When I was in my early twenties, a very close friend who was advising me on college choices had suggested that I consider a school in Pittsburgh. I rejected the idea without consideration. He knew immediately that my decision was based on one simple thing: proximity to water. I recall him saying “I never lived near water, so it never enters in to my thought, but I can see that you, like many people, have some primal need to be close to water.” This was notion not hard to deconstruct.
My parents moved to a lake community when I was born. I lived there for the next eighteen years, and returned there after my children were born. There were several reasons, but being near water was one of them. Myself and all of my siblings attended our local community’s summer camp where we spent eight weeks each summer for eleven years each, earning colors on our shields. After the eleventh year we were awarded a bronze shield for athletic achievement. More than a third of the time would be spent in the water each day learning various swimming and live-saving techniques, canoeing, water games, and other made-up pursuits on the twenty two small lakes that made up our community.
I think the subtleties of living near water shaped many of my friends growing up. My friend Russell Sparkman entered a very specialized, resident scuba diving program and became an instructor for many years. Later he went on to found a web-based photojournalism company and has done some amazing work in creating awareness of nature and our environment using some spectacular parts of the world as his stage. Two of his most recent journeys involve water systems: the Palmyra Atoll and the Florida Aquifer system. http://www.oneworldjourneys.com/ Their current project is now on location in Bermuda for another online water and environment journey.
Another close friend, Christopher Jones, has spent his career chartering, racing and rigging sailing vessels. Chris spent years in Saint Lucia, U.S. Virgin Islands running a charter service as the captain of several pleasure sailboats, and he now makes his home at the Liberty Yacht Club in New York Harbor.
My father spent time on an aircraft carrier during the Korean War. His experience on a naval ship further impressed on us the importance of water. He never spent a lot of time lecturing us about it, but we all knew to take care about wasting water around the house. Later, when a few of my friends were officers on Navy ships, I learned about how precious fresh water becomes while at sea, and also about the great energy that is required to create it from seawater.
Our entire town uses private water wells for all domestic water. We live above a rich and clean aquifer, the Cohansey. The Cohansey runs deep below the protected pineland region of Southern New Jersey, and it is a source of clean fresh water. Many people assume that well water is free, but that is not quite true. A new well, or well extension, costs between $7,000. and $10,000. Operating a well pump uses electricity. Both of these costs remain hidden to most homeowners, since they do not associate the first costs or electric utility bill with their water. Some people opt for further filtration and softening systems that add additional costs. In the end, we likely pay more per gallon consumed than do our neighbors who have a municipal water supply.
The other hidden cost of water waste is the costs that are incurred to treat sewage. With the exception of landscape irrigation water, most water gets flushed into the sanitary sewer system eventually. This is the double whammy. You pay first to pump it, clean it and deliver it through pipes. Then you pay again to clean it before it is returned to rivers and oceans. Sewage treatment is also very heavily dependent on electrical energy and chemical resources. So, every drop of water saved is a double savings.
The externalities of water waste are almost never considered in my community, since we generally have abundant water supply. In the South and West, however, the externalities are becoming clearer to average citizens. Water must first be secured from the limited and tightly regulated rivers and aquifers, and then pumped and transported for treatment and delivery to customers. More and more areas in the U.S. are facing demand in excess of available supply, and also the long-term depletion of giant aquifers that will not recover for many generations.
Over the past few years, we have converted our home to be extremely water efficient. It is hard to eliminate all water waste, but I have made great strides toward that end. We started with the purchase of a front loading clothes washer that uses about 7 gallons per load, versus the 30 gallons consumed per load in our old washer. Once that project was completed, we installed double water restrictors on all of our faucets and shower heads. I had expected complaints, since this reduced flows from around 5 to 7 gallons per minute to fewer than 2 gallons per minute. After the first few days, I never heard any comments. It became the norm very quickly.
A later project involved decommissioning our brand new, underground, landscape irrigation sprinkler system. That was hard. We had installed it ourselves with quite a bit of back-breaking labor. In the end, we still miss having a perfect lawn and landscaped yard, but it was a real drain on our water system while it was in use during the hot summers. We did attempt some drip irrigation, but the final outcome involved planting more drought tolerant, native plants and grasses. The solution is far from ideal for our desired landscaping intentions, and we may eventually install some underground rainwater collection and storage system to use for limited irrigation.
