what do you drink when there's nothing else?

Recycling greywater by individual households for irrigation and flushing toilets has generally only been adopted by hardcore greens, but the BBC reports that now the Queensland (Australia) government is looking at drinking recycled waste water. Drought is forcing the situation, but this should help increase awareness of the need for water conservation in the long term. According to the BBC News report, water is already recycled in places like Singapore and the UK, but the idea is still unpopular in Australia.

And another BBC report this week says Sydney faces the threat of severe droughts and other climate-related dangers.

water, water everywhere

The Cape Times reported on 1 December:

Between 38% and 53% of Cape Town's water is 'lost' every year somewhere between the supply dams and our taps... [the authorities] don't know where the missing water is going.

Considering current rates of use and government's targetted economic growth of at least 6%, water supply in the Western Cape will soon be a serious challenge. 95% of the rivers that feed into the water management regions of the province are in an ecologically critical condition. There are no more opportunities to build dams, so the only remaining supply options are desalination of seawater and tapping the Table Mountain aquifer (estimated to hold 66 billion cubic metres). Using the aquifer is cheaper than desalination, but recharge rates are unknown, so this may not be a sustainable solution.

wastewater to biofuels

One of the most creative proposals I have seen for combining wastewater effluent with labour-intensive farming for job creation comes from Robbie Robinson in South Africa. He says that low-quality agricultural land is already being used with subsurface drip irrigation fed with dolomitic water from gold mines. He figures that clusters of small-lot farms could use the millions of kilolitres of water produced by the mines to grow rows of crops in rotation, so that a central biofuel production plant could be supplied with feedstock throughout the year, and the farmers would have a continuous income.

[Source: The Star (Johannesburg), 17 November 2006]

transport needs to change

Highbeam Library Research reported on 18 Feb 2004 in the European Report:

Road transport generates more than one fifth of all carbon dioxide emissions in the EU, with passenger cars being responsible for more than half of these emissions.

And here's another lesser-known fact: Standard engineering practice in urban design is to channel rainwater into the stormwater drains, while we replace that rain by using treated drinking water to irrigate our gardens. Makes no sense. And transport's role in this? According to the Center for Watershed Protection, as much as 65% of the total impervious surface cover in the American landscape are surfaces designed for cars including, but not limited to, streets, parking lots, and driveways.

[Source: Driving Urban Environments: Smart Growth Parking Best Practices, a Publication of the Governor's Office of Smart Growth, State of Maryland.]