By combining desalination with wastewater recycling, energy consumption can be reduced by 67 percent

Childress says we're not creating a new technology or a new process, but looking for synergies that might exist in coordinating adjacent facilities - something that's not currently being done.

Looking ahead, looking at water differently could be the key to using it as efficiently as possible. Cities like Los Angeles have begun to adopt an initiative called "One Water," which aims to treat all of the city's water resources as one entity and strive to manage them in a more environmentally friendly, economical, and socially beneficial way.

Instead of treating water as rainwater and wastewater and seawater, how about saying it's all the water that needs to be treated? Then we can look at our systems and assess what we need to achieve that goal. The ultimate goal for coastal cities like Los Angeles is to close the water cycle - not send water into the ocean, but identify every valuable resource in the discharge stream and find ways to reuse it. Right now, it's too expensive to do that, but hopefully that's where we're headed.