I recently had the opportunity to spend some time with Paul Maschka out in San Diego. Paul is (among many things) an educator, a business owner, an activist, and an organic farmer. One of the evenings we were walking a couple of blocks to a local brewpub when he said something that has really stuck with me. As we walked past a number of lawns that had sprinklers running over them he said, “look at all that drinkable water.” It struck me because I had never really given much thought to classifying water on the basis of being drinkable or not. This is one of the privileges of living in a “first-world” country where one can simply turn of the faucet and expect: 1) water to flow out, 2) which will not make you ill. Yet this simply remark - look at all that drinkable water - highlighted to me the obvious fact that some water is drinkable and some water is not. This fact alone would suggest that we should allocate the more valuable and versatile drinkable water toward purposes that require clean potable water, whereas used, collected, or “gray” water that is not quite drinkable can be used for watering plants (preferably edible plants). In fact, I observed this very smart allocation of water in action at Paul’s home where I noticed that the discharge hose from the washing machine led out to a garden instead of straight down the drain (apparently plants have no problem with this as long as you use non-toxic laundry detergents without salts in them). This not only saves the drinkable water for drinking, but it also saves the potential expenses associated with the waste treatment of the laundry water, which together save you money on your water and waste treatment bills. So, I would encourage you to consider how you use our drinkable water. The California Water Service Company is currently in Stage 1 of a drought management plan and is asking its customers to voluntarily reduce their water use by 10%. The State of California has enacted a bill to require urban water suppliers to reduce their water consumption by 20% by the year 2020. This is to say that it is likely to become more expensive and more difficult to apply drinkable water to lawns. But even independent of those factors, a smarter use of our shared resources is always…well…a smart thing to do. Cheers,
Larry