Dear Headway reader,
A decade ago, Jerry Brown, then California’s governor, imposed the state’s first mandatory restrictions on water use. Years of drought had brought about a harsh confrontation with reality: Californians would have to change their relationship with water.
“You just can’t live the way you always have,” Mr. Brown said to his fellow Californians at the time.
But in California — and most notably in Los Angeles, the state’s most populous metropolitan area — a quiet revolution was already underway, Michael Kimmelman reported for Headway in June:
Over the last half century or so, millions more people have moved to greater Los Angeles, settling in increasingly far-flung reaches of the desert and in the mountains, requiring more faucets, toilets and shower heads, producing more garbage and more gridlock on the 405 freeway, reinforcing all the clichés about excess and sprawl.
And during this same time, Angelenos have been consuming less water.
In his feature, Michael recounts the story of how a massive infrastructure project was built to ferry water to the city from across the Southwest. Today, he finds, those who monitor the region’s aquifers and reservoirs say that comparable efforts are necessary to prepare for a drier future.
But such efforts to conserve water in the state will be building on a catalog of initiatives that includes both notable successes and telling setbacks.
One of the visible examples of lifestyle changes Mr. Brown included among his plans to pare back water usage in 2015 was an effort to substitute drought-tolerant plants for 50 million square feet of lawns. “Just a quarter of the $22 million allocated for rebates in the rest of the state has been claimed so far,” the Times noted then, “perhaps a sign of persistent resistance to ripping out grass.”
Fast-forward to today, Michael reports, and we find the City of Los Angeles alone “has so far swapped out some 53 million square feet of lawn” — more than the target for the entire state. Even as Angelenos were drought-proofing their lawns, though, they were turning up their noses at water recycling efforts that voters found … unpalatable.
How a little alliteration tanked water filtration
“Potable reuse” — that is, wastewater recycling — has been a water conservation measure since well before 2008, when Elizabeth Royte went deep on the idea for The New York Times Magazine. In 1995, L.A. was on track to be an early pioneer of the approach when the city invested $55 million to begin building the East Valley Water Reclamation Project.
Five years later, the water treatment facility was built and ready to use. But just as the first treated water began to flow to the utility’s customers, the president of a local homeowners group hit upon a vivid and derisive phrase for the treatment process: “Toilet to tap.”
The image of sewer water pouring out of sinks captured the public imagination. Jay Leno did a bit about it in The Tonight Show. Joel Wachs, who as a City Council member voted to approve the facility’s construction in 1995, railed against it as a candidate for mayor in 2000.
“Go tell somebody in North Hollywood that they have to drink toilet water, but the mayor won’t have to drink it in Brentwood,” Wachs said.
Wachs was mistaken, incidentally. Water from the facility would have flown throughout the city. But usage was discontinued days after it started, thanks to the uproar.
The backlash against “toilet to tap” set water recycling in Los Angeles back for decades. By 2015, when California’s new water restrictions were announced, L.A.’s southern neighbor, Orange County, had already moved forward with a state-of-the-art purification system that was pumping out 100 million gallons of water a day. L.A. itself had not yet implemented a wastewater recycling project though. “Water Flowing From Toilet to Tap May Be Hard to Swallow,” read a Times headline that year.
In 2023, a statewide rule change in California finally superseded any remaining local squeamishness about treating wastewater. “Los Angeles will soon begin building a $740-million project to transform wastewater into purified drinking water in the San Fernando Valley,” The Los Angeles Times reported last year.
According to a recent report from U.C.L.A.’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, “California is vastly underutilizing recycled water as a resource.” The state reuses only 22 percent of its treated wastewater, unlike Arizona and Nevada, which both reuse more than half of the water available to them for treatment.
But as Michael reports, that could change.
— Matthew Thompson
Links we liked
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A Huffington Post contributor discovers the transformative power of paying off school lunch debt. (See also: Susan Shain’s 2024 story for Headway on the rise of free school lunch.)
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“The first fully mobile lung cancer screening unit in the country” is criss-crossing rural West Virginia.
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A correction was made on June 26, 2025: A picture caption in the previous edition of this newsletter misspelled the given name of a woman who was serving a 28-year sentence for carjacking. She is Dena Hernandez, not Dana.
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The post How Los Angeles Learned to Save Water appeared first on New York Times.
