Facing severe droughts, developers seek to reuse water they have | Real Estate

W.hen the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco fully reopens this year after a 16 month pandemic shutdown, one of its more unusual features is in the basement.

A series of pipes and holding tanks cast in concrete, which are arranged on two levels in the parking garage like a hidden microbrewery, will collect the dirty water that occurs in the daily operation of the building through a six-stage filtration process and return it clean. Non-potable water for use in toilets and for drip irrigation.

The black water system, so named because it treats all wastewater, including from toilets and showers, takes up the space of 16 cars and will filter an estimated 30,000 gallons per working day, or 7.8 million per year. The system, the most comprehensive of its kind in a US high-rise building, is designed for visitors – every step of the process is labeled, said Amanda von Almen, Head of Sustainable Built Environment at Salesforce.

It’s also designed to help the company achieve its goal of cutting the company’s water usage in half. “San Francisco is our home, and there is a drought here,” said von Almen. “We have to do something about it.”

Water recycling efforts are gaining traction as severe drought penalizes industries in states like California, Montana, New Mexico, and Utah.

The concept is not new, but it is increasingly seen as a promising sustainability boost, especially as more cities and states take action to limit water use, and as a smart protection against rising water costs and future scarcity.

Park Habitat, an office tower that will include a blackwater recycling system when built in downtown San Jose, California, is made for a world where droughts are common, said Andrew Jacobson, West Bank development director, the developer of the Project.

Proponents of water conservation say such technologies have been where solar and renewables were a decade ago: technologically feasible, with groundbreaking projects that are bending the cost curve and advancing the concept towards wider accessibility.

“Ten or 15 years ago, a green building was a nice to have, whereas today it is dictated by regulations and the market,” said Aaron Tartakovsky, co-founder and CEO of Epic Cleantec, a wastewater technology startup in San. Francisco. “There is no denying that the drought has accelerated the talks that many are already having.”

Industrial water use has long been a corporate focus. Reducing the cost of water to produce or cool data centers has great value in terms of resilience, sustainability and reputation. However, commercial real estate is increasingly becoming another way to reduce water consumption, reduce reliance on resources and promote green trust.

Commercial real estate is “where the pendulum balance is” for water conservation, said Paul O’Callaghan, founder of BlueTech Research and co-producer of the 2020 documentary Brave Blue World: Racing to Solve Our Water Crisis. About a third of water use in San Francisco, for example, it takes place in commercial buildings.

Much of the technology behind water reuse is long established and relatively easy to install and use, but requires that local regulations be caught up.

“Some cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City and Boston are creating the regulatory framework to expand this technology,” said Tartakovsky. “But now states like Hawaii and Washington are trying to develop systems that mimic what San Francisco did.”

Salesforce installed the black water system primarily to demonstrate its leadership in the area, said von Almen, who declined to provide cost or savings figures. But it pays off in the long run, especially if the cost of water increases over time.

Developers are increasingly seeing value in black water systems, particularly on a large scale, to provide water for irrigation and cooling towers. Even the cost of retrofitting a building, long considered impracticable because of the need to add so many pipes for recycled water, is now more sustainable, Tartakovsky said.

A $ 2.5 billion, multi-purpose waterfront project led by the San Francisco Giants and developed by Tishman Speyer will use a black water system. Every building on the site that broke ground this year will build on it over time. A new not-for-profit utility, Mission Rock Utilities, will build and manage both this and a central thermal energy system.

Other cities have tried to change their infrastructure requirements to encourage or even mandate greater water reuse in commercial structures.

San Francisco is one of the pioneers in water conservation. A 2012 ordinance set standards for reuse and was updated in 2015 to require new buildings over 250,000 square feet to collect, treat and use gray water, a term for wastewater minus toilet waste.

Rafael Mandelman, a member of the city’s board of directors, has proposed doubling the amount of water new buildings must collect and reuse, including buildings 100,000 square feet or more.

Analysis in Austin, Texas predicted the number of water customers in the fast-growing state capital would quadruple in 100 years. To meet some of this demand, the city is encouraging developers to install reuse systems and plans to eventually make them compulsory.

“Seeing building owners bring their own water to the table, so to speak, is a paradigm shift,” said Katherine Jashinski, a senior engineer for Austin who focuses on on-site water reuse programs. “Companies moving here from California are interested in sustainability and want to ensure a safe water supply.”

Cutting-edge examples include even more resource and energy savings. In San Francisco, a system that Epic Cleantec will install in a planned 55-story mixed use called 10SVN not only recycles black water and thus saves valued water

$ 12 million in the first decade, but also solids in the waste stream to organic soil. It will even recover the thermal energy from the wastewater and reuse it.

“Wastewater isn’t really waste,” said Epic Cleantec’s Tartakovsky. “It’s clean water, it’s organic matter, it’s nutrients, it’s energy that we can redistribute, which ultimately doesn’t lead to any waste.”