What's up with recycled wastewater's PR problem?

Summary

Short Wave Episode Summary

Episode Title: What's up with recycled wastewater's PR problem?
Date: March 27, 2026
Hosts: Regina Barber and Rachel Carlson
Special Guest: Peter Annan, journalist and Executive Director of the Burke Center for Ecosystem Research

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Episode Overview

This episode focuses on the psychological and public relations challenges—often called the "yuck factor"—that hinder public acceptance of recycled wastewater as a solution to water scarcity. The conversation is science-forward but approachable, combining personal reactions, an on-air experiment, and expert insight to break down myths and facts about recycled wastewater for drinking.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

The “Yuck Factor” and Public Perception

• Experiment Setup (00:42–01:15):
  Host Regina Barber is presented with a glass of water containing a (plastic) cockroach as a visceral way to kick off the "yuck factor" discussion.

  • Quote: "I had this, like, visceral reaction. Why are we drinking this cockroach water?" — Regina Barber (01:15)

• Psychological Barriers (01:21–02:45):
  Discusses research showing that even if water is scientifically clean, its perceived association with contamination (from criminals or even sterilized cockroaches) leads people to reject it.

  • Quote: "[...] just the mere idea that it had been contaminated at one point in time was enough for some people to say, nope, not drinking that." — Rachel Carlson (01:19)

The Science of Water Recycling

• Overview of Wastewater Recycling (04:31–05:57):
  Rachel and Regina introduce guest Peter Annan and the concept that recycling wastewater is not a new solution—Orange County and Windhoek, Namibia have done it for decades.

  • Quote: "Orange County is tapped out. It is turning 100% of its sewage into drinking water right now." — Peter Annan (04:57)

• How It Works (05:49–07:30):
  Peter Annan lays out the multi-step purification process:

  • Microfiltration (removes protozoa, bacteria, viruses)
  • Reverse Osmosis (removes chemicals, pharmaceuticals, PFAS, more)
  • Remineralization (prevents pipe corrosion)
  • Continuous, real-time monitoring for contaminants
  • Ultraviolet disinfection (extra layer of safety)
  • Storage and mixing with groundwater or reservoirs (environmental buffer)
  • Delivery to consumers
  • Quote: "It is so pure that minerals need to be added back into it so that that pure water doesn't leach minerals from concrete conveyance pipes..." — Peter Annan (06:40)

The History and Success of Water Recycling

• International and Domestic Context (07:30–08:26):
  Water recycling is more common than many realize. Orange County began with "Water Factory 21" in 1971; Windhoek, Namibia started even earlier.

• Case Study: Orange County’s PR Strategy (08:31–09:49):
  Orange County avoided public backlash through aggressive and ongoing public relations efforts, including hiring a high-profile PR consultant.

  • Quote: "What's failed in some of these systems is public acceptance because of rushed or inadequate public relations to help people understand that this is safe. It's mind over matter." — Peter Annan (09:25)

Safety and Incidents

• The Acetone Incident (10:00–11:35):
  In 2013, acetone was illegally dumped into Orange County’s sewage. The multi-step treatment diluted the chemical far below regulatory limits, and real-time monitoring caught the issue. The only regret was not being more transparent for PR reasons.
  • Quote: "They said, you know, we don't regret that decision from a health standpoint, but from a public relations standpoint, if we were to do that again, we would offload the water, shut down the system temporarily just for public relations." — Peter Annan (11:13)

Arguments For and Against Recycled Wastewater

• Pros:

  • Cheaper than desalination or long-distance water importation
  • Local, drought-resistant supply
  • Technology is highly effective—failures are PR, not technical (11:44–12:42)
  • Quote: "It's local and it's drought resistant because there's always sewage." — Peter Annan (12:05)
  • Quote: "People always gotta go." — Rachel Carlson (12:09)

• Cons:

  • Psychological resistance in communities not yet experiencing dire water stress
  • PR challenges can lead to non-acceptance even when technology is proven
  • Alternatives (like desalination) are sometimes chosen for perception, despite higher cost and footprint
  • Water conservation remains the cheapest, easiest solution where feasible (12:59–13:50)
  • Quote: "The cheapest, easiest solution to any water crisis is more conservation." — Peter Annan (13:37)

The Path Forward

• Need for agricultural cooperation and community buy-in to address water conservation and recycling (13:54–14:21)

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Memorable Moments and Quotes

