In theory, the idea of one, continuous water cycle is easy to understand. But somehow, the idea that our wastewater could one day wind up in our drinking glasses can be a bit harder to accept — even if the recycled wastewater only gets there after lots of time and advanced water treatment processes.
Altamonte Springs City Manager Frank Martz is familiar with the concerns.
“People have grown up only thinking about sewage and stormwater as the thing that goes into the gutter,” Martz said. “It just disappears when I flush the toilet, when I wash the dishes. The water just comes out and it's clean, and it goes away … Like magic.”
Except it isn’t, Martz knows, from spending so much time at pureALTA, a pilot project at the city’s wastewater treatment plant, where reclaimed water — recycled, treated wastewater — becomes drinking water. One mid-November morning while being given a tour at the facility, I decided to taste some, fresh from the tap.
The recycled water flowed clear from a spigot Martz turned on inside the facility. It tasted normal and had no smell.
“They've asked us to figure out how to do it, and we have figured out how to do it,” Martz said.
“Proven technology”
Right now, Altamonte Springs doesn’t distribute the recycled water to customers for drinking. The state-funded pureALTA facility only gets turned on for demonstrations. But Florida is headed in that direction: toward potable reuse, the planned use of treated wastewater for drinking.
State rules enacted earlier this year allow for both indirect and direct potable reuse: the delivery of recycled, treated wastewater into a drinking water supply, either directly or via an environmental buffer, like a lake or a river. In both cases, the recycled water will go through an additional, advanced water treatment process after leaving the wastewater treatment plant.
Those advanced water treatment techniques vary, all designed to remove things like bacteria, viruses and parasites. At pureALTA, the reclaimed water is sanitized with ultraviolet radiation. Ultraviolet rays bombard the water, breaking up all pharmaceuticals and other inorganic compounds into “inert elements” that are then no longer harmful to human health, Martz said.
“This is now proven technology,” Martz said. “We have done all the testing necessary.”
For now, the state is basically allowing “the population to get used to the idea of alternative water,” Martz said. But once the time comes for Central Floridians to start drinking recycled water on a large scale, Altamonte Springs will be ready.
“There will come a day when this type of technology is going to provide the drinking water that we're using,” Martz said. “People will look at projects like this and say, ‘Why didn't we start using this sooner?’”
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Central Florida, center of water reuse
A shift toward using reclaimed water for drinking is still just getting started in Florida. But the broader concept of using reclaimed water for beneficial purposes is nothing new, especially in Central Florida, where most of the state’s water reuse happens. Right now most recycled water here is used for things like watering lawns at homes, golf courses, parks and schools.
Central Florida is a hub for water reuse for several reasons. One is the region’s intense development patterns, according to Clay Coarsey, the St. Johns River Water Management District’s director of water supply planning and assessment.
“With all the new growth that we've been seeing in Central Florida, as Orlando kind of expands out towards the outer beltway there, it's very inexpensive, when you're putting in new development, to have that third pipe there; to have that reclaimed water source available,” Coarsey said.
By the year 2045, Central Florida’s water demand will be 41% higher, coinciding with an expected regional population boom of 40%, according to the Central Florida Water Initiative. The coalition of regional water managers, utilities and other area stakeholders recently approved a water supply plan aimed at preventing an anticipated water shortage. The plan calls for more investment in alternative water supply options, including potable reuse projects.
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Coarsey is used to getting some bewildered looks whenever the topic of a water shortage in Central Florida comes up in conversation.
“I think, for most of the folks in Florida, they don't put a value to the water until they turn on the tap and nothing comes out. And then it becomes very valuable, right?”
Given the region’s plentiful beaches, lakes and springs, “it's hard for people to think that Florida has a water supply challenge,” Coarsey said.
Most Central Floridians’ drinking water comes from one of the most productive freshwater aquifers in the world, a massive, geologic feature known as the Floridan aquifer system. That underground aquifer feeds the region’s beloved freshwater springs, plus some rivers and lakes. In Central Florida, much of the aquifer system is unconfined, making it easier to recharge more quickly — including with recycled water.
But pumping the aquifer has consequences.
“If you use too much of the water out of that groundwater system, you start to have negative effects on those water resources,” Coarsey said.
Overpumping of groundwater can reduce water quality and trigger sinkholes. In 1950, Polk County’s Kissingen Spring permanently dried up: “the first major spring in Florida to become a casualty of too much groundwater pumping.” That could happen again, particularly if the state were to enter a prolonged drought phase, Coarsey said.
Recycling water can help Central Florida maximize all its water resources, ultimately putting less pressure on the aquifer, according to the District.
Maximizing the “water pie”
Florida Atlantic University engineering professor and former utility director Fred Bloetscher talks about water supply challenges using the metaphor of a “water pie.”