The last and final water conservation project in our home involved the replacement of the old water closets with new high efficiency units. I saved this for last since it seemed the least necessary, and also the least proven of the conservation methods. While teaching a building energy efficiency course a few years ago, I had a plumbing engineer tell me that low water use toilet fixtures were not feasible in the U.S. as a result of the slope used in our sanitary sewer systems. This sounded odd at the time, but it did make some engineering sense. I recalled from my own civil engineering coursework that sanitary flow was dependent on a certain slope, and the standards and tolerances were tight in order to maintain long piping systems without the need for pumping stations. That paradigm ended for me about a year later when a colleague in our Washington, DC office informed me that he had just built a 700 room hotel using an Australian fixture called Caroma. I recalled seeing the dual-flushing fixtures on my several trips to Australia over the past few years. With that new information, I ordered and installed the fixtures immediately. My wife thought that I was taking this a little too far. The cost was over $600. per unit, and the payback was nowhere in sight. That project was completed quickly and there have been no problems whatsoever. I estimate that we save about 100 gallons of clean well water per day as a result of the switch. Over the course of a year, that is enough to fill a large residential swimming pool.
I once saw an exhibit in Philadelphia where a local artist created a sculpture to demonstrate how dependent the city was on the river water and reservoir system. The point of the exhibit was to show that every drop of water entering the public water treatment system had been through a human body or a manufacturing process three times from the mountain headwaters down to the city’s intake pipe. That was the first time that I had really considered the resiliency of water, and how we sometimes take it for granted as an unlimited natural resource. Soon afterward, I found myself wandering grocery stores and big box retailers gauging which items would become sewer and which ones would become landfill. It is fascinating to consider not only the volume, but also the short lifespan from store shelf to waste stream of most things that we buy. Water is not only what keeps us alive, clean, healthy and recreated, but it is also the vehicle that we have chosen to carrier away much of our waste.
This week, I watched the Al Gore movie titled An Inconvenient Truth. Part of my responsibility in my new role as Sustainability Executive at an international real estate and construction company is to make sure that others in our Americas business unit see this film for general awareness purposes. In Australia and Europe, the staff were taken directly to cinemas in groups during working hours, but here in the U.S., the theater run was short, likely because the issue of climate change has become so politically polarized.
The one thing that struck me the most about the film was the constant water theme in the subject of climate change. Water is capable of storing so much heat that it is the engine of our Earth. Whether in liquid, gaseous or solid form, the volume of water on our planet is what keeps all of our critical climate cycles alive and moving in the ways that we expect. The notion that this life sustaining H2O molecule can in one instance bring irrigating rain and drinking water, but in another result in hurricane formation or flood, causes me to think about the amazing physical and chemical properties that make water the essence of our planet.
Incalculable volumes of water circulate at the surface and depths of Earth’s oceans in many shifting currents, the largest of which is the global thermohaline current. Seawater is transported in this global current system carrying heat energy, debris, gases, pollutants and sea life. The round-trip transit time is estimated to be up to 1600 years. The impact that we are having is just now coming to light. Just last week, someone sent me an article about the Pacific Gyre current system, which has trapped plastic debris and floating garbage from the entire Pacific Rim. The size of the floating plastic mess is estimated to be as large as Texas, and is thought to be incapable of being cleaned-up. All of the millions of tons of plastic garbage slowly degrade in the sun and salt, only to become part of the ocean food chain.
My Personal Social Responsibility Commitment involves making a continued and focused effort to conserve clean water and the energy resources and carbon emissions associated with it. In addition, I plan to extend my commitment to education others through a personal awareness campaign, beginning right here on my blog, and extending through my role at work and my influence in the community I live in.
Paul King's Top 15 Ways to Conserve Clean Water
* don't buy bottled water (plastics pollute)
* filter drinking water at home and bring to work
* don't wash car at home
* use water saving dual flush toilets
* install water restrictors on all faucets and shower heads
* don't irrigate landscaping except when necessary
* recharge storm water on-site
* don't pollute with yard chemicals or fertilizers
* use water saving clothes washer
* run dishwasher only when full
* shower faster
* brush teeth without water running
* shave from a cup or basin
* dispose of household, automotive and office chemicals properly
* dispose of batteries properly to limit damege to undreground aquefirs
