge amount of energy. They burn the methane, also not the best. Sure it's better, but the issue is that we need huge amount of processes to clean water in the near future and we can't afford to use burning as a form of energy for that really.

Yup! Those filters are insane

yeah, people are ignorant and dumb. Especially in "conservative" groups. Something similar happened with nuclear energy in the 90s as an excuse to keep running things on coal because it's "safer"

It really depends on where you live. There's also atmospheric water capture for places with high humidity. But we would all benefit from recycling waste water. Virtually all fresh water in the world is recycled anyway the only difference is that it comes from the natural water cycle.

wastewater recycling is WAY cheaper than desalination because the reverse osmosis pressure is so much lower, so it's generally a much better choice whenever you can convince the public to accept it. Unless you're the crazy Israelis who use desalination for drinking water and then use the wastewater to supply something like 70% of their agriculture in the middle of the desert.