Working Waste Into Water

We're living in a time when it's becoming more and more popular, even trendy, to live simply and waste less.  Technological advances encourage us to rethink some of our traditional ways of dealing with life's challenges, including how we get water and what we do with our human waste.


So how do you feel about drinking urine?


If you think about our modern-day water cycle, where pee is typically flushed down a toilet, transported through pipes to a wastewater treatment plant, treated, and discharged to a waterway; and this treated water evaporates, condenses, precipitates, and travels to another waterway, where it is pumped to a water treatment plant, purified, and used for drinking water, we are drinking recycled urine.  There's just a lot of time and space between flushing the toilet and turning the faucet.  This distance - this disconnection - helps us feel comfortable; we don't feel like we're drinking waste.


But how do you feel about using a toilet that treats urine and changes it into drinking water?  Would you be willing to drink it?  Frank Rijsberman, of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is dreaming of this and other out-of-the-box options to take care of the world's water supply and waste problems.  You can read more his ideas at Pee-Cycling: Bill Gates Is Getting Creative with Human Waste.


A related article, titled The Water Cycle (with a Decidedly Human Twist), describes the technology and advantages of the Orange Country Groundwater Replenishment System (OCGRS), a facility that creates drinking water using sewage.  OCGRS treats 70 million gallons of sewage every day, satisfying the needs of nearly 600,000 people in a water-strapped region.  Bernadette Clavier of the Stanford Center for Social Innovation writes that "the real genius of the project lies in the fact that it has convinced the residents of one of the country’s richest counties that the toilet is a viable source of drinking water (albeit one with a $500 million plant standing between their toilets and their faucets)."


Perhaps viewing water as a precious and limited resource will help us to take some steps towards its preservation.  Any of us can learn to turn off the water during showers and teeth brushing, flush the toilet less often, fix leaks or use collected rainwater for watering plants.  Maybe this changed thinking will even help us to get over the yuck factor that keeps us from supporting new technologies.  

Water Makes Me Smile

Today is World Water Day.  Not unlike a birthday, the holiday encourages us to take time to be grateful for water, and to hope for its presence, health, and abundance in the future.

I've been working on trying to use creative means to express gratitude for various things in my life.  This is definitely a stretch for me - I've never seen myself as a creative person.  Today, as I was reading up on water conservation, I found a link to some poetry composed by some New York City public school 5th graders.  Feeling inspired, I thought I'd write my own poem (please keep in mind that the last time I scripted a poem may have been when I was a 5th grader!)...

Water grants the deepest of joys
Giver of life
In you we splash and jump
You bind us together in happy memories
We marvel, we wonder, we celebrate


Bubbling, flowing, rushing 
You're a fountain of beauty being poured out

On you, on me
Making us clean and new
Cooling the heat on the inside
Healing us



OR

Roses are red, violets are blue.
I'm grateful for water.
I hope you are too!

Maybe you have your own poem to share.  I'd love to hear from you!

Water's True Cost

Dave did it!  He fixed a leak in our bathtub faucet that had been plaguing us for months.  And he did it without needing to shut off the water to all of our house.  Our tub, thankfully, has its own water shut off valve, unlike our dishwasher.  Since I started this blog, I had been feeling at least a little convicted that we needed to do something about this leak.  After all, I've been trying to discipline myself to be grateful for the water we have and mindful of our water consumption.  Having an obvious leak in our bathroom doesn't really fit with that.

After our water walk, we kept one of the containers that we used to transport water (a gallon-sized apple juice container) to put under the leaky faucet, and we would periodically use the water to flush our toilet.  This helped us to calculate that the faucet was leaking nearly 2 gallons of water per day.  To delve into this a little further, we'll have to do some math (yay!): our family of 4 pays $30-$35 every 3 months for the 11,000 or so gallons of water that we use during that time period.  So we were paying roughly $0.003 per gallon, or less than one cent per day, due to our leaky faucet.  I have to admit that, given our very low cost of water, it was difficult to feel motivated to buy the parts required to fix the leak and to make time for the fix;  being compelled to make this change was about more than just the money.

Last week, I bumped into a friend unexpectedly.  We chatted for a little while before she mentioned that she needed to get back to her house to talk with her landlord about her extreme water bill...around $270 for 3 months of water usage!   I was feeling upset for my friend, knowing that there was something very clearly wrong (an error in the water meter reading?  a serious leak...but wouldn't that be obvious?) and fearing that maybe she would be held responsible for the financial consequence.  How could anyone be expected to pay that kind of water bill?  But as I pondered this, I started to wonder...

