The Brief

The California State Water Resources Control Board on Tuesday approved new regulations for direct potable reuse, AKA "toilet to tap," or highly treated sewage that’s piped directly from a water treatment plant to your home.

Some of the largest direct reuse programs in the state are being developed here in Southern California.

So, when will you be able to gulp down water that’s gone from flush to faucet?

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (R) prepares to taste wastewater that was treated at the Antioch Water Treatment Plant with former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (L) and Antioch Mayor Lamar Thorpe (C) on Aug. 11, 2022 in Antioch, California.

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A bit of background

While this might sound like a new development, these regulations have been in the works for more than a decade now. And whether you realize it, there’s a decent chance you’ve already been drinking small amounts of purified sewage water in California.

Indirect potable reuse has been allowed for quite some time. That’s when sewage water is treated, pumped into a reservoir or some other environmental buffer, mixed with natural sources of water and then pumped back out and treated again.

Orange County has had one of these recycled water systems in place since 2008.

“The reality is that anyone out there on the Mississippi River, anyone out there on the Colorado River, anyone out there taking drinking water downstream from a wastewater treatment plant discharge, which I promise you you’re all doing, is already drinking toilet to tap,” said E. Joaquin Esquivel, chair of the California State Water Resources Control Board, during the meeting Tuesday.

Recycled water programs have been ongoing since the 1980s, with the finished product frequently used to irrigate places like golf courses and public parks.

Our water problems have been getting worse each year as a result of higher temperatures and extreme drought conditions exacerbated by the climate crisis. We need to explore alternatives to imported water, which is why recycling is a key part of the state’s water supply strategy.

A view of the lime post treatment section of a water treatment facility run by the Orange County Water District.

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In the near future, toilet to tap could account for as much as 10% to 15% of our supply, according to Darrin Polhemus, deputy director of the division of drinking water for the California State Water Resources Control Board.

Up to 90% of contaminated water streams can be reliably recycled, with the leftover discharge usually sent to the ocean.

The new regulations aren’t the final word on direct potable reuse. Guidance will continue to develop as systems are implemented. And there’s no requirement for localities to participate in wastewater reuse. Any projects that do go ahead should be open for public comment before they’re approved.

Is it safe?

“I would have no hesitation drinking the first glass out of the first potable reuse facility in California,” said Daniel McCurry, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at USC. “I think it’s going to be cleaner than most bottled water you could find.”

The new rules require a minimum of four separate treatment processes, ensuring redundancies in case one fails. And the process is monitored from beginning to end. If the water doesn’t pass the necessary requirements, it’s discarded.

A sample of purified water (L) flows next to wastewater following the microfiltration treatment process at the Groundwater Replenishment System (GWRS), the world's largest wastewater recycling plant, in the Orange County Water District.

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Reverse osmosis, UV lights and carbon filters are all part of the filtration process. Helping to pull out and eliminate everything from pharmaceuticals to PFAS, to enteric viruses and protozoa like giardia and cryptosporidium, all of which can cause serious gastrointestinal issues — 99.999999999999999999% (that’s 18 nines after the decimal point) have to be removed. That's a higher degree of purification than is required for indirect potable reuse, which has been in place.

“These are probably the most protective potable reuse regulations that’ve ever been written,” McCurry said. “There’s probably some in the industry who feel like they're too strict, but it’s probably wise for us to err on the side of caution for now.”

City of L.A.

L.A.’s recycled water program is called Operation NEXT, the goal of which is to retrofit the Hyperion wastewater treatment plant so that instead of sending our treated water out into the ocean, we can pump it back into storage systems, including the aquifer beneath the San Fernando Valley.

“It’ll create a new drinking water supply for the city of L.A. leading to sustainability and the development of local supplies. All the things that we know we need here, specifically in Los Angeles, given the climate crisis," said Jesus Gonzalez, manager of recycled water at LADWP.

Besides a retrofit to purification technologies, L.A. will also have to build pipelines all of the way from Hyperion to conveyance facilities.

Gonzalez anticipates that the $20 billion investment should supply roughly a third of the city’s future water supply. That said, it could take another 15-plus years before it’s up and running.

Los Angeles County

L.A. County is partnering with the Metropolitan Water District on a program called Pure Water Southern California, which could be the largest facility of its type in the United States, according Deven Upadhyay, executive officer at the MWD.

They’re currently in the environmental planning stage, and the cost estimate for the first phase of the program is going to be about $6 billion.

“That’s a lot of money in the water world,” Upadhyay said.

We’ll have to wait and see how the new regulations are used, but at least some of the water will be pumped into groundwater basins for storage. Upadhyay didn’t specify how much of our water could be covered by the new system.

Orange County

Orange County has the world’s largest water recycling plant, and has been running their indirect potable reuse program since 2008.

They currently produce about 130 million gallons of recycled water every day, processing all of the available wastewater across the O.C. Sanitation District.