• The Cockroach Experiment:
  "It's a cockroach. I mailed like 20 of them to ARU, but I have a glass of water that also has a plastic cockroach in it." — Rachel Carlson (01:03)

• On Overcoming the Yuck Factor:
  "What we're seeing is that the water crisis is getting so bad in so many parts of the country and the world that people are in some places just already over the psychology of it... bring it on. We need this option." — Peter Annan (12:26)

• Lighthearted Closing:
  "I'd drink it." — Regina Barber (14:40)
  "Can you do it right now? I'll do it with you." — Rachel Carlson (14:41)
  "Yeah, I'm drinking the water. Ready? One, two, one, two, three." — Regina Barber (14:44)

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Notable Timestamps

• 00:42–01:21: Start of the "yuck factor" experiment with plastic cockroach in water
• 04:50–05:57: Introduction of expert Peter Annan and background on recycled wastewater
• 05:57–07:30: Step-by-step explanation of water recycling process
• 08:31–09:49: Discussion of Orange County’s successful PR approach
• 10:00–11:35: The "acetone incident" and lessons for transparency
• 12:09–12:42: Discussion of recycled wastewater as a reliable and local resource
• 13:37–13:50: Emphasis on conservation as the first solution
• 14:40–14:49: Hosts commit to drinking water from the experiment

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Tone and Style

The episode is science-forward, humorous, and conversational, balancing technical information with relatable anecdotes and audience-friendly explanations. The humor ("plastic cockroach water," "people always gotta go") is used to make a potentially off-putting topic accessible and engaging.

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Conclusion

Recycled wastewater offers a reliable, safe, and proven solution for areas facing water scarcity, but public acceptance remains a significant barrier. Educational efforts and transparent communication—rather than technological improvements—form the next frontier for widespread adoption. As water stress increases, societal attitudes are beginning to shift, and recycled wastewater may soon become a more common part of our water supply. The real challenge is winning over hearts and minds—not just perfecting the science.

Transcript

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[Regina Barber]

Hey, shortwavers. Regina Barber here with producer Rachel Carlson.

[Rachel Carlson]

Hi, Gina. Okay, I'm Rachel. Really excited because as you know, we've been talking about water this week.

[Regina Barber]

Yes, I am aware.

[Rachel Carlson]

As part of this last episode in the series, I am making you do an experiment with me.

[Regina Barber]

I love science experiments.

[Rachel Carlson]

I'm so excited. I have our intern, Aru Nair, who is gonna bring you the experimental object, I guess we'll call it.

[Regina Barber]

Yeah, aru's right here. I see their face. Just so mischievous. Just a glass of water. Oh, wait, no. Oh, there's something in the water. What is in the water?

[Rachel Carlson]

Describe it.

[Regina Barber]

It's a cockroach.

[Rachel Carlson]

It's a cockroach. I mailed like 20 of them to ARU, but I have a glass of water that also has a plastic cockroach in it.

[Regina Barber]

So it is fake. Okay, okay, it's fake.

[Rachel Carlson]

Sorry, I should have said that first.

[Regina Barber]

I had this, like, visceral reaction. Why are we drinking this cockroach water?

[Rachel Carlson]

Throughout this week, I know we've been talking about a lot of scary problems when it comes to water.

[Regina Barber]

Yes.

[Rachel Carlson]

So I wanted to ask some experts about solutions. And initially I was looking for, you know, a cutting edge solution. But what I found was that we've had the solution, or at least one solution for decades.

[Regina Barber]

Oh.

[Rachel Carlson]

Recycling wastewater for drinking water. But it's caught up in something people referred to as the yuck factor.

[Regina Barber]

Yeah. The idea of using wastewater grosses people out.

[Rachel Carlson]

Right. And I found this paper from 2015 that was looking at people's perceptions of wastewater, and it looked into the idea of water having been contaminated in some way, like sipped by a convicted murderer or exposed to a heat sterilized cockroach. That's. That's why you have the cockroach. And even if the water went through this whole cleaning process, just the mere idea that it had been contaminated at one point in time was enough for some people to say, nope, not drinking that. Even if by the time they would be drinking it, it was completely clean.

[Regina Barber]

Okay, okay, I see where we're going here.

[Rachel Carlson]

Yeah, you can kind of see where this is going. And people who were more sensitive to the water being contaminated were also more likely to reject wastewater.

[Regina Barber]

Well, that going to Be thirsty Today on the show. Recycled WasTewater has a PR problem, but it could be one solution to the global water crisis.

