Only Looks Like a Tempest when You're in the Teapot
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Bad news:
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Greywater reuse offers much more benefits than are realized
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in most systems.
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Good news:
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Even the worst shortfalls in greywater design rarely cause
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actual harm, and for the few that do, it's not much.
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For every hundred greywater users in the US, probably 15 are achieving most
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of the benefit they should, eighty-some could do better, and a few systems have
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overall negative net benefit.
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Of these, most have an overbuilt system—the problem is that the ecological
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cost of the pumps and pipe are greater than the saved water.
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Perhaps one greywater user in a thousand is discharging diaper greywater directly
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to a water way, which is about the only way you can create a significant health
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hazard. Almost all such systems date from a time when the ecosystem was much
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bigger and the human imprint much smaller.
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There has not been one documented case of greywater transmitted illness
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in the US.
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In our area, we have curbside recycling of mixed recyclables as well as trash
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pick up.
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I've observed that well-meaning citizens put plenty of stuff which looks vaguely
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recyclable but is not in their recycling bins (e.g., polystyrene packing), as
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well as totally recyclable materials in in a form which is impractical to recycle,
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like thousands of bits of loose paper, broken glass, and specs of plastic. At
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the sorting facility, they send this sort of stuff to the landfill.
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For some households, the percentage of their recyclables which are actually
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recycled is as low as 20%, though it could be 95% with good information. This
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does not mean recycling is dangerous or illegal.
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This is a totally different kind of "failure" than, say, burning
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PVC in the backyard (which forms clouds of carcinogenic dioxin). These folks
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just need to know what they're doing wrong, and how to do it better.
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The aim of this web page is to share with greywater users and regulators
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what they're doing wrong. The aim of our
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greywater
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books
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is to detail how to do it better.
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Please bear in mind as you read the exhaustive litany of "problems"
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that even the most pathetically misguided attempts at greywater reuse still
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wind up showing some net benefit relative to the alternatives.
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Here's an overview of the failure of greywater reuse to achieve more of the
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benefit which it easily could:
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Most new complex grey water reuse systems are
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abandoned, most simple ones achieve less than 10% irrigation efficiency within
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five years.
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If grey water treatment systems were built according
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to overdone legal requirements, many would consume so much energy and materials
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to save so little water that the Earth would be better off if the water were
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just wasted instead.
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Claims made for packaged grey water filtration
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systems are often inflated. Some are very expensive and many don't work.
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Some also have the preceding problem.
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The majority of successful grey water recycling
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systems are so simple and inexpensive they are beneath recognition by regulators,
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manufacturers, consultants, and salespeople.
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A web search on "grey water" "greywater"
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"gray water" or "graywater" will yield hundreds examples
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of the errors below. Many are designs from the early 70's, reprinted on the
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web as cutting edge, despite having been discredited in the field for twenty
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years.
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