Fertilizing rainwater

[Orchid Whisperer]

Originally Posted by Roberta

Actually, where I live water gets scrounged from various places... southern Calfiornia is basically a desert. So there is good water that comes from the northern part of the state (originating as snow melt), there is seriously awful water from the Colorado river, and some local ground water. Where I live, actually, it's mostly groundwater, some of which is even reclaimed from treated effluent from the sanitation district plant (since you have background in the environmental business, check out GWRS | OCWD), very little is imported. But each local water district has a different mix, and it varies both by location and time. Even the snow melt ends up mineralized, because there are a lot of carbonates around in the local rocks over which it passes before it gets into the system.

Metro Atlanta does a variant of effluent reuse. See: Water Recycling in Clayton County, Georgia | U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit A company I used to work for had some early involvement with this facility; at that time, the final cleanup went through soil in a forest ecosystem. Both then and now, that highly treated effluent went back to raw supply for drinking water.