[Rachel Carlson]

And we'll get into how lots of places have been successfully using recycled wastewater for decades.

[Regina Barber]

You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from N.

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[Regina Barber]

Dell.com DellPCS okay, Rachel, we're talking about water recycling. So it's one of the ways scientists say we can begin to address water scarcity. But as you pointed out, there's this yuck factor. Like some people, people are just grossed out by the idea even if they know the water's clean.

[Rachel Carlson]

Yes, people find it super icky. But using recycled wastewater is not a new idea.

[Peter Annan]

Orange county is tapped out. It is turning 100% of its sewage into drinking water right now. You know, it is kind of old news in some parts of the country. And then Windhoek, Namibia has been doing it since the 1960s. So when you start to look internationally, it's even older and more common.

[Regina Barber]

Yeah, I mean, I honestly thought a lot more cities were doing it.

[Rachel Carlson]

Yeah, it's not new. Peter Annan is a journalist and the executive director of the Burke center for Ecosystem Research up on Lake Superior in Wisconsin. And he's a self described water geek. He wrote a book called How Recycled Sewage is Transforming Our Water that came out in 2023.

[Regina Barber]

Okay.

[Rachel Carlson]

And then before that he wrote a book on the Great Lakes water wars.

[Peter Annan]

Sewage is too precious to waste anymore.

[Regina Barber]

I never thought about sewage being precious. So let's hear about what you and Peter talked about.

[Rachel Carlson]

Yeah. First, I just had him walk me through the recycling steps. Wastewater goes through once it's recollected before it's drinkable.

[Peter Annan]

The first step is it goes to microfiltration. And microfiltration takes out what I call the big, small stuff. So that's protozoa, bacteria, viruses. We're talking about things like cryptosporidium and giardia and things like that. And then step number two is the deep clean. In many cases, that's reverse osmosis. Reverse osmosis takes out chemicals, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, pfas, and any viruses that might have slipped through the micro filtration process. And so it is akin to distilled water, and it is so pure that minerals need to be added back into it so that that pure water doesn't leach minerals from concrete conveyance pipes on the way to the faucet. And then throughout the water recycling process, there's this real time contaminant monitoring to make sure nothing slips through. Then there's little tweaks and differences depending on the system. But the next step is ultraviolet disinfection with hydrogen peroxide, which is an extra layer that's somewhat redundant with reverse osmosis. And then the water tends to be held on site a little bit longer. And then it's either put into a groundwater system or a reservoir called an environmental buffer in the industry.

[Rachel Carlson]

So it mixes with what's already in the aquifer, and then it gets sent to customers.

[Peter Annan]

Exactly.

[Rachel Carlson]

Okay.

[Peter Annan]

And some people in the water recycling industry think it's silly to take this super pure water and mix it with groundwater, which isn't quite as pure in that indirect pulver reuse system. So we were increasingly seeing that purified water is just mixed with the rest of the water that goes out to homes and businesses in a community. So it's a lot.

[Rachel Carlson]

That's a lot. I mean, but that idea of treating wastewater isn't new, right?

[Peter Annan]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Rachel Carlson]

So could you walk me through some earlier examples of people doing this?

[Peter Annan]

Yeah. So the leader in the United States is Orange County, California. They started in 1971 with this project called Water Factory 21. And they went through the treatment process starting in the 1970s.

[Rachel Carlson]

And this is when the idea was more controversial because it was so new.

[Peter Annan]

Yeah. So Orange county managed to sort of snake through that controversial era without, you know, public relations problems, in part because they've always been really aggressive and assertive regarding public relations. They hired General Norman Schwarzkopf's PR guy from the Persian Gulf War. And he came in and with this really kind of assertive, super, super proactive public relations program. And Orange county never got pulled into that kind of that hysteria that was in the early 1990s and 2000.

[Rachel Carlson]

Wow.

[Peter Annan]

And they have been at the forefront for so long that many water utilities will go to Orange county, get a briefing from the Orange county folks not only on the technology, but also on the public relations, because the technology has not failed. What's failed in some of these systems is public acceptance because of rushed or inadequate public relations to help people understand that this is safe. It's mind over matter. And we really need this as an additional water source in large swaths of the Sun Belt and around the world.

[Rachel Carlson]

And the Sun Belt is that southern part of the US Kind of from Southern California to Florida. Ish.

[Peter Annan]

Yep.

[Rachel Carlson]

In your work, have you found a time when the technologies failed?

