We just returned from five days at the Paris Hotel. With nearly 3,000 rooms, that’s a lot of showers daily, as well as lots of flushes. And with over 150,000 total rooms in the area, the mind boggles. Where does that water go? Do they have wastewater treatment in the hotel, or does it all go somewhere else? Do different hotels handle it differently?
To dispose of one question quickly, standalone wastewater-treatment facilities in individual hotels would be prohibitively expensive, to say nothing of extravagant. Former Southern Nevada Water Authority General Manager Pat Mulroy said that the resort corridor uses three percent of Las Vegas’ total water usage. Three percent! That’s mighty impressive on the low end, considering, as you say, those thousands of toilet flushes per day, not to mention showers, dishwashing, laundry, water attractions, etc.
According to SNWA Public Information Officer Bronson Mack, “Southern Nevada reuses nearly all of its wastewater through a community-wide water-recycling process. All water used indoors -- whether at home, the office, or a hotel -- is captured, treated to near-drinking water standards, and returned to Lake Mead (some reclaimed water is delivered to golf courses and parks for irrigation, but most of it is returned to the lake).”
Clark County has a large wastewater-treatment plant near the Las Vegas Wash (in a chapter of our book My Week at the Blue Angel, author Matt O'Brien described a private tour of the plant) and the ecosystem of the Wash itself acts as an additional, organic, "scrubber" of reclaimed water.
“For every gallon of treated water returned to the lake, Southern Nevada can take another gallon out of the lake without affecting Southern Nevada’s limited Colorado River water allocation of 300,000 acre-feet,” Mack resumes. “Because we have the smallest allocation of water of any state that shares the Colorado River, maximizing the use of our total water supply is paramount. This unmatched water-reuse process is a sustainable and efficient way that our community uses and conserves its water resources. We reclaim 40 percent of all water used in our valley through this process.
“When it comes to the resorts on the Las Vegas Strip,” Mack continues, “all of the water used inside the resort is reclaimed and returned to Lake Mead through this process. In fact, we could turn on every shower and sink in every hotel room on the Las Vegas Strip and it would not increase the amount of water our community depletes from the lake. That's because nearly all of the water is safely returned back to the lake where it may be used again. So, our 40 million annual visitors can enjoy a long hot shower or bath without worry of wasting water.”
