Let's Talk About the Environment: WATER

good advice! I am always looking for better ways to be earth friendly!!!

Our kitchen and guest bathroom (which is not used too much) are on city water; therefore the bulk of water usage is for the dishwasher. Our bathroom plus laundry is on cistern water. Our water bill is usually just around minimum. When we wash cars and pressure wash we use cistern water. We have two large cisterns collecting rain water.

We got a whole-house purification system and now I refill water bottles instead of buying bottled water. I do not wash a load of laundry or dishes without making sure the machine is FULL. We do not let the water run when brushing our teeth or shaving. I don't shave my legs in the shower, instead shaving them first using a tub of hot water in the tub and then I rinse during my regular shower. I collect rainwater to water my indoor and outdoor plants. There are LOTS of simple things that can be done!

I collect rainwater in a barrel to water my plants. We also have low-flow heads on all of our faucets - you can't tell a difference!

Our fridge at work is stocked with bottled water. I made a resolution in January to quit drinking bottled water at work and so far four others have joined me. I bought a Brita pitcher and we keep it in the fridge so those who like their water colder than tap water can use that water instead of grabbing one of the bottles.

An article just came out last week...the 8 glasses of day is a myth! People should not struggle to drink 8 glasses (and then dump it out because they can't drink it all).

Using a Brita in the fridge is a great idea too.

I do a few things living in the Phoenix area. First, I use drip irrigation in my garden and landscaping watering deeply once a week, mulch around all plants and water in the evening to maximize penetration and retention. Second, I cover my pool with a snug fitting tarp and do not have a self refilling system. When the pool is covered I lose virtually no water to evaporation even when checked week to week and the chlorine lasts substantially longer. On hot days we used to (pre tarp days) lose from 4"-6" of water every day! We keep our pool filled year round and tarped except when being actively used. This means we aren't wasting water refilling each year and have a large emergency supply of water (8500 gal) year round. Conservation and preparedness all in one.

We use rainwater barrels for water collection that we use to water our garden... We are also toying with gray water harvesting for the garden.

Oh boy, did you open up a can of worms by letting this question get out to a permaculturish Portlander!

We are trying to get good graywater rules like Arizona, but they will most likely turn out like Washington's (just north of us). California's graywater rules are rumored to be far too bureaucratic to be advocated for here.

The organization doing this is called Re-Code Portland. A local rag nominated us as Rogue of the Week for wanting to do this, and we got a lot of cool people at our first meeting from that. I was a token 58-year old rogue--great fun.

Nearly every time it rains here (yes, it rains a lot) we get combined sewer overflows (not affectionately known as CSO's). This means human effluent goes directly into our river. Somehow the salmon seem to survive it, but it's gross. The poor fish get uppers and downers and all the drugs legal and illegal that humans pay big money for. Too bad the fish don't have fine print to read before they are forced to swim in that stuff! No self-respecting pharmacist would let them combine like that.

More enlightened countries avoid this by composting above ground so that that stuff does not get in the groundwater. It is used by compost-loving plants before it taints groundwater.

For a great show on this, go to KBOO and search for Ole Ersson. He is an M.D. who is pretty expert on this stuff.

Some new buildings are actually plumbed to use graywater to flush toilets, but again, Arizona is probably ahead of us.

I would like to point out that urine contains Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium in a good ratio for many plants. When properly diluted, it is ideal for some kinds of plants. It has to be diluted because of the salt content.

A good gardening tactic is to plant corn, beans, and squash (the sisters) together. The beans set nitrogen for the corn, the corn provides a trellis for the beans, and the squash shades the ground so too much water is not lost to evaporation.

Got to run to an environmental movie. Thanks for posting.

I work for an agricultural company. We are vigilant about learning new ways to save our run-off water. Currently we estimate that we save & re-use 95% of our run-off water. It filters down into holding ponds & then is re-pumped to the plants when watering is needed.
I work for a plant nursery, in Texas.

I take cold showers
I wash dishes by hand

Darwin, I've read that a dishwasher uses less water than hand washing (though whether it uses less power, I'm not sure).

Mary S. makes good points. It is a rarely-admitted fact that much of the serious pollution of our rivers today, vs. 30+ years ago, comes from towns and cities whose citizens won't pay for proper sewage treatment facilities.

