Coffee shops in Israel have installed reverse osmosis systems to provide drinking water for the coffee machine. Tap water is not good enough for our exquisite taste buds. This machines's by product is a salty concentrate which is forbidden to dispose in the sewage. It has to be collected and disposed in the sea. If properly permitted.
4 comments:
Coffee is my hobby and I am quite familiar with RO setups. Ideally coffee is made with water of moderate hardness. Coffee is mostly water so the water must taste good and the best tasting water is natural spring water that has a little hardness. The hardness also affects the way the water extracts the coffee. RO water is NOT ideal because all hardness has been removed. A proper setup for coffee brewing is a "remineralization" cartridge downstream of the RO . This introduces a small amount of calcium carbonate to the water to restore optimum hardness.
This is a fine balance - for best taste you would want around 90 mg/L of hardness but the machines themselves will begin to "scale" (deposit minerals inside the boiler and internal tubing which will eventually clog the machine) above 50mg/L. De-Scaling is a major maintenance headache in the coffee - the equipment has to be shut down, food safe acids (such as citric) are introduced in the boiler and allowed to soak, then must be flushed out again.
In the US, the output of RO machines just goes to the drain - yes it is high in minerals but it is a tiny trickle for a home/shop sized RO setup and gets diluted with the general waste stream.
K
Worse, RO does not add minerals to the water, it takes them out. So forcing the people to pay for the disposal of the concentrate is unfair.
I think that the scaling of the coffee machines is the main reason behind the need for RO.
Yes it is totally silly to treat the sidestream as toxic waste - as you say it is just the minerals that are already in the water and if you re-dilute them with other waste water then you are back to the original tap water. Then again maybe ALL tap water should be regarded by the authorities as toxic waste - don't give them any ideas.
K
They dont need my help. Natural air is illegal and and the hot air blown out by heaters and air conditioners is criminal. There are circular lists of "suspect" shops and factories that are receiving menacing letters from the different regulators on a daily basis.
Post a Comment