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On a typical day, the equivalent of 15 million flushes flows into a gray concrete facility overlooking Interstate 805 in University City. What happens next is a testimonial to what modern science can do – given enough money. The North City Water Reclamation Plant turns sewage into water. Considered the jewel of San Diego's reclamation program, the plant handles 25 million gallons of sewage a day, though it reclaims only 4 million. And after six years in operation, it is its own best customer – using 1 million gallons a day for plant upkeep. Water reclamation is a popular concept. But in practice, few potential customers want it and fewer still can afford to install the purple pipes needed to carry it. So far, San Diego has spent nearly $500 million on the citywide water reclamation program. It sells a gallon of reclaimed water from the North City plant for less than it costs to produce it. Even so, the plant is outperforming a sister plant in the South Bay that has been open for almost two years without reclaiming a single gallon. But what the city's reclamation system does, it does in style. Most San Diego sewage is treated only enough to be legally dumped in the ocean. The North City plant can beat that. It produces recycled water clean enough for toilets, fountains, laundries and car washes. Clean enough to fill lakes and aquifers, mix cement and make snow. Virtually clear and odorless, the plant's reclaimed water is also fit for swimming, though not for drinking. Rich in nutrients, it is especially desirable for irrigation. But at 4 million gallons a day, the water reclaimed is a fraction of the sewage produced by the 2 million people in San Diego and 15 other communities served by the metropolitan sewer system. North City treats the other 21 million gallons of sewage it processes daily at a lesser standard and dumps it back into the city's sewer system, where it mixes with 150 million gallons of raw sewage treated daily at the Point Loma sewage plant. Inefficient as this might seem, it saves residents money. Without the reclamation program, sewer customers would have paid $3 billion in the mid-1990s to overhaul the 40-year-old Point Loma plant to treat sewage at a higher standard. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency allowed San Diego to build a reclamation system in lieu of upgrading the level of treatment at Point Loma. The agency says it is satisfied with the San Diego system's performance, even though the North City plant will not meet EPA performance goals this year and the South Bay Water Reclamation Plant has yet to produce any reclaimed water. "I think they're trying really hard," said Nancy Woo, director of the EPA's regional water division. Not everyone sees it that way. Robert Simmons, a retired University of San Diego law professor, represented the Sierra Club in an eight-year legal debate over the level of treatment needed at the Point Loma plant. "What good is having plants that have the potential to produce reclaimed water if you're not actually reclaiming the wastewater?" Simmons said. On Wednesday, Simmons will join a coalition of environmental activists in asking a San Diego City Council committee to authorize a one-year study of how to increase the use of reclaimed water. In part, they want the city to revive a defunct proposal to add reclaimed water to a reservoir and eventually use it for drinking, nicknamed the toilet-to-tap plan. Ken Weinberg, director of water resources for the County Water Authority and a backer of reclamation, said it is too early to pass judgment on the San Diego program. "You learn from experience," Weinberg said. "This stuff takes longer to implement, and it's more difficult, than we had thought." Customers who receive reclaimed water say they are, for the most part, pleased. "It sure makes sense," said Joe Dumbauld, facilities engineer for Novartis Pharmaceuticals, which hooked up to the city's reclaimed water distribution system a year and a half ago. "Why waste good drinking water on plants when this reclaimed water is so much cheaper?" San Diego sells its reclaimed water for 80 cents per 100 cubic feet, or 748 gallons – half the price of drinking water. The behemoth There are 19 water reclamation plants in San Diego County, but North City is the region's behemoth. Visitors from as far away as China and Venezuela have come to admire its engineering. The plant needs only 14 hours to complete the process of reclaiming water from sewage. Filters, chemicals and fecal-eating bacteria separate solids from liquids in the facility's underground basins. Within hours, the sewage water is treated at the higher secondary standard the EPA initially wanted at Point Loma. The North City plant processes 25 million gallons of sewage a day, treating 21 million gallons to the secondary standard and discharging it back into the sewer system. It then