[Peter Annan]

There haven't been. I mean, there have been moments that the. The treatment system has picked up things that have gotten through the process. So Orange county, again, is an example, and I think it was 2013. They had an industrial customer that illegally dumped a large amount of acetone into the sewage system.

[Rachel Carlson]

Oh, no.

[Peter Annan]

And so that ended up getting into the wastewater system in Orange County. Passing through the wastewater treatment, it entered into Orange County's potable water recycling program.

[Rachel Carlson]

Okay.

[Peter Annan]

The real time monitoring picked it up. They took a sample they. Of their water. That acetone was so diluted by that time that it did not reach the level of their permit with the state of California.

[Rachel Carlson]

Oh.

[Peter Annan]

And so they decided to let. Let the water go through into the groundwater system where it dissipated. And neither Orange county nor the state of California have detected acetone since at unsafe levels because of the dilution level.

[Rachel Carlson]

Yeah.

[Peter Annan]

But in. And that this incident was first reported in. In my book and in my interview with Orange county, they said, you know, we don't regret that decision from a health standpoint, but from a public relations standpoint, if we were to do that again, we would offload the water, shut down the system temporarily just for public relations. So that's as close as we've come to any kind of an incident that's known as the acetone incident in Orange County.

[Rachel Carlson]

Nail polish remover gate.

[Peter Annan]

Right.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Yeah.

[Rachel Carlson]

Okay. So close call, but not necessarily from a health perspective.

[Peter Annan]

Right. So the cost benefit analysis is there. It's cheaper than desalination, generally speaking, of ocean water, and often it's cheaper than diverting water in from Other parts of a state or other parts of the country. And it's local and it's drought resistant because there's always sewage.

[Rachel Carlson]

People always gotta go.

[Peter Annan]

They always gotta go. That's right. Yeah, that's absolutely right. So it's really over time, the big factor has been psychological, but what we're seeing is that the water crisis is getting so bad in so many parts of the country and the world that people are in some places just already over the psychology of it and they're bring it on. We need this option, we need this locally drought resistant source of clean, purified drinking water. And the cost is worth it from a security standpoint.

[Rachel Carlson]

Yeah. Okay, so we've talked about the yuck factor. We've talked about the PR component. You mentioned cost earlier. What are some of the arguments against using recycled wastewater if we're kind of going to play the doom and gloom card?

[Peter Annan]

Yeah, yeah. I think in some communities they're just not ready for it. They're just not psychologically ready for it or their water situation isn't dire enough for them to include it in their water supply portfolios. Other places, I think psychologically, even though it's more expensive often and it has a more significant environmental footprint, some people just prefer to go for desalination when they have it as an option. And the cheapest, easiest solution to any water crisis is more conservation.

[Rachel Carlson]

Right.

[Peter Annan]

And so when you can conserve your way out of a problem, there's no reason to spend the money on water recycling or desal or anything like that.

[Rachel Carlson]

Can we conserve our way out of the problem though?

[Peter Annan]

Well, I think that's the debate that we're in right now. We're not going to be able to solve the long term water solutions in the country, in the world, without embracing and working with agriculture and. And that. That debate about how much ag can conserve on top of all the urban conservation programs that have been in place in many parts of the Southwest in particular is sort of another stage in the debate.

[Rachel Carlson]

Yeah, it takes community buy in.

[Peter Annan]

Exactly.

[Rachel Carlson]

Peter, thank you so much for chatting about wastewater with me.

[Peter Annan]

You're welcome. Thanks for your interest.

[Rachel Carlson]

Gina, after hearing this conversation with Peter, where's your head at? Would you drink the water in front of you right now?

[Regina Barber]

I'd drink it.

[Rachel Carlson]

Can you do it right now? I'll do it with you.

[Regina Barber]

It's plastic, right?

[Rachel Carlson]

It's plastic.

[Regina Barber]

Okay. Yeah, I'm drinking the water. Ready?

[Rachel Carlson]

One, two, one, two, three.

[Regina Barber]

Yeah, it's fine.

[Rachel Carlson]

Thanks, Gina, for doing this experiment with me.

[Regina Barber]

I loved it. If you liked this episode. Please share it with a friend. It really helps the show. And hey, give us a follow on the NPR app or wherever you're listening from.

[Rachel Carlson]

I produced this episode and it was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Aru Nair checked the fax. Jimmy Keeley was the audio engineer. I'm Rachel Carlson.

[Regina Barber]

And I'm Regina Barber. Thank you so much for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from npr.

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