LOTT Clean Water Alliance wants to make wastewater drinkable. Are you ready for that?
If you read that headline and spit up your morning coffee, wipe your chin and catch your breath: This isn’t happening just yet in the Olympia area.
But it is an idea that the LOTT Clean Water Alliance, the wastewater utility in downtown Olympia that treats millions of gallons of sewer water per day, is exploring.
And about a year from now, the utility, in partnership with the South Puget Sound Community College’s brewing and distilling program, aims to use about 500 gallons of that treated water to make beer and other beverages for the public to try.
“This product, this project, is not going to connect to any pipes or anything like that,” said LOTT Executive Director Matt Kennelly during a recent interview at its campus downtown.
“This is just proving the concept, and it has been proven across the world for quite a while. Washington state hasn’t done it yet, but LOTT is in a unique situation where we have proven treatment expertise in how to do this,” he said. “We’ve been doing reclaimed water for quite a while now, and so with our treatment expertise and acknowledging that climate change is here, water shortages are coming, we want to prove tomorrow’s water.
“We want to prove that this is a resource that we can unlock for our community to consider in decades to come, similar to the reclaimed water program that’s been successful for 15 to 20 years now. What we’re looking to do now is take that first step, show our community, show our state, our regulators, that this product can be safe, reliable, and we can apply proven technology to make it happen.”
Perhaps you’ve heard about this proposal. After all, Kennelly has been making the rounds, recently visiting the Port of Olympia commission and Olympia City Council to provide an update on the utility as well as talk about treating wastewater to a drinkable standard.
Internally, LOTT is calling it the “Class A+ reclaimed water demonstration project.”
In the beginning
How did LOTT land on this idea? About three years ago, Kennelly was briefing Tumwater City Council about the state of the utility when a council member asked him about the notion of taking reclaimed water to the next level.
It was a light bulb moment for Kennelly.
“It was like, OK, people are ready for LOTT to take this next step,” he said. “It just felt like the right time, yeah.”
Kennelly then approached the state Department of Ecology and asked the following questions: Are you even interested in this idea at all? Like, is this a no-go from the start?
But the Ecology official, according to Kennelly, was receptive to the idea, saying, “We want to promote reclaimed water, and we wanted to go this way. We just needed a utility to step up and be that one, to say, ‘We want to do this.’”
The state Department of Health also has been part of these discussions, said Kennelly, and both agencies will be involved when that first batch of water is provided to SPSCC for the demonstration.
“It’ll be signed off from Department of Health and Ecology that it’s all safe and available for drinking,” he said.
How will it be treated?
LOTT treats about 13 million gallons of wastewater per day in the summer, although flows can be much higher during the winter when rain falls and fills stormwater drains.
Wastewater is run through multiple treatment steps before the majority of it is released into Budd Inlet. A smaller portion, about 1.5 million gallons per day, is treated to a reclaimed standard that is largely used for irrigation. Tumwater Valley Golf Club uses about 600,000 gallons of it, Kennelly said.
Reclaimed water also supplies the water feature that’s near LOTT’s administrative building on Adams Street and the manmade stream that runs in front of the Hands On Children’s Museum in the East Bay Public Plaza.
LOTT is going to invest $2 million in two different processes, one of which will be the water-purifying process known as reverse osmosis.
“Reverse osmosis is tried and true and has been used in many, many places,” Kennelly said.
The other process is a carbon-based filtration process.
“You use carbon to absorb those constituents and pollutants that you want to remove that you would normally remove in reverse osmosis,” he said.
Why invest in two processes?
“We know the regulators are looking to us to say, ‘How can this be done?’”
“And if we just do one, they’re going to only allow that one in the state, probably,” he said. “So if we do the two main ones that have been around in the nation that have been approved, we have both paths.”
Kennelly acknowledged there’s an “ick factor” when thinking about drinking wastewater. He made clear that residents will not turn on their taps at home and be drinking it.
“I think that’s the important part right now: it’s not going to anybody’s pipes,” he said. “This is just an event. You can come and support it. If you don’t want to try it, fine. Some people are saying, ‘Count me in, let’s do this.’ But in concept, I’ve found with elected officials, as well as the other groups I’m involved with, there has been broad support.”
This story was originally published August 3, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
