Conversations on Website Conversion discussion

Water waste is something that we all have to contend with—even if we aren’t business owners. Fortunately, due to its ubiquitousness there are a lot of strategies that have been developed to deal with the innate inefficiencies of water usage. Before you start making changes, you should take a measurement of your current water usage. Once you have done this, you can start making changes and measuring their effects. A first, easy change to make is to install water aerators on sinks and hoses that you use. You can check to see if you are using low-flow toilets. If not, you don’t necessarily need to replace your fixtures—you can simply install a water-displacer which will keep the tank from refilling entirely.

By the time we get through Part 2 of this book, we’ll already be well on our way to creating more efficient and greener business. Had you ever considered streamlining your water-usage? What sort of impact do you think changing your water practices will have on your overall efficiency? Even if your business is not water intensive, there is no reason not to become efficient where and how you can.

This book offers up some great ideas in this area. If possible I would like to outfit my house for a greywater system which is a way to conserve and reuse water "for a sustainable water culture." I have a friend who is into permaculture and he explains it like this. So simple but so revolutionary!

Visualize for a moment your morning shower. The warm water runs gently and momentarily over you, then falls to the drain. It goes on its merry way to...well, to a place most of us rarely think about. It simply goes "away" after our brief contact with it. Similarly, think about that last load of laundry you did. How much water did it take to complete these mundane tasks and where did it go?

Now imagine, instead of that water draining "away" to the sewer or septic tank, it was captured and reused. Imagine if those 15 to 50 gallons (depending on the type of washing machine) or 10 to 40 gallons (10-minute shower, depending on type of showerhead) of what's known as "greywater" were re-purposed for something productive that also required water, say, growing food in your garden or irrigating fruit trees.

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You can use graywater to flush toilets too, it's not like that water needs to be particularly clean!

I think that it's completely shocking how much water it takes to do something as commonplace as flushing a toilet. I'm glad that the low-flow ones are coming into their time, because the waste of older models is pretty shameful. Washing machines and dishwashers can be the same way--I try to make certain that the dishwasher at my house is always run on the "Eco" cycle (it has and Eco cycle!) which uses much less water than the traditional cycles.

Another great thing for a small-scale (which is probably why our book didn't mention it too much) is rainwater collection. It's incredibly wet where I live, so we have some rainbarrels set up, which we then use to water the garden.