subjects the remaining 4 million gallons to more filters, disinfectants and salt removers. At this point the water is considered reclaimed. Occasionally, however, the equipment malfunctions. When this happens, drinking water is added to reduce the salinity of the reclaimed water or replace it. Last year, 39 million gallons of drinking water were used for this purpose. The city has customers for about 3 million gallons of the daily output of reclaimed water. The purple pipes, tinted to differentiate them from drinking water pipes, carry the recycled water to 292 meters at sites owned by businesses and government. Most use it for irrigation. The City of San Diego does not currently sell it for residential use. The North City plant's biggest customer is itself. It uses a million gallons a day to irrigate drought-tolerant landscaping, backwash filters and hose down floors. That water also goes down the drain to Point Loma. It's not easy to track the intricacies of the city's water reclamation system. The records are kept in different formats by two city departments using separate methods to measure reclaimed water. The San Diego Metropolitan Wastewater Department produces the reclaimed water, and the San Diego Water Department sells it. Neither the City Council, which routinely approves expenditures for the reclamation system, nor the EPA are given regular updates on reclaimed water use. The San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board gets information, in yet a third format recording use by individual customers, but not the total use. The North City plant cost $207 million to build, not counting the cost of financing. The purple pipes cost $92 million, and the city has paid an additional $18 million to retrofit irrigation lines for customers. The plant reclaimed 1.5 billion gallons of water last year at a cost of $7 million. That water was sold for $2.2 million, and the plant got a $1.2 million subsidy from the County Water Authority and the Metropolitan Water District, which wholesales water to Southern California. The South Bay Water Reclamation plant was built for $143 million and operates at an annual cost of $6 million. But it has been mired in problems with its ultraviolet disinfection system. The system, needed to produce reclaimed water, does not meet state standards. The city and the manufacturer of the system hope it will be functioning by year's end. Even so, no purple distribution pipes have been laid for the South Bay plant. It will be two years before the plant carries reclaimed water to its first paying customer, the Otay Water District. Until then, all 4 million gallons treated at the South Bay plant at the secondary standard are emptied into the ocean. 'It's expensive' Selling water, or used water for that matter, isn't easy. Even in a desert. Water officials counted on high demand when they planned San Diego's reclamation system in the late 1980s, a time of drought and threats of water rationing. By the time the North City plant opened in 1997, the drought was over and conservation measures, primarily low-flow toilets and shower heads, had extended available drinking water supplies. However, city-funded market studies failed to detect a drop in interest in water reclamation. "Reclaimed water was really sexy five to 10 years ago. Now, demineralization of ocean water is sexy," said Michael Thornton, general manager of the San Elijo Water Reclamation Facility in Cardiff. His North County facility produces a million gallons of reclaimed water a day. "Everyone put a lot of money into recycled water, and what they've found is it's a hard program to run. . . . It's expensive to get the customers hooked up, unless you're in a new area," Thornton said. "If you're not, you have to go back through streets and put in pipes. It gets really expensive." By state law, reclaimed water cannot be sent through existing water lines. The purple pipes that carry it cost $1 million or more per mile to lay. In 1997, the San Diego Water Department raided its cash reserves of $65 million intended for fixing the city's crumbling drinking water system. It used that money to lay 46 miles of purple pipeline to customers in Mira Mesa, Torrey Pines, Scripps Ranch and University City. Since then, an additional 10 miles of pipeline have been installed. The city plans to spend an additional $11 million by the end of next year on two more miles, a storage tank and a pump station. But all of that money and equipment only gets the reclaimed water to a customer's property. There, more money must be spent to retrofit the consumer's existing plumbing or irrigation system. The minimum cost for plumbing is about $10,000; however, most irrigation retrofits are five times that amount or higher. Even the most ardent supporters have been stunned by the costs. The city has picked up $18 million in retrofit costs for 100 customers, many of them private businesses. A