“Everybody's competing for that same pie. And really, the pie, traditionally, has been surface water and groundwater,” Bloetscher said.
But the idea of reclaiming wastewater for beneficial purposes changed that dynamic, Bloetscher said. “A large portion of the water … that we use is for irrigating plants. That does not need to be drinking-water quality water. So the concept was: let's go ahead and take wastewater, and let's reclaim it and then reuse it for irrigation.
“And magically, what that does is make the pie bigger. Because now we have a third source of water: it’s reclaimed wastewater.”
Now, especially in water-limited areas like Central Florida, Bloetscher said, reclaimed water is “absolutely” moving toward conversion to drinking water.
But not everybody is convinced.
Daytona Beach resident Greg Gimbert has concerns about what he and other potable reuse critics call “toilet to tap.”
“It's completely gross. I don't believe it's safe,” Gimbert said.
And despite how officials are framing the state’s water supply challenges, Gimbert said, he doesn’t believe direct potable reuse is inevitable in Florida. Instead, Gimbert thinks state and local leaders are just money-hungry, trying to squeeze in as much development — and as many dollars — as possible.
“The default assumption is: ‘We're going to keep developing as fast as we can, as much as we can, without regards to the health of the water,’” Gimbert said. “But we don't have the obligation to limit our own reasonable water supply to make room for one more.”
For Gimbert, the movement toward direct potable reuse has already gotten “out of hand.” But he says community members he’s spoken with, including aspiring and elected local politicians, aren’t paying enough attention to the issue.
“People want to be told that it's gonna be okay and it won't affect them. And it's gonna,” Gimbert said.
Recycled water on the rise
At least 37 U.S. states intentionally regulate reclaimed water use as of November 2023, up from just 19 in 2004, according to a 2024 study by researchers at the University of Maryland.
Different from policies for safely disposing of reclaimed water, which may allow for some “incidental” use of the water in the process, “intentional” regulations are written specifically with the goal of using reclaimed water in mind. In other words, “intentional” regulations are about making use of reclaimed water, versus getting rid of it.
“It takes some time, right, for people to start realizing: ‘This reclaimed water is actually now an asset, and not something that we're just trying to dispose of,’” Coarsey said.
It was that reuse mindset that led to the idea for the Orlando Easterly Wetlands park, known as the Orlando Wetlands, in Christmas.
Back in the 1980s, engineers transformed a former cattle pasture in northeast Orange County into the sprawling, 1,650-acre wetland treatment system that exists today. There, an average 15.5 million gallons of reclaimed water flow into the wetlands every day from the Iron Bridge Reclamation Plant in nearby Seminole County. It is one of the world’s very first examples of a large-scale wetland treatment system built to treat municipal reclaimed water, according to Orlando Wetlands Manager Mark Sees.
Sees has been around since the beginning and recalls hearing some concerns from residents in the Christmas area.
“That was a common sentiment early on in this project…. ‘Well, here comes the city of Orlando, and they're dumping their waste in our backyard,’” Sees said.
But the project is beneficial on multiple levels, Sees said, helping the region offset water use while also providing valuable wildlife habitat for hundreds of species.
“We're very, very proud of the work we’re doing," Sees said. “The water that's moving through our urban core-- if we can run (it) through wetland systems, we can not only clean that water, but then we're also providing a home for all these species that otherwise have no place to go.”
After moving gradually through the wetlands, the water eventually leaves through a creek that ultimately feeds into the St. Johns River. The water leaves the wetlands significantly cleaner than when it arrives, according to Sees and public test results going back to 2001.
Before sending it to the wetlands, the treatment plant removes about 95% of the nutrients from the reclaimed water, according to Wetlands Manager Mark Sees. “It’s that last 5% that’s really hard to deal with.” As the reclaimed water moves slowly through the wetlands, most of the remaining pollution gets filtered out.
Next steps
Skeptics of drinking recycled water remain, like Gimbert in Daytona Beach. “If the goal is continued and unrestrained development, they're doing the cheapest thing they can.”
Gimbert said instead of water reuse, he wants to see more focus on strategies he thinks could help trigger redevelopment, like restricting existing water permits.
Coarsey, with the water management district, said he remains focused on one task: “reusing each water molecule as many times as possible before it eventually discharges out to the Atlantic Ocean.” It’s a tall, complicated order, one in which potable reuse will gradually play more of a role.
“The utilities don't want to invest time and resources and infrastructure projects until the rules have been put in place, and that just happened earlier this year,” Coarsey said. “So I think you're going to start to see more and more, specifically our larger utilities, where this is going to be a part of their water supply portfolio.”
In Altamonte Springs, Martz said the city is prepared.
“The decision about when this type of water is integrated with drinking water systems? That's a decision for the folks in Tallahassee,” Martz said. “The water itself is ready. The question is: are the users ready?”
