Our Water Runs Through It
by Tony Chavira
TreeHugger has a few particularly ominous images of water contamination in their slideshow of the World's Dirtiest Rivers and Lakes, with several of the finalists right here in our own backyard. Disgusting as they may appear, what's even more disappointing is the idea that we're currently struggling to conserve as much freshwater as we can and yet still polluting our natural freshwater access points. What other options would we have? Well, we could try recycling our gray water, but that’s a messy situation. National Public Radio has a pretty good, straightforward article on gray water, or “used water” that I think is worth giving a skim:
The “it” is gray water, which looks like its name—a bit gray, a bit cloudy. After all, it's the wastewater from bathtubs, sinks and washers. The gray water lapping up Carpenter's dirty clothes will soon be lapped up by her passion fruit trees—and no, the fruit won't taste like Tide. She uses a special type of detergent that doesn't contain salt or boron, compounds which dehydrate plants. “I spent about $350 on my system, and what I've saved in water is about a 100 gallons a week,” she says.
So how does Carpenter's system work? She's hooked up a valve that drains the water outside to a garden. Roughly one million residents in California use a similar type of gray water contraption. Some of them have been trained by Laura Allen, the co-founder of Gray Water Guerillas in Oakland.
“Currently, the codes are very restrictive and basically make sustainability illegal,” Allen says. “So the kinds of systems we do—safe, simple, economical—are accessible to most people.”
That's right, and in the whole of Los Angeles only 5 or so people are allowed to recycle their gray water under California code. Everyone else is pretty much doing it illegally or in a roundabout way. But hey, it's like anything else: we just need to advocate for it hard enough and inform the public.
To close this post on a semi-optimistic note, KCET Local's program Departures features cool videos, photos and information on sections of the Los Angeles River and what's been going on to redevelop and reclaim it as an actual river. It focuses on sections of the river and the environmental personalities of several areas of it in Los Angeles. Click on the screenshot from their map below for a link to the site!
