'Sewer' water in a bottle — yum!

SYRACUSE — The water appears crystalline and pure. The plastic container like any other water bottle you'd buy at the neighborhood market.

The label tells another story altogether.

It says: "North Davis Sewer District drinking water."

If that's not enough to give you pause, read on. This is not water from a fabled mountain spring. Nor is it a product of a soda pop conglomerate that claims the water has been double- or triple- or quadruple-purified.

Folks at the sewer district, says sewer-district manager Kevin R. Cowan, hand out bottles to those who tour its facilities. This "refreshing" humor is trying to make a serious, instructive point.

"We make them (visitors) think it is the treatment product," he said. "But it's also a lesson about our environment ... (about) being more conscious about what goes down the drain."

"This water originated as all-natural sewage collected through high-quality reinforced concrete sewer lines in the high mountain valleys of northern Davis and southern Weber counties," the label says in parody of many another water bottle.

"It was then processed using state-of-the-art screening, grit removal, sedimentation/flotation, biological oxidation, solids contact conditioning, and chlorine disinfection on the way back to you. This system is usually effective in removing up to 94 percent of biodegradable pollutants...."

Hmmm: 94 percent.

And that's a major point. What are you sending down the drain, hoping that the sewer district can remove it all before the water is returned to nature (and not, as you may be thinking, put into water bottles)?

"Ingredients," notes the back side of the bottle's label: "Water, fecal matter, toilet paper, hair, lint, rancid grease, stomach acid and trace amounts of Pepto Bismol, chocolate, urine, body oils, dead skin, industrial chemicals (aluminum, copper, zinc, lead, chromium, nickel, molybdenum, selenium, silver arsenic, mercury,) ammonia, ... soil, laundry soap, bath soap, shaving cream, sweat, saliva, salt, sugar. No artificial colors or preservatives. Some variations in taste and/or color may occur due to holidays, predominant cuisine preference, infiltration/inflow, or sewer cross-connections."

Cowan says: "It's all in good fun."

He said Jeff McFarlane, pretreatment coordinator at the plant, used similarly labeled bottled water as a tongue-in-cheek Christmas gift for his neighbors last year, since they all know where he works.

Cowan said the district decided the bottles had promise as an inexpensive way to both have fun and promote water quality.