BIZARRE: Restaurant serves drinking water recycled from its toilets

To highlight a new type of water purification system, a restaurant in Kuurne, Belgium, has started serving its customers free drinking water recycled from its sinks and toilets.

The water served at the Gust’eaux restaurant in Kuurne these days is the same as any other potable water – it has no smell, no taste, no colour – so it’s impossible to tell that it’s source is actually the restaurant’s toilets.

By using a complex, five-step purification system, Gust’eaux is able to turn its sewage into water so pure that it has to be enriched with minerals before being served to clients.

The Belgian restaurant is not connected to the city’s sewer system, so it really needed a close-circuit solution to solve its sewage problem.

Thanks to this allegedly unique water recycling system, the toilet and sink water is initially “cleaned” with plant fertilizer, then a part of it is mixed with collected rainwater and used for flushing toilets, while the rest is passed through a series of purification processes that make it indistinguishable from tap water.

“The water that results is too pure to be drinkable, so we add minerals to make it healthier,” a representative of Gust’eaux told Belgian news channel VRT News.

The restaurant offers its recycled toilet water to patrons in a variety of forms – as free drinking water, ice cubes or in coffee. It’s reportedly also used for brewing beer.

According to Sudinfo, the same water purification system is used to provide drinking water to isolated communities, but the experience is unprecedented in Europe.

Odditycentral