Recycled water could keep Waimea green

WAIMEA — The county’s wastewater management folks are talking about using treated wastewater to irrigate various chunks of turf in Waimea, and they’re holding a public meeting from 6 to 8 tonight at the Waimea Canyon School cafeteria to bring the public up to speed on the project.

Ed Tschupp, Kauai’s chief of wastewater management, said the practice is already being used on several golf courses islandwide.

The Waimea Wastewater Treatment Plant was recently upgraded to an R-1 facility, according to a press release, “to produce a high quality alternative water resource that will provide the greatest benefit to the Waimea community.”

That change means Waimea’s water treatment facility went from an R-2 facility to an R-1 facility, which meant adding another layer of treatment to the process, Tschupp said, as well as adding more intensive disinfection.

He said they’ll be using ultraviolet light for disinfection instead of the traditional chlorine method.

Currently, the county operates an R-1 facility in the Lihue plant, which has been in service since 2010.

“We view R-1 water as a water resource,” Tschupp said.

He said the primary effect on the public is that the parks department will be able to do more irrigation, so it means more grass and greener grass.

Tonight’s meeting is a discussion about how that water will be distributed throughout the community.

“In concept, somebody could be saying they’re putting doo-doo water on our park, so there’s always potential for public concerns and we want to inform the public,” Tschupp said. “We’ll be prepared to talk about things like relative risk and generally public acceptance of reclaimed water.”

Tschupp said there’s a slide in the presentation that addresses the possibility of pharmaceutical contamination.

He said that according to national studies it would take a landscaper over 2,000 years of daily exposure to recycled water to build up an equivalent to 1 dose of Prozac.