Approximately 30 years ago, and for quite some time before that, it was chemical companies that polluted the rivers the most. EPA has shut down the vast majority of those problems (which is not to say that significant problems have been completely eliminated, or remediated- big problems remain with persistent bio-accumulators, molecules that aren't metabolized and are concentrated in species as you move up the food chain).

Along with cities, agriculture is a major polluter of fresh water, mainly with fertilizer runoff, but also with pesticides in some cases (i.e. the Pacific Northwest, where salmon are being killed by pesticides, breaking Federal court orders and laws that the Bush administration refuses to honor or enforce and actively fights). Criminal behavior! See Chemistry for a sustainable world and search for Salmon.

The problem with agriculture has been made worse with the disaster of corn ethanol, which not only uses a huge amount of water in the ethanol production step, but which has eliminated crop rotation in many areas (because that would mean no tax subsidies for corn in a growing season). The lack of crop rotation requires the use of more artificial fertilizer than before, in just the recent past, and artificial fertilizer is not retained as well by the soil as natural fertilizer from crop rotation (using soybeans, for example), so the artificial fertilizer runs off into streams, rivers and lakes, and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico and other salt water habitats.

So, I talk and write about the environment nearly every day, and do what I can. You can see my environmental sites here:
Chemistry for a sustainable world
Gather.com (environmental articles, book reviews and photos)
Blogcritics magazine (a mix of book reviews and environmental articles, only two so far
New sites this week:
Sustainability and the environment group on Squidoo
Solar Power lens on Squidoo

I also use the social networking resources gather,com, stumbleupon, digg, technorati, my blog rolls, del.icio.us, reddit, BlogCatalog, HUGG from treehugger.com, facebook and bloggingzoom, all under the nickname chemrat, to call attention to environmental news, blogs, websites, etc. That's partly why I'm up after 4 am for the second night in a row (and stress- I figure I might as well do something useful if I can't sleep). I would greatly appreciate anyone voting for or commenting on my posts at these various sites, including Gather.com, of course.

As far as I can tell based on anecdotal evidence, but quite a lot of it, digg, reddit and bloggingzoom, green posts are often buried by an active group of negative, politically conservative reviewers, though I suspect the DIGG algorithms themselves are not innocent here.

We are struggling at home with old plumbing, the partial replacement of it, and a few ruined plaster walls and ceilings due to bad old cast-iron stacks, etc. I'm not as good with water use as I'd like to be, but we have been conscious of things like turning of the water while brushing teeth for a long time (my wife's influence on that one). My 13-year old son almost never showers, but we hose him down now and then. I guess my one major water triumph is working on a project that reduced polluted water emissions by hundreds of millions of pounds a year. It was implemented in Belgium and later stolen by S. Korean and Chinese companies. On the plus side, pollution is reduced in S. Korea and China (which is badly needed). On the minus side, the company that took all of the risk and paid for the R&D is ripped off, making it hard for them to continue to try risky, potentially high environmental-payoff R&D programs.

At home, we have indoor clotheslines in the basement for drying towels, etc. I don't even use a towel at our city pool any more- I either air/sun dry myself or use one of those super-absorbent synthetic 6 inch squares that the Olympic divers use. Makes me feel professional!

We're getting the CFL's in as the incandescents go out. We're careful to recycle electronics (including batteries). Keep electronics out of landfills! Otherwise, nasty stuff ends up in the water supply.

I also help my State legislator write environmental policy: her heart and mind are in the right place, but she isn't a technical expert (which I am, at least on some of these things).

Thanks for establishing a great place for green discussion and interaction!
I'm HUGGing this page!

What are you doing to cut your water consumption?

Aside from the euwww-factor:
1. When it's yellow, let it mellow. When it's brown, flush it down. 'nuff said on that topic.
2. We use Culligan, so it's not as bad as individual bottles of water, but it's still elitist. To compensate, I collect any water left over in glasses and give to the dog's water dish or plants. Sometimes I'll pour it into my teapot and bring to a boil to steep my tea. With four children in the house, we do have abandoned water glasses, iykwim.
3. Donning rubber gloves, I use my nylon scrubber to clean off dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. I skip the rinse-before-wash process as much as possible.

Installing a rainwater irrigation system.

