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.