"We're letting drinkable water go out into the ocean every day," he said. "Southern California alone dumps 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater into the Pacific every day."
"Some people are already drinking their own pee and don't know it," said Britt, referring to the people of Orange County...because of imminent drought in the West, many people will have to rely on treated sewage -- containing human waste -- for their drinking water.
"We now have too many people living in places where we don't have fresh water," Britt told AOL News.
As an example, Britt cited the Phoenix area, which gets its drinking water from a remote body of reservoirs, including Lake Mead, which sits more than 230 miles away.
He suggested that Phoenix and other cities throughout the Southwest may soon go the way of Orange County, Calif., which does exactly what he's foretold – it recycles wastewater into tap water.
That's right. From the toilet bowl to the punch bowl, so to speak.HTML clipboard
"Some people think it's piping sewage straight to your tap," Dadakis told AOL News, "but it's a little more complex than that. We're using an advanced purification technique that provides the best quality available for replenishing Orange County's groundwater base."
The method, called the Groundwater Replenishment System, or GWRS, went online in January 2008 and currently turns 96 million gallons of wastewater into 70 million gallons of recycled water daily, for an efficiency rate of nearly 75 percent.