Gray Water

Why use Gray Water?
It's a waste to irrigate with great quantities of drinking water when plants thrive on used water containing small bits of compost. Unlike a lot of ecological stopgap measures, Gray Water reuse is a part of the fundamental solution to many ecological problems and will probably remain essentially unchanged in the distant future. The benefits of Gray Water recycling include:

  • * Lower fresh water use
  • * Less strain on failing septic tank or treatment plant
  • * Better treatment (topsoil is many times more effective than subsoil or treatment plant)
  • * Less energy and chemical use
  • * Groundwater recharge
  • * Plant growth
  • * Reclamation of otherwise wasted nutrients
  • * Increased awareness of and sensitivity to natural cycles

Why Does Gray Water Matter?
Viewed narrowly, Gray Water systems don’t look that important. A low flow showerhead can save water with less effort. A septic system can treat Gray Water almost as well. But when you look at the whole picture-how everything connects-the keystone importance of Gray Water is revealed.

Ecological systems design is about context, and integration between systems. The entirety of integrated, ecological design can be reduced to one sentence: do what's appropriate for the context.

Ecological systems-rainwater harvesting, runoff management, passive solar, composting toilets, edible landscaping-all of these are more context sensitive than their counterparts in conventional practice; that's most of what makes them more ecological.

Gray Water systems are more context sensitive than any other manmade ecological system, and more connected to more other systems.

Get the Gray Water just right, and you’ve got the whole package right—and that matters. Many people and organizations instinctively recognize that Gray Water is the ideal test case for the transition to a new way of regulating and building that is appropriate to a post-peak resource, mature civilization.

The US Green Building Council, the City of Santa Barbara, CA, Oregon ReCode, and SLO Green Build are among those organizations which independently chose Gray Water standards as the technology with which to launch their programs of regulatory reform.

Is Gray Water reuse safe?
Yes, there are eight million Gray Water systems in the US with 22 million users. In 60 years, there has been one billion system user-years of exposure, yet there has not been one documented case of Gray Water transmitted illness.

(In contrast, 400 Americans get hit by lightning each year.)