Water Reclamation

Every building recycles its own water rather than drawing continuously from an outside main. The design recovers 93 per cent of daily use — roughly 40 m³ a day for a thousand people passing through — leaving only a small makeup to replace, rather than treating water as something that arrives once and leaves as waste.

That makeup comes from inside the building, not outside it. Rain sheds off the roof and dome into a treatment plant directly beneath, contributing about 1.06 m³ a day; recovered condensate from the building’s own mechanical systems adds another 1.9 m³. Together they cover the 2.8 m³ a day the recovery loop can’t replace on its own — nearly twice over. Both are stored in small distributed tanks tucked under the greenhouse grow boxes before entering the loop.

The technical core is what the reclamation loop actually removes, not what it adds. Because reverse osmosis concentrates contaminants rather than eliminating them, the same water recirculating again and again would poison itself within weeks if nothing were pulled out. Salts leave at a hot separator, metals off a fixed bed, mineral residue after that — a contaminant train doing the opposite job of a conventional treatment plant, which purifies water once rather than keeping the same water clean indefinitely.

Bulk storage lives at grade, not on the roof. The building’s pool holds 281 m³ and is explicitly the structure’s main water reservoir — bulk water is too heavy (2,000–3,500 kg/m²) for the roof to carry, so only the treatment equipment goes up there, and the standing volume comes down to where the floor can bear it. The pool itself is treated without chemicals — UV light, oxygen, high flow differentials — and polished to drinking-water standard afterward, doing double duty as both recreation and reservoir.

Where the source material leaves a genuine gap

It’s clear that treated water flows down from the roof plant to every floor via a dedicated domestic riser, and clear separately that the pool is treated on its own cycle and polished to potable standard. What isn’t stated is whether these are one continuous loop — recycled water passing through the roof plant, then the pool, then back to taps — or two parallel systems that happen to share a building. Both readings fit the text; neither is confirmed by it. Anyone relying on this for actual plumbing design should treat that sequence as unresolved, not settled.

The one outside connection that does exist is a fallback, not a supply: a building completed before its own five-year system is finished connects to a conventional municipal main in the meantime, the same way it would run on a packaged chiller before its fuel cell is installed (see Energy & Power).

Governed by Bureau 23.