Cambria to launch zero liquid discharge pilot in latest push to solve long-standing water crisis

For more than a decade, Cambria has lived in a constant state of water uncertainty.

Now, Global Water Innovations Inc., a project developer, is preparing to test a pilot project at the Cambria Water Reclamation Facility with the hope that it could finally make the plant more viable for use.

“Preparations for full zero liquid discharge (ZLD) testing are now underway, marking a significant step forward in advancing the district’s water sustainability efforts,” Matthew McElhenie, Cambria Community Services District (CCSD) General Manager told New Times in an email. 

The pilot comes almost a decade after the facility was originally built under an emergency permit during one of the worst droughts in California history. 

Designed to treat brackish groundwater with reverse osmosis and inject the purified water back into the aquifer, the facility was intended to serve as a critical drought-year supply, McElhenie said. But it has never received a full coastal development permit, and aside from brief periods of testing in 2015 and 2016, it has remained largely dormant.

The zero liquid discharge pilot project is a potential solution brought forward by Clark Easter, Cambria resident and CEO and founder of Global Water Innovations.

“Cambria has been in a water crisis for many years. We’ve been unable to build new houses, even on parcels people already own, because we’re short on water,” he said. “About nine years ago, during a severe drought, Cambria built a reverse osmosis desalination plant. The idea was to treat groundwater and then reinject it near the city’s wells as a supplemental water source during drought years.”

But the system’s concentrated waste stream, brine, is a challenge the facility wasn’t properly equipped to handle, Easter explained. In seawater desalination, brine can be discharged back into the ocean, but inland facilities like Cambria’s don’t have that option.

“The engineers who designed Cambria’s plant built an evaporation pond, assuming the brine would evaporate, but it was poor engineering. Cambria’s in a fog zone, so almost no evaporation happens,” Easter said.

With nowhere to put the brine, the CCSD began trucking the waste roughly 50 miles to the South San Luis Obispo County Sanitation District in Oceano, a process that costs about 25 cents per gallon, Easter said.

“If we generated 50,000 gallons of brine per day, that’s roughly $12,000 a day. For a small town, that’s impossible,” Easter said. “So the plant has been mothballed for about eight years.”

The zero liquid discharge pilot aims to drastically shrink that cost.

“Through this pilot, we hope to bring that down to about 3 cents per gallon—around 90 percent cheaper. That would make brine disposal affordable,” he said.

The technology uses a combination of electricity and chemical reactions to strip minerals out of the brine, recovering most of the water.

“As brine gets more concentrated, minerals like calcium, magnesium, silica, and sulfate precipitate out as scale,” Easter explained. “Our solution uses electricity to split ions apart. We pull calcium and magnesium in one direction, sulfate in another, and in Cambria’s case, silica in a third. This dramatically reduces scaling potential.”

According to Easter, previous Global Water Innovations pilot projects in Pleasant Valley, San Luis Obispo, and Napa Valley have successfully recovered up to 98 percent of brine water. He expects Cambria would have similar results.

“The system won’t work for every inland brine source, but for 90 to 95 percent of them, it appears to work very well. This could open up huge new water-resilience opportunities across California.”

But not everyone is convinced the project is the right direction for Cambria.

CCSD board member Harry Farmer has lived in Cambria for 39 years and has watched the facility’s woes from the beginning. He said the community’s initial support for the emergency water project has eroded over time.

“The water reclamation facility was [being] built back in 2014, and it has yet to be permitted,” Farmer said. “We’ve spent about $23 million on this facility that hasn’t operated.”

Farmer said he views the ZLD pilot as yet another cost for an already expensive project.

“Brine waste is a problem no matter what,” he said. “And this ZLD system is going to cost a lot of money…. It’s going to be another major expense added to what I consider a boondoggle.” 

McElhenie said the pilot falls under the district’s existing maintenance-testing permit and has been vetted by regulatory agencies.

“The project team has already produced an initial batch of ‘test’ brine to evaluate system performance and confirm operational readiness,” McElhenie said. “The district looks forward to providing additional updates as we move closer to full ZLD demonstration and continue to enhance the district’s long-term water resiliency.”

The water reclamation facility itself began construction in 2014 under then Gov. Jerry Brown’s statewide drought emergency proclamation, as Cambria faced fears that its limited water supply could soon be depleted. The project was approved under an emergency coastal development permit—allowing construction to proceed before completing environmental reviews.

The facility treats a combination of creek underflow, percolated wastewater, and brackish water from a saltwater wedge, then reinjects it into the aquifer near the San Simeon well field, McElhenie said. This reinjection creates a protective “mound” that slows freshwater movement and prevents saltwater intrusion, boosting dry-season supply.

On paper, the project promised to boost drought resiliency. In reality, it became a long-running source of controversy.

For the CCSD to run the facility during non-emergency periods, it must obtain a long-delayed coastal development permit from San Luis Obispo County—after which the California Coastal Commission will have the final say.

This process has proven difficult, but now, more than 10 years later, the facility’s coastal development permit application is finally with the county, McElhenie said.

“The county has completed its review of the submitted materials and responses to the information hold and has confirmed that the project is accepted for processing, and will now receive its environmental determination pursuant to the California Environmental Quality Act,” McElhenie said in an Oct. 16 letter to the community.

New Times reached out to the county and the Coastal Commission but did not receive a response before publication.

The district anticipates the pilot will be fully underway by “the beginning of December,” McElhenie said. ∆

Reach Staff Writer Chloë Hodge at chodge@newtimesslo.com. 

This article appears in Nov 27 – Dec 7, 2025.