Utility in the market for more used water

Roads and restaurants are not the only things strained by Lee County's booming population. Natural resources are also taking a hit — especially water.

As more people continue to consume potable water through drinking and bathing, more wastewater is produced, said John Mulliken, director of water supply planning for the South Florida Water Management District.

That means the need to recycle wastewater into reclaimed or reused water for irrigation — which conserves drinking water — is becoming even more critical, Mulliken said.

"It doesn't make sense to be using our high quality, fresh groundwater for other purposes such as irrigation, when we can make the reclaimed water available," Mulliken said.

Florida's west coast has always been a trendsetter when it comes to water conservation, especially reclaimed water, he said. About 80 percent of Lee County's wastewater is recycled, he said.

However, new communities in unincorporated Lee have left Lee County Utilities in a classic supply-and-demand teeter-totter with reclaimed water.

"We do not produce enough reclaimed water to meet irrigation demands," said Howard Wegis, staff engineer with Lee County Utilities.

About 70 percent of unincorporated Lee's wastewater is recycled, Wegis said. The reclaimed water has some nutrients and is so clean you could drink it, he said.

"You probably could, but you wouldn't want to encourage people to drink it. It's what we call the 'yuck factor' in this business," he said, chuckling.

Reclaimed water is popular with areas that have large expanses of green, such as communities on eastern Corkscrew Road with golf courses and common areas, he said. Some areas also use the reclaimed water for median landscaping.

It's popular because it's cheap, he said.

Lee County Utilities charges 25 cents per 1,000 gallons of reclaimed water. Potable water costs $2.26 per 1,000 gallons for the first 6,000 gallons used monthly, he said. The more water used, the higher the cost, he said.

Demand plummets for the reclaimed water during the wet season, he said. Reclaimed water often is inserted into a deep injection well during the summer months, and then it's gone for good, he said.

"We can't store millions and millions of gallons in the rainy season to use for a half year later for irrigation," he said.

Lee County Utilities is working now on new long-term storage methods, such as an aquifer storage and recovery system, he said. The key will be finding an aquifer that is not being used for potable water, he said.

Most places that use reclaimed water have short-term storage, but those are tricky, too, he said.

"You have to be careful that those storage ponds, tanks, whatever, don't discharge into the rest of the storm system," he said.

The Villages at Country Creek used to use reclaimed water, until Lee County Utilities cut the community off about three years ago, said resident Arnie Rosenthal.

The utility company was afraid Country Creek's storage area would overflow during heavy rain and contaminate the Estero River, Rosenthal said.

"We would love to have (reclaimed water), but that would take the construction of a large tank to hold it," he said. "That would be extremely expensive, and I'm not sure anybody would want a large tank next to their home."

Another catch with reclaimed water is that it is expensive to lay the pipes needed for irrigation, said Fred Partin, executive director of Bonita Springs Utilities.

"When reality sets in that you have to come up with a few million dollars to put in infrastructure to receive the water, which you may have gotten before at no cost because of wells or lakes, and then you have to pay for the water, it's not so desirable," said Partin.

BSU recycles 100 percent of the community's wastewater, and most of it goes to Resource Conservation Systems, a company contracted to care for the landscaping at the Bonita Bay Group's developments, he said.

BSU plans to expand available reclaimed water in the future, he said.