Would our water consumption habits change if we regularly incurred bills of $270 per quarter instead of $30 per quarter for our water usage?  At what point would we start to care?

In her article titled The Next Big Ideas in Conservation: Paying Water's Real Costs, Carmen Revenga, senior scientist with the Nature Conservancy, states that the price you pay for water is but a small fraction of what it actually costs to extract water, deliver it to users, and treat it after its use.  She argues that once we start purchasing water at something closer to its real cost, that not only would we respond by using less water, but there would also be money for things like upgrading inefficient water distribution systems, protecting our existing water supply, and bringing water to people who don't currently have water access.





Trust me, I'm not excited about another bill increase.  So how can we be responsible for water's true cost right now without paying higher water bills?  Let's start with some of the following water conservation practices:

• Turn off the water while we brush our teeth, wash our hands, and do our dishes.
• Take shorter showers.  Take fewer showers.
• Purchase water-saving/efficient appliances.
• Run only full loads of laundry and dishes.
• Install rain barrels and use the water for our garden and flowers (hopefully more on rain barrels later this week).
• Go to a car wash, where wash water is recycled, or use rain water to wash our cars.
• Wear a clothing item/use a towel more than once before washing it.  If it isn't dirty, don't wash it.
• Check for leaks and fix them.
• Compost food waste instead of using the garbage disposal.
• Protect our water supply - get involved in a local watershed group, plant trees and vegetation along streams, dispose of trash in the appropriate place (let's not sweep leaves or pour oil into our storm drains!).
• Be grateful for the water we have.  Remembering that access to clean water is a privilege will help us to use less of it.

Future Generations Will Praise Us...And Think We're a Little Crazy!

Growing up, I loved going to my Nana and Pop Pop's house.  It served as a safe haven of sorts.  My cousins were often there, so it was guaranteed that I would have someone to play with other than my sisters.  It was also a given that there would be food...lots of food...usually too much food to eat.  There was a big backyard and basement to explore...plenty of places for me to escape.  But also places for me to engage, especially if I was willing to watch sports or Jeopardy, which is often what the adults would be doing.

I loved my Nana so much because she was always showing her love for me.  Forever in her kitchen or sewing room, she was making me or my sisters or cousins some new clothes or our favorite desserts.  But I also thought some of her practices were strange.  She was always saving things like foil or plastic food storage bags.  I used to joke with her and with my sisters and cousins about the rinsed out and hanging up to dry plastic bags.  Why doesn't she just go to the store and get more plastic bags?  It reminded me of my Dad and his installation of a special shower head in our bathroom.  Why would we need to be able to easily shut off the water in the middle of our showers?  After all, we have all of the water we want (this thinking wasn't exactly true, as I learned when our private well was pumped dry by a neighboring construction project).

What I didn't understand then was that my Nana and my Dad had grown up during a different time, a time when material goods and necessary resources weren't as plentiful and weren't taken for granted.

A few days ago I read this article titled What Will Future Generations Condemn Us For? by Kwame Anthony Appiah.  Appiah lists practices such as our poor treatment of animals and the elderly and suggests that if people have already heard the arguments against a practice, if the defenders of the practice do not provide moral counterarguments but invoke tradition or necessity, and if supporters of the practice engage in strategic ignorance, then a practice is destined for future condemnation.  It reminded me of a conversation that Dave and I had recently about slavery in the US.  Of course it's easy for us to condemn that practice now, but if we were living in that time, would we have spoken out against slavery?  Or would we have justified it by telling ourselves that our actions couldn't possibly make a difference and that life as we knew it wouldn't be possible without slaves?

Lately, I've been feeling convicted about my greed and materialism.  I have to admit that I don't like to see how my habits directly or indirectly impact other people or our environment in negative ways, because that means I'll have to change.  And really, it's just easier and less time consuming to be wasteful.  I don't want to have to think about how my purchases and other practices enable injustice systems to continue.

Thank you Nana and thank you Dad for compelling me to think.  I used to be convinced that you were crazy, but now I appreciate that you are wise and thoughtful and sacrificing.  I hope that I can be those things for my children and grandchildren.  I want their praise, not their condemnation, even if it means that they think I'm crazy!