Good Point. We are planning rain water harvesting this June when Monsoon slashes here! I hope however that something similar to what we use in Jets will be available for home use. May be air with force can suck the contents off toilet to the septic/waste tank. may be tissue paper will roll out itself! Just wild thinking for those entrepreneurial minds! Water in future should be used only for drinking and cooking.

Follow the money. I posted an article onwhat brokers are saying about water utility bonds. That's one side of it, the other side of the money is that the majority of developed nations only think of themselves, let the other guy save I want........ The fact that fresh drinking water is only two per cent of the total water on earth and some of it needs filtering never enters their thoughts. When water cost them 25% of their pay check they will cry.
I'm designing a small solar water distiller for cleaning up pollutedf water and I'm hoping it will also work with sea water.
If it does then people around the world can use it for their drinking water. Not for government projects, for individual people. Hitler tried extracting gold from sea water but he used fuel rather than solar.
Most of the bottled water is tap water, and 18 million gallons of oil a year goes to making plastic water bottles. Utilities will spend close to a trillion dollars to upgrade exsisting pipes and water flows.

Does anyone else think that " By placing a brick in your toilet tank, you can save four gallons of water each time you flush." is incorrect??? That's got to be one BIG brick to displace 4 gallons of water. :-)

My house has old toilets that use about 5 gallons/flush - they will be replaced in the next year as we remodel our baths. New toilets these days use 1.6 gallons/flush or less. (I'd actually like to put in a composting toilet, but I don't know if building codes would allow it and it would probably ruin the resale value of the house.)

We're also going to stub out for gray water when we remodel the baths - so we can add a system at such a time when they get the codes all figured out here in California.


Other things we do:

Collect rainwater from the roof. You can buy some really nice looking barrels ($$) or find a source of free 55 gallon drums and connect them together. I'd love to install a cistern for more storage. I use the water for irrigation.

Collect water while the shower warms up. Easiest to do if you have a "showerhead on a hose" - Can use this water to flush the toilet or water plants.

Keep a pitcher or bowl in the kitchen sink and collect water as you wash off veggies etc.

Adjust irrigation timers seasonally - turn them off during the rainy season. Check your system for leaks, overspray, run-off etc.

No more bottled water - put a simple filter on the tap and carry my own bottle.

Ditto to things others have said.

I capture sink water and water plants. I am really concerned about the water issue and the sinking ground water levels.

I live in rural Alaska where we have to haul water from the river during the summer and ice from lakes and river in the winter so we have it down to a fine art. Dish water is used to flush our vacuum sewer line about half the time, our laundry is done in a small portable washing machine and some of that water is used to mop (rinse water is used in the next load as wash water) All our little kids fit in the bath together, older ones know to wet themselves and then turn the shower off when they are lathering up, and turn it back on when they are ready to rinse off.

A question of trade-offs: there is an electric tankless water heater that INSTANTLY produces the correct temperature, without the wait time for heated water to travel from the traditional tank to your showerhead. By installing one of these, you eliminate a lot of wasted water. On the other hand, in an emergency situation, the water stored in the tank can be accessed as an additional source of clean drinking water as long as you cut off the power source and the intake (so no unheated water enters the tank, thus introducing bacteria that has already been killed by the heat treatment). Having been through Katrina, with the related emergencies at the water treatment plants and the need to boil water for EVERYTHING, I can say with confidence that the conventional tanks DO have their uses.

If I ever build a house, the bathrooms will have separate water heaters attached to their plumbing--more readily available, pre-boiled water on hand--but the distance it will have to travel will be much less--thus saving on use.

Right now we are inundated with water (flooding along the Mississippi River, though it doesn't reach where I am, some 50 miles inland in central MS) but I keep large foam flowerpots (no drainage holes) along my roofline to catch rainwater for my garden--which is in closely grouped containers a few feet away. I also save the cold leftover coffee to use as liquid fertilizer and compost the grounds, along with eggshells and any other green matter and chopped leaves, to use in my garden. I haven't used pesticides in years and my father swears you could throw an egg in my yard and have a flock of chickens by morning. Earthworms have been crawling out of the soil by the hundreds lately (due to saturation)--I counted twenty in a space of 6 feet on my driveway the other day.

Does anyone have any good information on vermiculture? Looks like I've got a huge stock already, accessibility is my problem.

I didn't realize that some of this stuff was happening. Great ideas though. I will start by doing the brick thing in the toilet. That is a great idea.

Thanks!! :0)