About 40% of what’s put back into the aquifer is coming from their O.C. treatment facility.

“We’re recycling everything we can recycle in terms of taking the treated wastewater, putting it through advanced treatment to a point where it’s beyond drinking water quality, and then putting it back into the underground aquifer,” said Mehul Patel, executive director of operations for the O.C. Water District.

Patel doesn’t anticipate these new regulations will affect the current system they have in place.

However, he said there’s a possibility that O.C. could see changes as a result of the regulations south of Irvine, where they don’t have a lot of naturally occurring water storage areas, leaving them reliant on imported water. They may benefit from a direct potable reuse plant there, though nothing is planned at the moment.

San Diego

By 2035, San Diego wants recycled water to account for half of their supply. Currently, they recycle about 8% of their wastewater, sending the rest out to the Pacific Ocean.

Phase 1 of their Pure Water San Diego project is currently under construction, and is expected to be completed by 2026, providing as much as 30 million gallons of recycled water a day. That water is slated to be sent to the Miramar Reservoir, where it’ll be mixed with other water in the system.

There are no current plans for San Diego to implement direct potable reuse, according to a statement from city spokesperson Ramon Galindo. That could change with Phase 2 of the project.

Hop onto TikTok and you'll find lots of videos of young people — mostly women — fake baking under the glowing UV lights of a tanning bed. Seattle dermatologist Heather Rogers says this is an alarming trend that comes after years of decline in indoor tanning in the U.S.

She points to a 2025 survey from the American Academy of Dermatology which found 20% of Gen Z respondents prioritize getting a tan over protecting their skin. And 25% say it's worth looking great now even if it means looking worse later.

They feel like "it's better to be tan than it is to worry about skin cancer," Rogers says.

A new study in the journal Science Advances reinforces just why they should worry.

Researchers found that tanning bed users were nearly three times as likely to develop melanoma — the deadliest form of skin cancer — compared to people who'd never tanned indoors. They also had DNA damage that can lead to melanoma across nearly the entire surface of the skin.

"Even in skin cells that look normal, in tanning bed patients, you can find those precursor mutations" that lead to melanoma, says Dr. Pedram Gerami, one of the study's authors and the IDP Foundation professor of skin cancer research at Northwestern University.

Gerami and his collaborators compared the medical records of nearly 3,000 patients who used tanning beds to an age-matched control group of patients who didn't tan indoors. They found that the more people used the tanning beds, the higher their risk of melanoma.

"If they had 10 to 50 tanning bed exposures, their risk was twice as high as the control group," Gerami says. If they had over 200 tanning bed visits, their risk was more than eight times as high.

"If you think about it, getting 200 tanning bed exposures can happen really quickly. If you go once a week for four years, there you are," he says.

The researchers also performed genetic sequencing on normal skin cells from tanning bed users. Most were younger women, which makes sense, because studies have shown that young women in their teens and 20s are the heaviest users of indoor tanning, says study co-author Hunter Shain, an associate professor of dermatology at the UC San Francisco.

Shain says when the researchers compared these skin samples to normal skin cells from people in the general population who were twice the age of the indoor tanners, they were "stunned" by what they found.

"Women in their 30s and 40s had more mutations than people in their 70s and 80s from the general population," says Shain, whose research focuses on the biology of skin cancer. "They somehow were able to cram in two lifetimes' worth of UV damage in 30 years."

Dr. Heather Rogers, who was not involved in the study, notes that tanning beds can emit ultraviolet radiation that is 10 to 15 times stronger than what you'd get from the sun. She says that tanning beds are often marketed as being safer than the sun, but this study shows how wrong those claims are.

Dr. Pedram Gerami says many of the patients he sees at a high-risk melanoma clinic are women who started indoor tanning as teens wanting to look better for events like homecoming and prom.

"Now, as young adults, they're having to deal with frequent skin checks, frequent doctor visits, frequent biopsies, lots of anxiety, and the emotional burden of having been diagnosed with cancer at a young age," Garami says. "So they have a lot of heaviness to deal with."

He says some of these patients chose to donate skin samples to the study in hopes of helping other young people avoid the same fate.

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Nearly every pop music holiday song written in the past 80 years owes at least some of its DNA to one Christmas tune in particular: "White Christmas," written by Irving Berlin and sung by Bing Crosby, which he first recorded in 1942.

It's reportedly still one of the best-selling songs of all time in any genre, though chart data from decades ago is unreliable. Even given that murkiness, the Guinness Book of World Records named it as the best-selling physical single of all time in 2012.

"White Christmas" wrote the formula for modern secular holiday songs — despite its complex and troubling history.

Songwriter Irving Berlin wasn't destined to be a Yuletide magic maker. He was born Israel Baline in Siberia to an Orthodox Jewish family; his father was a cantor turned kosher butcher. But Berlin embraced assimilation — he married an Irish Catholic woman and had Christmas trees in his house. Even so, for Berlin, Christmas was a holiday shadowed by personal tragedy.

