Published 7:00 am Thursday, June 6, 2024
Irrigating crops with treated wastewater is widely considered a promising but underused way to help relieve drought impacts in Oregon and across the West.
Given that consensus, it would seem self-imposed bureaucratic obstacles that hinder water recycling could be revised or scrapped with minimal fuss. But that assumption fails to account for the difficulty in changing entrenched state government processes — even when nobody disputes an overhaul is warranted.
“We’ve had a stale regulatory framework for these projects,” said Susie Smith, retired executive director of the Oregon Association of Clean Water Agencies.
Because the state’s rules are outdated and confusing, utilities can’t confidently estimate how much wastewater recycling will cost and if it’ll reliably work compared to other methods, she said.
“If they can’t get a clear picture, they run out of time and pick a different option,” Smith said. “What we’re seeing happen is it gets eliminated from consideration.”
Until the regulatory procedures for installing water recycling projects are clarified in Oregon, treatment facilities will be reluctant to make such investments, said Jared Kinnear, water resources project manager for the Clean Water Services utility in Hillsboro, Ore.
“The things we want to do on the creative side are constrained by the existing rules,” he said. “So we do need more flexibility.”
While wastewater recycling projects are ultimately governed at the federal level by the Clean Water Act, the state government’s implementation of those standards poses the main hurdle, said Bob Baumgartner, regulatory affairs director for Clean Water Services.
“These efforts are widely done elsewhere, we’re just not there yet,” he said.
The regulatory complications surrounding such projects may appear absurd, since sewage facilities already discharge treated wastewater directly into rivers — but they can’t use that same water for irrigation without additional regulatory scrutiny. If it’s clean enough to enter waterways, that may beg the question: Why are additional hurdles necessary for wastewater to be sprinkled onto crops and soaked into the soil, since it’ll end up in the same place anyway?
Experts say the answer often has more to do with meeting bureaucratic requirements than legitimate concerns about water quality.
“It’s logical and illogical at the same time,” said Todd Miller, environmental services supervisor for the City of Springfield, Ore.
Even if it seems unlikely using wastewater for irrigation will be more harmful than releasing it straight into a river, regulations prohibit facilities from taking those types of risks, experts say.
“There might be unintended consequences if we haven’t studied it,” Miller said.
For example, the wastewater that passes through an irrigation system may end up running off into a small creek, potentially introducing a higher concentration of pollutants than if it’s diluted in a larger river, experts say.
To avoid such hazards, the sewage treatment facility must closely examine the ultimate fate of the wastewater, which is tougher to do if it’s entering an irrigation system.
“You basically need to track that molecule of water,” Miller said. “It provides a bit of a regulatory burden compared to another water source.”
Irrigators and other water users may be reluctant to participate in such recycling projects if they’re associated with a higher level of government scrutiny, even if the water is available free of charge, said Thomas Gray, public information and education analyst with the City of Springfield.
“Well-motivated laws and regulations sometimes have quirks that need to be cleaned up,” Gray said.
Wastewater treatment experts contacted for this article generally don’t blame Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality for the impediments to water recycling. Instead, they say the predicament results from convoluted layers of statutes and rules that have accumulated over years and decades. Widespread recognition of the problem at least offers the opportunity to clear the logjam.
“We’re hopeful things are moving in the right direction,” Gray said.
Officials with DEQ acknowledge the current restrictions aren’t always necessary to comply with the federal Clean Water Act.
The agency is currently working to remove the regulatory obstructions that prevent wastewater recycling from reaching its full potential in agriculture, as directed by legislation passed last year.
“I firmly believe there’s an opportunity to provide recycled water for irrigation canal augmentation,” said Pat Heins, DEQ’s state coordinator for biosolids and water reuse.
As is often the case, though, the state government can’t turn on a dime — regulatory reform will require continued investments of time and money.
Heins rejects the notion that Oregon DEQ’s recycle wastewater program is lagging behind those in other states. Rather, each state government takes a different approach based on the unique circumstances within its boundaries, he said.
Some states have less advanced water recycling programs but can still be more permissive with how treated wastewater is used, Heins said. For instance, the situation may be different in a Southwestern state where water temperature is a lower priority than in Oregon, where fish species often rely on cool streams.
Even so, Oregon’s DEQ doesn’t have as many specialists devoted to water recycling as agencies in Washington and Idaho, hampering its ability to focus on the issue, Heins said.
