Introduction
While much of the country is still on water restrictions and the continued growth of the country in its limited fruitful regions keeps growing, there becomes a need to ration water. The introduction of desalination plants (converting sea water into drinking water) looks to alleviate some of the pressure, they are only part of a solution. While depending on rain is clearly not the optimum solution, populating our lush coastline with environmentally damaging desalination plants is also not optimum. A focus on the conservation of existing water and an optimisation of desalinated water should be our focus. How do we ensure this?
Categorising the types of water usage
There clearly are different categories for water usages. Watering your garden is clearly separate from drinking glasses of water. Washing your clothes in water is clearly separate from using water to flush waste away in your toilet. There are degrees of quality which go uncategorised, unharnessed.
For the sake of prudence, we’ll categorise household (and industrial use of water) into two categories.
1. Drinking water – Water for bathing, drinking, preparing food etc, essentially any water that actually touches you or anything you eat.
2. Utility water – Water used for other purposes, where sanitary isn’t a large concern.
We reject entirely recycled water because we don’t want to drink it, however don’t have such an issue using that water as a medium for flushing our waste from our toilets.
Recycling and optimising the water supply.
So its clear that the average household and business needs not one but two types of water. One fit for human consumption and the other not. I propose that we start an initiative whereby we build new houses with two sets of water pipes. In these new estates where these houses are being build, we incorporate water recycling mechanisms where drainage water, sewage water, and generate waste water is collected, processed and returned as Utility water. Such water would be used to operate washing machines and garden hoses and toilets. A different coloured tap, perhaps a red one would denote the fact that the tap contains non-drinking water.
The specific use of the water depends on the social mores of the population. However in situations like filling a swimming pool it is patently ridiculous that we fill a household pool with hundreds to thousands of litres of drinking water. We then fill the pool full of chemicals making the water no longer drinkable or suitable for any common use. Recycled water would not contain anything that would harm or otherwise not be contained in common drinking water. Ideally its use as a standard water source would be optimal, however this concept is unpalatable. While the use of utility water in pools may depend on the local population. There clearly are areas, significant areas where the type of water would be useful. Denying recycled waters use in the general population and using drinking water for all purposes is clearly not a sustainable option.
What would all this achieve?
Well, instead of having one fickle source for all our water needs, rain, we would distribute sources so that most of a cities drinking water could be derived from desalination plants, most of a cities utility water could be recycled from expended desalination water, expended utility water and general rain runoff. In reality we could simply pump expended utility water back into desalination plants (if you understand what desalination plants do you’ll realise that the only thing that comes out of them is pure (useless chemical H2O (water used for ironing boards)) water). An additional market would arise in the use of collected waste. Such waste would generally be suitable for use as fertilisers or could be collected and resold chemical waste. At a minimum, waste water could be used to power methane power plants which could in turn power the desalination plants. While it may seem to open an environmental waste issue, we would simply be collecting waste that would otherwise be dispersed into the environment or return back into the water table. Such waste would inevitably end up in drinking water unless collected.
Desalinating, Separating and recycling water would ensure that we could comfortably use water into future. It is a cost effective, simple (in comparison to the current system) and scalable solution that would not need re-engineering by our descendants (as the current water system, designed by our ancestors needs re-engineering now).
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