Recycling startup CEO says we need to overhaul our ‘flush and forget’ society

The bulk of water recycling now happens at centralized wastewater treatment plants, requiring thousands of miles of pipelines to move the water. This practice is neither efficient nor cheap. But as more municipalities begin to require water recycling in commercial and residential buildings, companies are stepping up with new methods of on-site water recycling.

San Francisco-based startup Epic Cleantec is one of them. It is attempting to move the water industry to a “circular approach,” according to its founder, by helping buildings recover and reuse wastewater on site. The company’s system removes solids from wastewater and turns them into soil, then treats the water to be clean enough for uses like toilet flushing, irrigation, cooling towers or laundry. It is not clean enough to drink.

Published by Diana Olick in CNBC.