While one can’t imagine anyone having missed out on all the hullaballoo around the crisis in Energy and all of the socio-political and socio-economic issues that are swirling around it, not as many people are as acutely attuned to a perhaps more critical crisis…water.
Specifically, I’m talking about the availability of fresh water. People are mostly made of water and most of our planet’s surface is covered with water, but potable water to drink and wash with is another story.
“Whiskey is for drinkin’, water is for fightin’ over” — Mark Twain
As that quote attests, this is nothing new. But perhaps the level of the crisis is.
Northern and Southern California have been fighting over water.
The Colorado River passes through 6 states and Mexico…and it’s not getting deeper.
One of the bigger crises today lies in China – right in their capital city of Beijing. Having grown to a population of 17M during a 10-year drought, they have exhausted all of their near-surface water and are drawing from miles-deep wells and from rivers and reservoirs in neighboring provinces, driving those regions to the brink.
Going Local and Taking Action
A great article appeared in the last few days on SmartPlanet talking about the small town of Cloudcroft, NM. With little in the way of natural water sources, the town had been trucking in 20,000 gallons of water every day. This was quickly becoming non-viable, so the town got innovative and acquired a state-of-the-art water reclamation system that lets them reuse 100% of their waste water.
Cool.
This is on one end of the spectrum in aggressively confronting this problem, but if all of our major cities could move incrementally in that direction, we could head this crisis off at the pass (um, do I have to say “partner”?).
eco+historical’s role
For our two projects, we’re taking our water conservation to a new level for urban architecture.
Sure, we’re pursuing the standard water-efficiency measures like using:
Low-flow faucets (just 1.5 gallons/min vs. older faucets at 2.5 or even 4 gpm)- WaterSense-rated toilets (1.28 gallons/flush)
- Motion-sensor water recirculation so hot water is hot when you turn on the faucet
- EnergyStar dishwashers and washing machines (use 30-75% less water)
- Irrigating landscaping w/all drip irrigation – no wasted spray
But that’s just dialing back our consumption.
What about “recycling” our water? Or making use of all that water that falls as rain and otherwise just floods the streets, saturates the ground, or runs off to the sewers?
Grey Water Recycling
In addition to being stingy with the water we use, we’ll reuse the water that we do!
We’ll recapture water running down the drain from our bathroom sinks and laundry and reuse it to flush our toilets or water our landscaping. This is called Grey Water since it mostly has schmutz in it that you can filter out (unlike Black Water – the water that flushes through the toilet and which must be treated chemically before it can re-enter the ecosystem).
By re-using this water that would otherwise go down the drain, we’ll save thousands of gallons a year that would otherwise be drawn from the city’s water supply (and thus from precious aquifers and reservoirs). Here’s a great illustration of a system from Australia…
Rainwater Catchement
Similarly, we can capture the rain that we would otherwise dump from our gutters onto the ground and put it in tanks for reuse for the same purposes that put the processed greywater. Between these two sources, a drought-tolerant garden could potentially require little if any water from the city’s water supply and one of our principal uses of fresh water – toilet flushing – can likewise be taken care of by water that would otherwise have been dumped. Check out the nice illustration from This Old House.
We’re certainly not the first to implement these kinds of systems, but they’re not terribly common in urban settings (aside from some guerilla implementations as add-ons to existing homes with non-integrated plumbing) and we plan to make these a standard part of the way eco+historical commits itself to weaning itself off our global “drinking problem”.
4 comments
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June 25, 2010 at 5:23 pm
Remy Sabiani
Hi Josh,
If you are interested in greywater systems available in California and want to learn more about greywater and how to use it for outdoor irrigation, visit: http://www.waterwisegroup.com.
Remy.
June 28, 2010 at 4:52 pm
mrfrancophile
Thanks, Remy. Have indeed looked at your site and the Aqua2use GWDD for our projects, as recommended by John Russell of WaterSprout. The challenge is serving a multi-zoned drip irrigation system and backing up the system with supply water for times when the house is unused (i.e. we’re on vacation) and the gardens and trees still need the requisite amount of water.
For projects like ours, where we’re putting in new gardens and trees that have a higher initial demand for water as they establish, it’s also a challenge to use a system that provides irrigation strictly based upon household water use (particularly a household with all WaterSense rated low-flow fixtures) for the quantity of available water for the garden. These direct-to-garden solutions also make it difficult or impossible to work with advanced moisture-sensing timer controls that could assure that each plant and tree gets just the right amount of water that it needs, factoring in any rain or lack thereof. We can design a custom system for such needs, but those tend to be pretty expensive to design and implement right now.
I won’t pretend to be an expert on these matters, but the like life, I suppose, the more I learn about greywater and rainwater systems, the more I realize just how much I don’t know!
June 27, 2010 at 5:37 pm
David Glover
The graywater system in this project lacks the single most important element of any thing green. It lacks sustainability. A great deal of water and energy goes into creating a system like this. So you waste more than you save. Its also very high maintenance. Truly going green means getting off the expensive thrill of using high tech super involved systems, to solve our problems. What we need to do is embrace simple SUSTAINABLE solutions that solve the problems without creating more larger problems. Sure this is a demonstration home but its demonstrating the wrong thing. You would be much better off using the graywater in the garden and using the rainwater for use in the house. You have a great greywater expert very close by in the east bay. She can be reached at http://www.greywateraction.org The simple graywater systems described at this site and at http://www.montereygreywater.com , work better, use 50 times less resources to create, are massively cheaper to install, are very low maintenance, and last practically forever.
June 28, 2010 at 4:42 pm
mrfrancophile
The graywater system I showed in the post was just an example, not a specifically recommended solution. It’s exciting that there are so many passionate supporters of the movement towards rain and graywater use and reuse, but despite the enthusiasm, there are a number of building codes that make interior reuse in San Francisco difficult, at best. It is possible to do such systems, but they require rather involved filtering solutions…sometimes natural, like constructed wetlands, and sometimes technological, like multi-stage filters, hydrogen peroxide, chlorine, and/or UV treatment to meet the required water standards. But codes and solutions are continually evolving, so solutions will become increasingly available to people with a wider range of budgets in the coming months and years.