10 Dec Pure Water Southern California receives additional $26.2 million award from Bureau of Reclamation

Pure Water Southern California has received a second large-scale water recycling grant of $26.2 million, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation announced earlier this month. The new grant comes on top of $99.2 million in federal funds awarded to the project in May. The proposed regional water recycling project, which is being developed through a partnership between Metropolitan and the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, would take cleaned wastewater currently sent to the ocean and purify it using an advanced, multi-stage purification process to produce high-quality drinking water.

The federal funds will help advance planning and design work and improvements to existing infrastructure needed for the project. Metropolitan and the Sanitation Districts are in the process of drafting the project’s Environmental Impact Report, which they expect to make available for public review in 2025. If approved by Metropolitan’s board, the program at full scale will produce 150 million gallons of water each day – enough to meet the demands of 1.5 million people.

“This is a huge project – potentially one of the largest water recycling projects in the world – that will benefit not only the 19 million people of Southern California, but the entire state and Southwest,” said Metropolitan board Chair Adán Ortega, Jr. “It will help lower demands on our imported water sources from the Colorado River and on the Northern Sierra. And it will help keep the economic engine of Southern California running, regardless of the future drought conditions we may face.”

Read the press release.