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Friday, Mar 29, 2024

Gray Water Makes Clear Sense for Conservation

By Rickey M. Gelb This year is the driest since Los Angeles has been measuring rainfall and we are all being urged to conserve this precious resource. Do we need to take shorter showers? Do we water our lawns less? Do we let golf courses go brown? Do we flush our toilets less? And how do bureaucracies deal with such an issue, other than telling consumers how to sacrifice? Do they find ways to be more efficient? Of course not, they raise our rates. If the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power was a privately owned business, its leadership would probably mandate improved efficiencies, new approaches to water management and exploration for new sources of water. It is even possible that they might find ways to really save a lot of water. But the simplest way for a public entity is to just raise prices. Why not, when there is no competition and no other place for consumers to go? Once again, when there’s a problem, it’s much easier to burden the pocketbook of the consumer rather than creatively explore real solutions. There is a realistic solution to the long-term problem we face because we live in a desert. Why not tap into the one of the largest sources of water flowing out of Los Angeles and put it to use? The solution: gray water. Gray water is any water that has been used in the home, except water from toilets. Millions of gallons of gray water flow into the ocean every day and it’s water we could still use, rather than waste. Dish, shower, sink and laundry water comprise 50 percent to 80 percent of residential “waste” water. It’s a waste to irrigate with great quantities of drinking water as we currently do when plants thrive on used water containing small bits of compost. Unlike many ecological stopgap measures, gray water reuse should be a part of the basic solution to many ecological problems and will probably remain fundamentally unchanged in the distant future. The benefits of gray water recycling include reduced fresh water use and less strain on treatment plants. Further, gray water treatment in topsoil is highly effective; its use provides the ability to build in areas unsuitable for conventional treatment; it uses less energy and fewer chemicals and is a great source of groundwater recharge. The DWP should install a large piping system from the Tillman plant in the middle of the Valley. It could run along the MTA Orange Line right-of-way and have numerous connections along the route for future attachments. This route would serve the entire Valley and provide gray water to all the parks, golf courses and landscaping along the Orange line and adjacent freeways. There are thousands of uses that could be utilized along this 20-mile route. Large private companies or residences that use major quantities of water could be authorized to connect to this system. This would help reduce the demand for our short supply of fresh water And every gallon of gray water used to irrigate freeway vegetation, golf courses and other non-human-consumption uses, is a gallon of potable water that we can use. The use of this large quantity of water would also lessen the amount of water we send through the sewer system to the ocean. Our local government leaders all claim that they want to champion environmental causes. Yet none of them push the DWP to evaluate and analyze this simple solution. Increased, and appropriate, use of gray water makes sense for all of us. It would represent an incredible conservation accomplishment. I believe that the City’s utilization of gray water would be an excellent opportunity for our local officials to put action in front of empty talk. Of course, were such a program instituted, the DWP would not need as much money for the sewer system and might be forced to reduce their next request for a price increase for additional sewer fees. Can you imagine if eventually everyone in the Valley would be able to request gray water for their landscaping (at a reduced price, of course) and we would cut our water demand in half? Would that be called Utopia? Let’s find a way to use water the way it was meant to be used: fresh, potable water for drinking, cooking, showering and other human uses; gray water for nonhuman uses. It only makes sense, doesn’t it? Rickey M. Gelb is managing general partner of Gelb Enterprises, a real estate development and property management company.

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