How to Green Your Water

So You Wanna Do More

Not content with just getting by? Go hardcore.

1. Ease up on the meat
To produce 1 kilogram of boneless beef, according to a definitive 2004 UNESCO study on the "water footprint of nations," it takes 6.5 kilograms of grain, 36 kilograms of roughage (coarse grains and pasture), and 155 litres of drinking water (Now Magazine). In The Food Revolution, John Robbins calculates that a vegetarian diet requires only 300 gallons of water per day, while a meat eating diet requires 4,000 gallons per day. You save more water by not eating a pound of beef than you do by not showering for an entire year.

2. Get serious about greywater recovery
Greywater recycling schemes range from large building systems to small home retrofits to simple low-tech recycling practices. TreeHugger has written about the Toilet Lid Sink which very sensibly lets you rinse your hands with the water that is filling the tank. Saves space too! The Aqus system does much the same thing but in an under-the-sink way. The Ban Beater lets you easily suck up bathwater and deliver it through a hose to your garden.

As our “Weird” Eco Habits contest has elucidated, a woman in Hiroshima not only saves water, but gets her exercise while moving bathwater by bucket from the tub to the laundry. "Three rinse cycles of clean water just seems such a waste."

3. Start with good green design
Read Inhabitat’s Green Building 101 to see what architects can do to reduce water use. Building a house from scratch? Plumb it for greywater recovery with separate pipes from the toilets and the rest of the house. Design the roof for decent rainwater collection or incorporate green roofs, which mitigate and filter roof runoff. Put in big cisterns to hold water through the entire summer. Use permeable paving to let water soak through to the ground instead of washing away.

If you or your architect is feeling like pushing the envelope, consider using a “living machine” to filter grey (or even black) water with natural plants and other organisms. And remember, if you live in the desert (California, we’re looking in your direction!), think twice before planting grass.

4. Get involved
In the year 2000, the United Nations established that 2.64 billion people had inadequate access to sanitation. This value represented 44 percent of the global population, but in Africa and Asia approximately half of the population had no access whatsoever to sanitation. Just a Drop reports that: “Every 10 seconds a child dies because of dirty water. 4 million children under five die terrible deaths each year due to water-born diseases. 1.1 billion children have no clean water close to their homes. Many children share the water they use to drink, cook and bathe with their livestock.”

Matt Damon set up H2OAfrica after he "saw firsthand the effects of one of the largest public health issues of our time, the world water crisis which is at its worst in Africa." And the United Church of Canada has started a campaign to control the spread of bottled water.

5. Location, location, location
Many of us live in places where we cannot survive sustainably. You can’t live in Arizona without air conditioning and water resources that millions are trying to share. Perhaps we should be making our choices about where we live by considering the ability of the land to actually support us without artificial means.

Florida's reservoirs below and above ground are badly depleted and becoming briny with saltwater seepage. The water shortage is so bad in parts of the state, despite a recent tropical storm, that people have been hauled into court and fined for violating strict water rationing standards. Some major American cities in the Southwest, including El Paso, San Antonio and Albuquerque, could go dry in 10 to 20 years

By the Numbers

Want the real deal? Here's where the rubber meets the road.

1. Much of the world gets by on 2.5 gallons of water per day. The average American uses 400 gallons per day, 30% of which is for outdoor uses and half for watering lawns- 7 billion gallons per day (EPA).

2. Worldwide, 70% of water is used for farming and most of it wasted through primitive irrigation systems that are only 40% effective (Wired). According to a 2002 article by Lester Brown, aquifers are depleting all over the world—in China by 2-3 metres per year. In the US, the Ogallala aquifer is shrinking rapidly. In India, aquifers are going down by 3 metres per year, in Mexico by 3.3 meters per year.

3. Worldwide water shortages could prove disastrous. Already, major conflicts such as Darfur have been connected to shortages of, and lack of access to, clean water. There are currently 263 rivers and countless aquifers that either cross or demarcate international political boundaries, according to the Atlas of International Freshwater Agreement, and 90 percent of countries in the world must share these water basins with at least one or two other states. For more information, Marq de Villiers on Water Wars of the Near Future.

4. Water expert Peter Gleick provides some numbers on the waste of water in American agriculture: “we use something like 1,430 gallons per capita in the United States. Only 100 gallons of that is household use per person.”

5. Unicef estimate that unsafe drinking water, inadequate availability of water for hygiene, and lack of access to sanitation together contribute to about 88 percent of deaths from diarrhea, or more than 1.5 million of the 1.9 million children under five who perish from diarrhea each year. This amounts to 18 percent of all under-five deaths and means that more than 4,000 children are dying every day as a result of diarrhoeal diseases.

6. Unicef also estimates that 11.3 billion dollars are required to provide basic levels of service for drinking and waste water in Africa and Asia. Amount spent on bottled water in the First World: $35 billion.

7. Making PET bottles for water uses up 1.5 million barrels of crude oil, enough to fuel 100,000 American cars for a year. 2.7 tons of plastic are used to bottle water. 86% become garbage or litter (Earth Policy Institute).

Getting Techie

Not content with the high level? Here's the nitty gritty.

1. Where does it come from?
The water cycle is the process by which water circulates around, over, and through the Earth. It is driven by the sun, evaporating water from the oceans, rising through the atmosphere and condensing as pure water or snow. About 505,000 cubic kilometers of water fall on the earth each year, 398,000 over the oceans. The pure water is stored as ice, as water in lakes, and in aquifers that have taken thousands of years to fill. 97% of water is stored in the oceans; 2% in the ice caps; only 1% is in lakes, groundwater or other useable sources. We draw on surface water (lakes and rivers) subsurface (groundwater through pumping) and a small amount is made (very expensively) through desalination. Read more about the water cycle at Wikipedia.

2. What is done to it?
Sometimes very little. Where the water sources are pure, like in New York City, very little is actually necessary. Other municipalities put their water through a three stage system of Primary Treatment (collecting and screening), Secondary Treatment (removal of solids and contaminants using filters and coagulation), and Tertiary Treatment (carbon filtering and disinfection). It is then stored in reservoirs or water towers so that it can be gravity-fed through the system.

3. Is it really pure?
While the consensus is that, overall, tap water is better than bottled water for you and the environment, there are some concerns. Older houses and apartment buildings may have lead plumbing which can contaminate it via pipes, solder, and old brass fittings. There is also a growing concern about low levels of antibiotics from agriculture and people disposing of medication down the toilet. Gender-bender hormones from birth control pills, along with phthalates from vinyl, are entering the water system and changing the sex of fish, lowering the sperm count of men, and doubling the number of annual male breast reduction surgeries.

4. Where does it go?
Too often, waster is just dumped. Often it enters combined systems that are overwhelmed when it rains. Where there is sewage treatment it is of variable quality, but a properly run modern plant can produce results that are fairly effective. The systems are designed to mimic natural treatment processes where bacteria consume the organic contaminants, and it can then be returned to lakes or as groundwater. Unfortunately, in sub-Saharan Africa almost no waste water is treated; in Latin America only about 15% is. The price is paid in diarrhea, typhus and cholera.