“We are limited to reacting,” he said. “Staffing is a big shortcoming.”
To make robust use of recycled water for irrigation, Oregon will need to conduct pilot studies to demonstrate to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency these strategies comply with federal law, Heins said.
“We need to get the EPA’s buy-off,” he said.
Discharging treated wastewater into irrigation canals would be an efficient method of recycling, but DEQ must prove such systems should be exempt from federal “total maximum daily load,” or TMDL, limits for pollutants, Heins said.
“If the irrigation canal has the same restrictions, there’s no reason to send it to an irrigation canal,” he said.
It’ll probably be possible to show irrigation districts shouldn’t be subject to TMDL limits as long as their canal systems are piped to prevent seepage, screened to exclude fish, and self-contained to avoid discharge to waterways, Heins said.
“That makes it clear-cut and an easier sell,” he said.
Sewage treatment facilities are expected to be eager to recycle wastewater for irrigation as they come up against stricter TMDL limits on temperature, since chilling systems are energy-intensive and expensive to operate, Heins said.
“Right now, the big driver is temperature,” he said. “The price tag jumps really quick. There’s got to be another economic way of doing this.”
At this point, though, the City of Hermiston has been the only agency in Oregon to win approval to discharge treated wastewater into an irrigation district’s canal system.
To prevent raising the temperature of the Umatilla River, the city spent $26 million building a system that brings its wastewater to the highest grade of cleanliness so it can be applied to crops, said Mark Morgan, assistant city manager.
“Salmon don’t like warm water, so during the summertime, we couldn’t be discharging our warm treated water into the river,” he said. “It was expensive for us to do, but our other options to remove that heat were also very expensive.”
Installing the equipment was a relative breeze compared to obtaining regulatory clearance for the project, which took about five years while construction took about two years, Morgan said. Through engineering analysis, the city was able to verify farmers used most of the water, while the small amount leftover was sufficiently cooled by low nighttime temperatures as it moved through 20 miles of canals, he said.
“Every time we see an opportunity to re-use water, we push hard for that possibility,” Morgan said. “We hate to see water used only once.”
The Biocycle Farm in Oregon’s Lane County has likewise proven its irrigation system is a closed loop, though the operation functions differently from Hermiston’s.
Owned by the Metropolitan Wastewater Management Commission, the farm irrigates poplars with treated wastewater from Eugene and Springfield while using biosolids — dried, treated sewage — to fertilize the 400 acres of trees.
“This is an agricultural operation but it’s not an agricultural operation for profit,” said Todd Miller, Springfield’s environmental services supervisor.
Farmers may joke that’s hardly unusual in the agriculture industry, but the distinction is that Biocycle Farm’s primary role is to dispose of treated sewage and effluent rather than to grow a crop. Economically, the revenues it generates only partially offset operating costs, which is meant to maximize biosolids application at a rate that will be consumed by trees without endangering groundwater with nutrient seepage.
“If we wanted to get into the black, we could, but it would come with some trade-offs,” Miller said. “The biosolids operation is job number one, so we don’t sacrifice that.”
The poplar farm only consumes a minute fraction of the available wastewater and it’s surrounded by private agricultural fields, so the utility could expand its irrigation applications. At this point, though, the regulatory and financial hurdles are too high to pencil out.
“There’s going to be tipping point where it makes that worthwhile,” Miller said.
Eventually, wastewater treated to the highest safety level at the front end may be used more widely for irrigation, he added. “I think that’s going to be the big regulatory leap.”
The price of pipelines and other equipment is a major barrier to wastewater recycling nationwide, but federal spending bills passed in recent years offer a chance to extend such infrastructure, said Susan Schlangen, a Northwest region official with the national WateReuse trade association. On the regulatory front, the federal government largely delegates oversight of water recycling to state governments, so each finds its own solutions to meet water quality standards, she said.
“For the most part, it’s state regulation that determine how it works,” Schlangen said. “It’s important we be able to learn what other states have done.”
Though the 50 states have taken different approaches to water recycling, the nation has a long way to go in capitalizing on the full potential of wastewater irrigation, said Ben Glickstein, the association’s communications director.
“We see a tremendous opportunity for additional agricultural reuse in the U.S. It’s something that remains untapped in many agricultural regions,” he said. “What’s happening now for agricultural reuse is a fraction of what could be done nationally.”