"On Christmas Day, 1928, his only son died. He always told members of his family that he disliked Christmas for this reason, that he could never, never get past the sadness that he experienced on Christmas Day," said author and New York Times contributing writer Jody Rosen, who wrote a book called White Christmas: The Story of an American Song.

The infant Irving Berlin Jr. died suddenly, less than a month after he was born. And at its heart, "White Christmas" is a deeply melancholic song.

Most Christmas carols and pop songs were unabashedly joyful. Berlin's song represented a turn, Rosen said: "It was strange to have a song that was all about this nose-pressed-up-to-the-glass feeling."

It also set a certain standard for Christmas songs that are about nostalgia, about some lost Christmas past. (Think, for example, of another enduring hit that came shortly after Berlin's smash: "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas," which Judy Garland sang in the 1944 film Meet Me in St. Louis, and which was written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane.)

But there's other stuff going on too. Irving Berlin was a hit machine as a Tin Pan Alley and Broadway songwriter. As a New Yorker and an immigrant himself, he was intimately familiar with a particular genre of songs, Rosen said: "That tradition of so-called 'home songs,' you know, songs that pine for a lost place, a lost ideal. These songs are so huge because we have an immigrant population, lots of people who've done a lot of moving. So there were songs about Irish people longing for Ireland and Italians longing for the old country there."

He said Berlin took that genre and flipped it into a Christmas song.

That's especially true of a largely forgotten, tongue-in-cheek introductory verse Berlin originally wrote for "White Christmas." The narrator is a New Yorker stuck in California (as Berlin frequently was, churning out songs for Hollywood): "The sun is shining, the grass is green, the orange and palm trees sway ... but it's December the 24th, and I am longing to be up north!" the protagonist sings.

Rosen said most people listening to "White Christmas" are missing additional subtext. He said that much of that nostalgic vibe in "White Christmas" — all that longing for a pristine, innocent Christmas of yore — is a reference to explicitly racist minstrel songs like Stephen Foster's "Old Kentucky Home," sung by Al Jolson and others — music that was still a staple in Berlin's day.

Foster was inspired by the Harriet Beecher Stowe novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and the song, hailed by Frederick Douglass and Paul Robeson, was meant to be empathetic to the abolitionist cause — the narrator is longing to be reunited with his wife and children, but their family has been torn apart by slaveholders. It later became a popular tune at minstrel shows, with its saddest lines omitted and its meaning twisted.

In "Old Kentucky Home," Rosen said, "You have, grotesquely, the freed Black man longing for life back below the Mason-Dixon line, back on the plantation. Here, instead of a Black man in the north longing for the sultry south, we have a well-to-do white person longing for the wintry north."

But the racial dynamics of "White Christmas" aren't just a matter of subtle references to older songs. Irving Berlin had great commercial expectations for "White Christmas." He built a whole movie around it: 1942's Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire.

Holiday Inn is stuffed with racist stereotypes and an entire blackface number. (That scene is usually excised from TV broadcasts today, but the whole film is available to stream online.) As Crosby and his love interest, played by Marjorie Reynolds, prepare to perform a song about Abraham Lincoln, Crosby spreads greasepaint on her face, as the orchestra plays "White Christmas" underneath. Not only is "White Christmas" the movie's biggest hit, it's also the film's romantic theme.

Blackface on stage and on screen was very much a recent memory for 1940s audiences, said scholar Brynn Shiovitz. She's the author of the book Behind the Screen: Tap Dance, Race, and Invisibility During Hollywood's Golden Age.

In Holiday Inn, Shiovitz said, "We get a pairing of nostalgia for Christmas, but also nostalgia for blackface, because so many of the people that were watching Holiday Inn when it premiered in the theaters grew up watching vaudeville, grew up watching their parents maybe even perform in blackface."

Audiences loved the song "White Christmas" and its spotlight in Holiday Inn — and American GIs stationed abroad during World War II clamored for the Armed Forces Radio Service to play the song. "White Christmas" was so sturdily successful that Hollywood made another movie centering the song in 1954 — also called White Christmas — this time starring Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen.

Since then, legions of musicians have recorded their own versions of "White Christmas" — including The Drifters, Elvis Presley, Iggy Pop and Sabrina Carpenter. And of course, each generation adds new layers of meaning to the song as it is stitched into our holiday season each year, said Shiovitz.

"With all of these other memories that people have of Christmas, whether it's being piped in while you're shopping, or it's playing on the radio in the car as you're driving to visit family — it's easy to kind of separate it from its history. People develop new memories with it. People have their own ideas of what the song represents, so it's just incredibly complex," Shiovitz said.

Today's audiences and artists don't necessarily hear or even know about the song's racist history, Shiovitz said — but that doesn't mean it's not there.
This story was edited for radio and digital by Jennifer Vanasco.
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