Can you reintroduce waste water from a Reverse Osmosis membrane into another RO membrane?

I'm a freshmen engineering student. I'm designing a water filtration system to recycle waste water from showers, urine, kitchen sinks and tap. The issue i'm running into is that the only relatively waste free way of purifying water, distillation, requires too much energy.

So far what I am doing is running only the urine through a distiller, then mixing that in with the rest of the waste water. The water is then ran through a sediment filter, then a carbon filter, then an RO membrane. The issue i'm having is the RO membrane is super inefficient. For every gallon of potable water produced, almost 12 gallons are wasted.

I was watching a video on youtube about a plant in Australia that runs it's RO waste through two more RO membranes in order to reclaim as much water as possible. Could this be done at a smaller scale. Could you take the wastewater produced from one RO membrane, then feed it into another RO membrane and still get potable water? If not, is there another way (other than forward osmosis) to make potable water with little energy? Here's a link to the video

Posted Aug 17, 2017, 7:46 PM UTC · edited

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