Our May meeting at Environmental Change-Makers was about water: “Water Wisdom for a year of drought and beyond.”

Right now, our society has a cavalier and wasteful attitude. We also have a “use it once and send it AWAY” attitude. And we completely accept the idea that it’s okay for our water to be imported from someplace else. It’s time to rethink our paradigm about:

When we ask water department personnel (like the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power employee who spoke at our Environmental Change-Makers meeting) about water wisdom, they give us a lengthy stream of solutions, ALL of which fall under water conservation, reducing our water use. The LADWP representative gave little to our May discussion about water sources or wastewater attitudes. He can’t. He emphasized that LADWP is a water purveyor–they are in the business of selling potable water. The complete portfolio of solutions to our water problems reaches far beyond the scope of his Department.

That’s why it’s up to us to talk about the full panorama of solutions. We need to implement all of these ideas in our lifestyles in order to embrace Water Wisdom.

WATER SOURCES:

Rain that falls on the city of Los Angeles hasn’t that much to do with what comes out of our tap. Faucet water around here comes from (a) Northern California through the State Water Project, (b) Owens River Valley on the backside of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, or (c) Colorado and Arizona from the Colorado River. Water Department documents will tell you we use a lot of groundwater, but this is a bit misleading. In order to prevent seawater (salty) from filling our groundwater basins, when our groundwater basins run low they pump our groundwater basins full of fresh water. Where does that fresh water come from? Read a,b,c above.

Water from sources a,b,c above doesn’t get to Southern California on its own. It’s pumped. Pumping water in California accounts for 19% of our state’s electricity consumption (ref). Since most of our California electricity is produced by coal, we’re talking serious greenhouse gas emissions in order to pump water. Around here, water wisdom is a global warming solution too!

Rain that falls right here on the city hits hardscape–concrete and asphalt–where it is quickly shunted to massive storm drains which sweep it out to the ocean. Every architect is trained in how to move rainwater away from structures, rapidly.

But we can rethink our attitude about water sources. The City of Santa Monica now requires rainwater infiltration pits to soak that rainwater into the ground. They require water-permeable surfaces in place of concrete sidewalks and asphalt parking lots. The City of Malibu has a maximum percentage of hardscape you can have on your land. These new regulations aim to capture the rain we do receive. As that rain soaks into the ground, it helps maintain levels in our groundwater basins. It also can be harvested, and stored for landscape use between rains.

WASTEWATER:

We have a “use it once and send it AWAY” attitude about our water.

One website calls it MIFSLA “mix it first, separate later.” We mix everything together–shower water run waiting for the hot water to come, relatively fresh greywater, urine, and blackwater–and send this icky combo to sewage treatment plants like our local Hyperion for them to deal with. (They treat it with bacteria and chemicals, then pump the liquid parts into the ocean. The solid parts they try to promote as soil fertilizer. http://www.bakersfield.com/619/story/52638.html ) But many parts of this combo aren’t so icky, when they’re not combined with the really bad stuff.

It comes back to cultural education. Most people don’t know the difference between potable water, greywater and blackwater.

When we turn on the shower and wait for the hot water to arrive, the cold water that comes first is potable water. You could drink it, but instead we send it to Hyperion. Solution: bucketing - capture that fresh water bounty and use it to wash the floor, rinse the clothes, or flush the toilet.

Figure out how you can use water multiple times before it leaves your property.

When you wash carrots fresh from the garden, that water could be easily reused to water your garden. Solution: garden sink - keep the water, and the rich garden soil, in the garden. (You don’t even need to buy a sink gadget - a bucket works fine).

If your plumbing configuration permits, shower water and laundry washer water can be diverted to water your landscaping. The LADWP speaker gave us some insight on why this currently isn’t legal: it falls between two city departments. Health declares it’s an issue for Building and Safety, while Building and Safety declares it’s an issue for the Health Department. To this I will add that education of the general public is also an issue. Since most people don’t know the above-outlined differences between potable water, greywater, and blackwater, they’re very likely to get things mixed up, which carries a potential serious hazard. Some cities like Santa Barbara are a bit more progressive and are permitting greywater systems, but for the most part, greywater plumbing is the realm of the brave few pioneers who are willing to reach beyond regulations.

WATER USES:

Outdoors: We think nothing of planting high-water-needs tropical plants in Southern California’s virtual desert. We still hang on to our water-slurping, high-evaporation lawns, a relic from our European roots and our aspirations to nobility and castles (where they needed large clear areas around the structure to see the enemy armies approaching). We hose down decks and sidewalks, all with cavalier regard for this valuable resource that is getting more precious with every passing year.

Get reacquainted with your broom. At the community garden, someone saw me sweeping the sidewalk and suggested that I use a hose. In the City of Santa Monica, it’s now illegal to hose down sidewalks, and it may soon be so in Los Angeles too. Yes, water can be used to push that dirt away. But a broom works well too, and gets you the exercise that our overweight population so desperately needs.

Indoors: Water conservation starts with simplicity: Turn the faucet off. Duh. Beyond that, there’s a lot we can do. Low-flow shower heads and aereators on the household faucets give you the pressure you’re accustomed to without taking so much water to do it. LADWP gives away these devices at their district offices. Shorter showers are another obvious one.

Energy Star washing machines use a fraction of the water that the old machines did a decade ago. I was surprised when I started to compare. Water wisdom merges with global warming solutions here. When coupled with the electricity savings in the much-more-efficient machine, unheated water for most wash loads, hooking that low-water washer to a greywater outflow to water our trees, and hanging out my laundry on a drying rack, my laundry is getting considerably earth wiser.

I was also astonished when I ran an energy monitor and discovered how much electricity our 10 y.o. dishwasher took. Handwashing dishes in a tub (don’t leave the faucet running) is probably the most water-and-power efficient solution out there. Scrape plates into a bowl headed toward your compost bin, rather than trying to push the scraps away with gallons of water. That way you run your disposal less often, which also saves water and power.

BOTTLED WATER?

While we’re on the topic of water, realize that our city tapwater is subjected to much regulation to assure its content. Bottled water, by contrast, is subjected to relatively little regulation, and even less inspection and enforcement. It’s simply corporate advertising that has convinced us that bottled water in shiny plastic bottles is somehow fresher and purer. Additionally, the bottles contribute enormous volume to our waste stream. Most plastic bottles don’t get recycled–80% of them linger for hundreds of years in our landfills. For those that do see the recycling bin, the term “recycling” is a misuse of the term. #1 and #2 plastic bottles are downcycled. They’re turned into fenceposts or fleece jackets. Their resins can’t go back into making another clear plastic bottle. Add to this the issues about privatization of water, and usurping of streams, springs, and aquifers. Read more at the Sierra Club campaign on bottled water (www.sierraclub.org/committees/cac/water/bottled_water/bottled_water.pdf), then carry city tapwater in a reuseable bottle.

Many of these water wise tips fall into the category of “simple and logical.” It’s so easy to overlook them, in an age where corporate advertisers push miracle gadgets that supposedly solve all our problems. There aren’t magical gadgets that will solve our environmental issues (the word for that is “consumerism”). The miracle gadget is inside our own heads. It’s time to use it. It’s time to rethink our attitude toward our earth’s resources, our attitude toward fair shares with our fellow human beings, time to rethink our interrelationship with the cycles of the planet.

LAPL = Los Angeles Public Library

LADWP = Los Angeles Department of Water and Power

Greywater can be spelled greywater, graywater, gray water, grey water, all of which serves to infinitely complicate your google searches…