Halloween is fast approaching and soon millions of candy wrappers will strangely find their way into the sewers. How do the two interact? Easy!
As parents and dentists have encouraged for countless years in the past – eating Halloween candy is bad for your teeth/health. But kids will be kids and will eat their hard earned candy treats. Where is the best place to hide the evidence? By way of the toilet, of course!
The 2015 Water Year just ended and more than 5,700 registered users hauled just shy of 45 million gallons of recycled water for irrigation at home. For a state locked in a historic 4 year drought this is very telling information.
As we look ahead, we should take every haulers motivation to keep their yards alive and put forward plans to bring recycled water to the masses in an economically efficient way. If anything, we need a New “Water” Year Resolution. Continue reading
Here is what you missed this month on RecycledH2O.
Between lots of activity on Twitter and a national celebration to bring awareness to Pollution Prevention Week, plus summer ending and with it outdoor summer fun – RecycledH2O published some stellar articles.
Below is a list with a quick synopsis of every article written since the August 2015 – Content Roll Up.
You see it all over the place these days. “DON’T FLUSH YOUR DRUGS!”
Why not? What is so bad about putting expired medication in the toilet and pulling the handle? Besides wasting water while we’re in a drought, the issues could occur when those pills dissolve in the water stream. Most conventional wastewater treatment plants can’t filter the chemicals in those medications out.
You go to the store and pick out the most delicious looking tomato. The clerk scans its’ barcode and you take it home. When you’re ready to eat it, you wash it in the sink and that little barcode comes flying off and right down the drain it goes. You think nothing of it. “Out of sight, out of mind.”
Except that sticker/label went somewhere. In most cases, it will travel through miles of underground pipe, making its way to a wastewater treatment plant where it will go from tank to tank through various pipes and eventually the water it’s floating in will be clean enough to be dumped into a river or bay and eventually, it will end up in the ocean.
#PollutionPrevention week
Pollution Prevention Week runs from September 21-25.
During the course of the week this blog will feature articles and news releases about things you can do as homeowners to prevent pollution of our waterways.
Take the graphic on the left for instance. Those plastic labels that “accidentally” get washed down the drain, most are not filtered out of the wastewater stream and can end up in the SF Bay, LA Harbor or Pacific Ocean.
Follow #P2Week on Twitter!
Stay tuned for more updates.
Watering the grass @ Levi’s Stadium
On Monday, the San Francisco 49ers played the Minnesota Vikings for the NFL’s first Monday Night Football game of the 2015 season. You may have noticed the awesome bright green grass at Levi’s Stadium, ironic since California is in the midst of an epic 4 year drought. How do they keep that grass so green while we’re being told to let ours die? The secret may be in the water.
Facebook.com/RecycledH2O
There are plenty of articles lately about new fill stations opening in Southern California (more importantly – the 4S Ranch area of San Diego County), and even more people on Twitter arguing that recycled water is not the answer (sigh). This brings up a perfect opportunity to share what recycled water haulers have learned about the containers they use.
Lets compare a 275 Gallon Tote to a Water Bladder to a 55 gallon barrel
Yard sign in Healdsburg
With 4 of 16 recycled water fill stations reporting their stats to this blog, I’d call that pretty good considering this is a completely new field. City of Brentwood, City of Healdsburg, Central Contra Costa Sanitary District and Ironhouse Sanitary District all make their fill station stats public.
This go around, while also asking for stats, I asked if anything has been learned. One fill station mentioned their purchase of the PortALogic system to reduce the man hours required in staffing the fill station. Something other fill stations may want to invest in when it comes to analyzing the increased costs of staffing a free recycled water fill station.
Combined volume giveaway: 8.7 million+ gallons
Two months ago I wrote an article about Chris Rossiter, a Danville resident who needed 2,000 + gallons of water per day (GPD) to keep his backyard paradise thriving. Enter the drought of 2015 and Chris was faced with a requirement to reduce his usage by 20% or face an Excessive Use Penalty from his water company. His usage was nearly twice that and he knew he had to do something about it.
Chris borrowed a trailer, setup a tank hauling system and put in temporary irrigation all over his yard. Chris streamlined everything to make watering with recycled water from two area fill stations, a breeze.
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