Water Reuse

Our conservation and efficiency potential is currently only partially tapped. Our re-use potential is hardly tapped at all.

Some day in the not too distant future, our practice of flushing toilets with drinking water will be viewed as being as archaic as using pigeons to carry text messages, as wasteful as sending every bottle and can to the landfill, and as disgusting as dumping raw sewage into rivers and lakes. Toilet flushing and numerous other water uses in and around the home do not require high-quality, expensive drinking water. Simple home graywater systems can meet these needs perfectly well – and dramatically reduce pressures on drinking water supplies.

Another current practice that will surely baffle future generations is letting all our stormwater run across our property, pick up pollutants, and enter the storm drain, where it must either be provided with costly treatment or allowed to pollute our public waters. By detaining more stormwater on each of our properties, we can reduce these downstream problems and secure additional personal water supplies that are perfectly good for many uses, both indoors and out. A growing number of homeowners, businesses and cities are doing just that.

Reuse of treated sewage could provide the greatest benefits of all. Instead of treating it as “wastewater” we can use it as a resource. Properly treated sewage is perfectly capable of meeting many of our water industrial, institutional and outdoor water needs. Dual distribution systems that provide businesses and homeowners the choice of using potable water for some needs and treated wastewater for the rest are already developed in many arid, populous areas of the country. They are beginning to be developed in others, including areas such as Western Oregon that until recently were considered to be “water rich”.

Water and energy utilities could greatly speed the development of reuse programs by simply re-directing some of the large amounts of money they already spend on securing new supplies. Every city in this country is sitting on a “conservation, efficiency and reuse reservoir” just waiting to be tapped. In almost every case, it can be secured more quickly, less expensively, with less controversy and with much less negative environmental impact than any other potential supply. In fact, the only environmental impacts of tapping our conservation, efficiency and reuse reservoirs – fewer dams, more water in streams, less energy used, less CO2 emitted, etc. – are positive.