Peter Glieck on NPR

Peter Glieck is the co-founder of the Pacific Institute [http://www.pacinst.org/] and a major advocate for recycling water. He appeared on NPR this week [link above] and discussed the water crises facing the west.

He explains that "the opportunities to build new dams and new reservoirs [are] pretty much gone...we're going to have to re-think the way we use the existing resources we have...I actually think the 21st century is going to be, in the United States especially, a century of water management and smart use".

Mr. Gleick speaks directly to the main theme of this blog in the interview, he points out that "in the 20th century we built this water system and it brings incredibly high quality potable water to our homes, and we use it to drink and to flush our toilets and to water our lawns. It's a crazy use of a wonderful resource. And so one of the things that people are thinking about in the coming years is ways of using nonpotable water for nonpotable purposes. In new homes, for example, increasingly we're seeing homes that are what called 'dual-plumbed'. They have two sets of pipes. One brings high quality potable water to our faucets, and the other brings fairly high quality but not necessarily potable water, sometimes treated wastewater, to flush our toilets and to use on our lawns, where we don't need potable water. It's expensive to do in homes that are already plumbed, but it's not as expensive to do in new developments where we have access to two different sources of water. We're going to see more and more of that".

All I can say is amen and thank you Mr. Gleick.

Our Own Research into Yuck Factor

Running Arizona's fastest-growing water and wastewater utilities, during record State growth, and in the midst of 13 years of drought required my company, Global Water Resources, to rely on regional-sized water recycling systems. To date, those systems have reduced our potable water demand by more than 750 million gallons; but to get there we had to overcome what Peter Friederici calls, "The Yuck Factor".

We hired a public affairs/lobbying firm, and a well-known ad agency to assess the public's attitudes towards water recycling; and to develop outreach and education materials to change those attitudes based on facts.
To see the outreach materials, visit (http://www.gwresources.com/community-outreach.php)

We conducted two sets of polls, one in 2005, one in 2007; and we conducted several focus groups to 'get into the details' of people's concerns with water recycling. Here's what we have learned so far:

• Most people don't know that water is recycled (69% didn't when we began, 57% didn't in 2007). This means that utilities and government leaders aren't doing enough to educate the public.
• With information, people become supportive of water recycling - our 2005 poll showed us that 35% of the public opposed recycled water use to flush toilets, two years into our campaign, that number is down to 14%.
• By simply explaining how we clean and treat recycled water, we doubled support for recycled water use for: golf courses, toilets, car washing, lawn watering. When we take the time to treat customer concerns seriously, and explain how processes work - people support sustainable water practices.
  
  

The Future is Drying up

Great New York Times article by Joe Gertner - think of this as a new chapter in Cadillac Desert. Gertner interviews heavyweight climatoligists and water engineers and finds they all share a common belief: The American Southwest built its water supply systems on anomalous data from the 20th Century - and, combined with its phenomenal growth, the region is now on a path to catastrophe Steven Chu, the Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a Nobel laureate tells Gertner that "there's a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster, and that's in the best scenario."

The problem Gertner illuminates is known to every serious water professional - the Colorado River is over-allocated (when it was divided it was assumed to have 17 million acre-feet of flows, it averages around 13.5 million), and what we thought was a long drought back in the 1950's, was, relatively speaking, a dry spell. The Southwest has had 60 year droughts on several occassions. Add two more factors to the mix, hypergrowth and climate change, and the systems we have in place look doomed.

In fact, Bradley Udall, head of the Western Water Assessment explained, "as we move forward, all water-management actions based on 'normal' as defined by the 20th Century will increasingly turn out to be bad bets."

The article has good detail on the allocation of water in the West, the improbability of Lake Mead every becoming full again, and the phenomenally costly approaches cities are taking. Examples of the latter - Aurora, Colorado investing $750 million to pump water out of the same river it dumps effluent into and pump that water back to the city for direct injection into the water system, and Las Vegas' $330 million payment to Arizona for banked water and its multi-billion dollar pipeline plan to import groundwater from east-central Nevada to Las Vegas.

To read the entire article, click on the title of this post.

The Yuck Factor

Peter Friederici has written a brilliant piece on the public's reaction to recycling water; in The Yuck Factor, he details how Cloudcroft, New Mexico became the first town in America to begin drinking treated and reclaimed wastewater. And Friederici explains in detail how much cities throughout the American Southwest have in common with Cloudcroft already.

To read the full article, click on the title of this post.