September/October 2011 Living Now
Recycle the Rain
by Nate Downey
Whether the water you consume comes from a cistern, aquifer, surface-water supply or desalination plant, it can be reused on your property again and again.
First, harvested precipitation can be treated with a bank of micron filters and a pair of ultraviolet lights such that the water can be safely consumed in drinking faucets and via shower heads. Some of the collected precipitation could be diverted to dishwashers, washing machines and flush toilets.
After becoming one of two types of water: greywater (waste from bathroom sinks, showers and clothes washers) or blackwater (from kitchen sinks and toilets) these resources can be treated in any number of ways.
Most people would prefer it go outside to enhance the landscape, but it is certainly possible, depending on your level of scrupulousness, to filter wastewater to the point of being reused in any and all of the fixtures in the house. On site water treatment has the potential to effectively close a home or a community’s water loop to a point at which harvested rainwater would be used for drinking, food crops and other forms of irrigation only.
Every other residential and many commercial and industrial uses could be taken care of with water cycling through the system indefinitely in a way that requires only rare replenishment.
One of the best examples of architecture that supports this level of water consciousness is the Earthship technology that Michael Reynolds has developed over the course of many decades.
Built primarily in and around Taos, New Mexico, Earthship technology has been applied in nearly every climate on the planet. Reynolds’ homes and subdivisions — which are constructed principally of old tires, used cans and bottles, earth, and concrete — use roof water for drinking, washing, indoor gardening and toilet flushing before what’s left heads out to the landscape.
“Architecture is not responding fast enough to the needs of our planet and her people,” Reynolds said in a recent phone interview. “In fact 21st century architecture is still mostly reducing our chances of survival as a species. Biotecture addresses the reality head on. People who live in Earthships have no utility bills to speak of and the buildings themselves are made almost entirely out of recycled materials and dirt harvested from the building site.”
The water systems that Reynolds’ homes use are particularly efficient. In his book, Water from the Sky, Reynolds describes how roof water is collected in cisterns and is directed first to the sinks, showers and washing machines inside the home.
After being used, the resulting greywater drops into a planter bed which filters the water such that it can be used for a third time to flush the toilets in his homes. Finally, this water is used in planting beds for a fourth time just outside the Earthship.
“Although Earthships have at times fallen short of some of their goals,” admits Santa Fe-based architect and former Earthship builder Peter Wilson, “the bottom line is that they have been designing, experimenting and working to achieve the goals that mainstream architecture is only now coming to grips with. Given the obvious threats of global warming, fortunately Michael is no longer one of the lone voices in an ‘alternative’ green building industry. Energy-neutral, passive-solar structures that harvest and reuse precipitation must become the norm if we are going to prevent climate change in any meaningful way.”
As a society, we are nowhere near the point of accepting Earthships into mainstream culture, but someday, perhaps only after a few more evolutions in the home-building industry, we will. My guess is that only after 10 good, solid years of harvesting cistern water for landscaping would we expect any large housing market to fully accept the use of rainwater inside the house.
Only after another decade, could we expect to see building codes that allow the reuse of blackwater in a closed or near-closed water loop. The amount of time for this evolution to occur will always depend on the seriousness of the local water (and/or food) situation, any given community’s desire to develop and grow, and the charisma and success of people like Reynolds and Wilson. For most people, however, this is an evolution that will be many years in coming.
Although it is theoretically possible for a community to become aquifer independent on roof water alone, water sustainability is not likely to occur without the appropriate reuse of our wastewater. Since sewage is so readily available and since the human need for water is continuing to increase, it is hard to imagine a future without a much more effluent cleansing and on-site or downstream reuse.
Call it what you will — water purification, treatment, filtration, sterilization or recycling — along with being the universal solvent, water is particularly cleanable and, therefore, worthy of being collected, distributed and reharvested indefinitely.
Nate Downey is the author of Harvest the Rain. Downey offers workshops in Oregon starting on Sept. 29 in Portland, Oct. 2 in Eugene, Oct. 3 in Corvallis and Oct. 4 in Ashland. For event details, visit www.harvesttherain.com. Reprinted with permission by Sunstone Press at www.sunstonepress.com.