Technical Bulletin No. 0140: Water Pollution: Old Headaches and New Horizons

The attached paper by Dr. Morris M. Cohn, Editorial Director of “Wastes Engineering” and “Water Works Engineering", deals with a subject of particularly timely importance, i.e. water pollution and its relation to the ultimate availability of national water resources. The final report of the Senate Select Committee on National Water Resources stresses that Committee's concern with the future availability of water in the United States. The report summarizes the future situation with the statement that total withdrawals from stream flow will, by the year 2000, constitute 80.7 percent of the average stream flow remaining in 1954. The author of this paper sees the answer to the problem of providing adequate future water resources by planning ahead through multi-interest, multi-purpose concepts by reuse of water in industry, and by "...sewage treatment and industrial waste treatment to the degree which will make it possible to discharge treated effluent...without adversely affecting the value of the diluting waters for their best and most reasonable purpose." His reaction to some of the dire predictions of doom in respect to the future availability of water are expressed in the following paragraph from his paper. “...Water reuse can dampen the effects of population and production on water requirements, if industry will practice in-plant housekeeping, reduce wastes, segregate flows, treat and utilize reclaimed substances, and recycle the effluents. The paper industry's experience in water reuse is proof that it can be done. All we need to do is to improve our techniques, reduce our costs and enhance our results".