Thinking of Grey Water Recovery In the New House

 

John Wesley Powell's famous 19th century watershed map that nobody followed, instead developing the West as if water didn't matter. Creative Commons license by Torpyl  Wikimedia

The house now has s roof. In our age of harsher winds, bigger fires and more powerful storms, how much longer will fragile and flammable stick buildings be the way we build homes?

 As we enter the season of buying and throwing away, I reflect on our quixotic system of paying to purchase, dispose of and to either landfill or recycle. In the case of trash, we pay for things, and when their usable life is over, we dispose of them and pay to do that. Still, that isn't the end since many of those things go to a landfill where generations down the road will be tasked with paying for the maintenance of what we throw away today. 

A similar system exists concerning municipal water, though there is more recycling. The writer Paul Kingsnorth has called the flush toilet a metaphor for our civilization, meaning we use resources without thinking about them and throw them away without thinking about them. As we enter the season of buying large amounts of stuff wrapped in large piles of packaging that we throw away, his metaphor is something we should think more about.

 We pay to have clean water brought to our home, after which we pay to ship most of it to a place where we pay to have it reprocessed and sent back to us to begin the cycle again. Much of this water is known as greywater, the effluent of sinks and showers that in the southwest U.S., where water is scarce, is commonly reused to water trees and lawns. All it takes is using biodegradable soaps and avoiding harsh chemicals; this water is perfect for reuse. The fact that when reusing greywater we have to think about what we put in the water, because we will later use it on our yard, is and example of how we should think about everything we dispose of, but we don't. Well, I do, but most people don't. If we had to reuse everything we dispose of, we would think differently about everything and it would force us to create a much better world.

As we build a new house, I hesitate to ask the builder to install a greywater diverter that I could use half the year to water nonfood items like the lawn and trees. The diverter would send the fifty to a hundred gallons of grey water  we might daily to a tank I could draw on later. I hesitate because I already watched him balk at a request to leave a large part of the lawn for garden space instead of turf and our request to have no carpet in the house because we both dislike carpet. Builders like a typical cookie-cutter home that fits in just like everything else in our cookie cutter world of strip malls, suburbs and fast food.

 I will look at other options to divert grey water and reuse it during the warm months. It is not about money since water is relatively cheap, it is about a value system that believes we shouldn't just throw away things that are resources. It is bizarre that I should run hundreds of gallons down the drain to buy hundreds more to water my trees and lawn.

We live in a semi-arid region west of the famous hundredth meridian, where rainfall falls below a certain level. John Wesley Powell made the above map of U.S. watersheds, hoping it would guide development. Nobody listened, as is testified by all the ruins of towns and farmsteads littering the west. In the U.S. Southwest greywater reuse is standard for watering lawns and trees. Here on the North Dakota-Montana border, a region that is almost as arid, there is very little that goes on. Part of it is half the year when water freezes; saving water is just hard to do. The other part is we are so used to just going by Kingsnorth's civilizational metaphor that by physically moving our effluents away so we can't see them, they effectively don't exist.