Take a minute and try an experiment. Do an internet search under “clean water plant.” Then do a search under “wastewater treatment plant.”
Which one brings more results? When I tried this, I got 225,000 for “clean water plant” and 17 million for “wastewater treatment plant.” There’s a lesson here: The profession still mostly identifies with wastewater — that is, with the raw material, not the end product.
Why should this be? Why is it that news stories about any city renaming its facility to clean water (or to the Water Environment Federation’s preferred “water resource recovery facility”) are relatively few
