When you flush your toilet or run your dishwasher, the wastewater flows to a plant run by the Hampton Roads Sanitation District.
Typically the water is treated, disinfected and released into local waterways. But HRSD has been working to recycle it instead.
The district is slowly expanding a program that converts sewage into drinking water and sends it underground for future use.
The Sustainable Water Initiative for Tomorrow, or SWIFT, launched in 2018 and operates out of a research center in Suffolk.
This month, HRSD surpassed 1 billion gallons of treated wastewater injected deep underground. By 2030, officials hope to add 50 million gallons per day.
“I can’t believe it,” said Germano Salazar-Benites, a treatment process engineer for SWIFT. “I remember pressing the button when we started recharging and I was so excited.”
For more than a century, Virginia has been drawing groundwater from the Potomac aquifer, an underground water body that spans the Mid-Atlantic coast and provides much of Hampton Roads’ drinking water.
As the region’s population grew, withdrawals started to outpace the aquifer’s ability to naturally replenish, dwindling the water supply.
Depletion also contributes to land sinking. Hampton Roads’ high rate of subsidence is a key driver of the region’s issues with sea level rise.
HRSD hopes the SWIFT project can help slow or reverse subsidence, as well as prevent intrusion from saltwater that contaminates the water supply.
Salazar-Benites said the district measures changes in land elevation at the Suffolk plant with a sensitive device called an extensometer. While pumping water underground, they can see the land rise ever so slightly and increase pressure in the aquifer.
Jay Bernas, HRSD’s general manager and CEO, previously told WHRO the organization created SWIFT largely to achieve regulatory compliance.
The organization faces state and federal requirements to limit pollution entering the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. A large part of the multi-state bay restoration effort regulates how many nutrients can run into waterways from sources including farms and wastewater treatment plants.
Expanding SWIFT is expected to reduce the total amount of nitrogen entering waterways from HRSD facilities by 70% compared to 2021 levels, and phosphorus by 50%, Bernas said.
The $2.8 billion expansion will include two full-scale plants in Suffolk and Newport News in addition to the existing research center. Part of the money comes from a $1.3 billion federal loan through the Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act program a few years ago.
Wastewater at the SWIFT facility flows through five layers of treatment, Salazar-Benites said. That includes using UV light, ozonation and filters to remove particles, disinfect and break down organic matter.
“The water that exists in the aquifer is really high quality,” Salazar-Benites said. “Our main job is basically (to) make sure that the water that we produce matches that quality, so it doesn’t disrupt the chemistry that is already there.”
Engineers learned a lot and changed some technical details since the program began, he said.
For example, the federal government drastically reduced the amount of PFAS — a class of manmade chemicals known as “forever chemicals” — that is allowed to be present in the water. HRSD is refining its system to comply.
The recent billion-gallon milestone also coincided with an educational program called “Imagine a Day Without Water.” Third-graders from Aberdeen Elementary School in Hampton visited the SWIFT center in Suffolk last week to learn about the importance of water conservation.