retrofit of Miramar Nurseries, for instance, cost the city $300,000, according to Hossein Juybari, the city's recycled water coordinator. The golf course at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station is being replumbed at a cost of $700,000 to the city. Biotech businesses on Science Center Drive in Sorrento Valley had to wait six years until the city's purple distribution pipe reached the area this summer. But now that the pipe is there, the retrofit money isn't. The city stopped committing to pay for retrofits a year ago. Terry Ghio, a senior director of government affairs for Ligand Pharmaceuticals, said her company and others can't afford to retrofit without at least some financial aid. "We're not even profitable yet," Ghio said. Building a market All along, government officials have overestimated demand for reclaimed water. Sales – predicted to reach 3 million gallons a day within the first year – didn't reach that level until 2003, six years later. A market study estimated that customers would use twice as much reclaimed water as they do. The University of California San Diego was expected to take 195 million gallons or more a year. Actual use by UCSD last year was 40 million gallons. The EPA figured the city could reuse 25 percent of the flows of the North City plant by the end of 2003, a goal it set when it granted the city $70 million toward construction. Currently, the city is reusing less than 17 percent of the sewage processed at North City, and water officials say they have no hope of reaching 25 percent anytime soon. By 2010, the EPA goal for the city becomes 50 percent. City officials are constantly looking for ways to market or use reclaimed water. A year and a half ago, in an attempt to attract new customers, the City Council cut the price of reclaimed water by 40 percent. They spent $15 million on the ill-fated toilet-to-tap proposal that was killed in 1999 because of concerns about its safety. City workers looked at discharging reclaimed water into Los Peñasquitos Lagoon and the San Diego River, or building reservoirs to store it. Those ideas have gone nowhere. They also looked at using the water to replenish groundwater aquifers. But San Diego County, unlike Los Angeles and Orange counties, doesn't have that many usable aquifers. There has been an attempt to promote its use in industry – in air conditioning cooling towers, for instance. But the high salinity of reclaimed water has raised concerns that it will wear out equipment prematurely. The city is studying that issue. Water officials, looking for ways to deliver the water beyond the reach of the purple pipe network, even calculated that it would take a total of 81 tanker truck trips to transport reclaimed water to a golf course – too many to be practical. They have required new developments in certain areas to be plumbed with purple pipes, and are even talking about running a reclaimed water pipeline to Balboa Park. "I think at some point in time, we looked at pretty much everything," Water Department Deputy Director Marsi Steirer said. Mandatory possibilities Water officials are revisiting a 14-year-old city ordinance that mandates the use of reclaimed water wherever it is available. The ordinance has never been enforced, but water officials think it should apply to customers that are near a pipeline, use more than 400,000 gallons a day and stand to recoup the retrofit costs in less than five years. A penalty for refusing to use reclaimed water is still under discussion, but officials are looking at a 50 percent surcharge on the water bill. On Monday, the city's Public Utilities Advisory Committee will hear a proposal to enforce the ordinance. The City Council will make the ultimate decision. Some property owners object to the mandatory-use rule, citing costs. They argue that the high salt content of reclaimed water – as much as 50 percent greater than drinking water can kill salt-sensitive plants and cause irrigation hardware to wear out faster. The city's Torrey Pines Golf Course, which waters its fairways with reclaimed water, uses drinking water on the putting greens. Erik Bruvold, vice president of the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corp., said the city shouldn't force property owners to use reclaimed water unless the city pays for the upfront retrofit costs as well as any losses in plants or machinery. The Water Department is trying to secure $2 million in grants to establish a revolving loan program to defray the cost of retrofits. Property owners would pay off the loan by paying the drinking water price for reclaimed water, instead of getting the reclaimed water at a discounted rate. Jon Jamieson, who wrote a book on San Diego sewage, said water reclamation won't take off here until the time is right. "It will take another extreme drought," Jamieson said, "for everybody to wake up."

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