GreenBuild Blog
Ten Steps to Prevent the Next Urban Water Crisis - Part 2
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Cities that have successfully reduced urban water consumption have worked on all fronts at once in a coordinated manner using pricing, regulation, incentives and education-creating a conservation culture, including updating codes and deploying new technology. My previous blog post outlined steps 1 through 5. Here I describe steps 6 through 10. Taken together they represent a comprehensive approach to urban water management. You can also download the entire chapter from this website.
Ten Steps to Prevent the Next Urban Water Crisis - Part 1
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Back in January 2010, when I began writing Dry Run: Preventing the Next Urban Water Crisis, I looked at solutions to past and potential droughts and water shortages. From the research, I developed a 10-step program to prevent urban water crises. The 10-step program is a series of actions for individuals, companies, nonprofits, government and the design and construction community that will lead to permanent energy and water savings.
Graywater Systems Provide New Water Resources
Wednesday, August 11, 2010Why use potable (drinking) water for flushing toilets, when there is another supply that you’ve already paid for? In many large buildings—offices, hotels, schools, etc.—the wastewater from sinks and showers can be significant on a daily basis, perhaps even enough for toilet flushing and irrigation. In contrast to project-specific engineering systems, some packaged graywater systems are “off the shelf” products designed for use in projects of varying sizes and types. Why not use water twice instead of once, especially for demands that have lower quality requirements, such as toilet flushing?
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Water Conservation Begins at Home - Think Twice, Flush Once!
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Check out your home water use from each monthly bill. If you’re at or below 150 gallons per day per person, you’re at the US average. But, hey, readers of this blog don’t want to be just “average,” do they? Look at what your opportunities are for home water conservation and resolve to take specific steps this year, both structural and behavioral, to cut your personal water consumption.
Time to Put Rainwater Harvesting into Every Green Building Project?
Monday, August 09, 2010One of my favorite green building technologies is rainwater harvesting: the capture, treatment and use of rainwater for uses inside the building such as toilet flushing and cooling-tower makeup water (to replace water lost by evaporation and back-flushing). This is such a simple and obvious thing to do in much of the country that one wonders why it has taken so long to be considered as a viable new water supply. Why harvest rainwater? There are many good reasons, starting with the fact that rainwater is high-quality water. Shouldn’t every green building project harvest rainwater? See Chapter 9 of my new book, Dry Run: Preventing the Next Urban Water Crisis, for a fuller discussion of using water that nature gives us for free.
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Avoiding Future Urban Water Management Crises
Monday, August 09, 2010Expected global warming in this century will cause significant problems for urban water management unless more water agencies begin to incorporate conservation and water use efficiency as integral parts of their future supply planning. In my book, Dry Run: Preventing the Next Urban Water Crisis, Chapter 4, I explore methods by which cities have addressed these crises in the past decade.
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The Water/Energy Nexus: Saving Water Saves Energy & Reduces Emissions
Monday, August 02, 2010Water and energy are inextricably linked, now and forever. Water is required to supply energy and energy is required to supply of water. This dynamic is called “the water/energy nexus.”
It takes electric power to move water from one place to another, to pump it from rivers and groundwater, to treat it before use and to treat it (as wastewater) after use. Today, an estimated 1 kWh of electricity is required to treat and distribute 1,000 gallons of potable water. Multiply that by tens of billions of gallons, and you have a lot of energy use!
The New Normal in Building Construction? Redirect your Marketing Focus!
Monday, August 02, 2010With everyone hoping for a speedy recovery in building construction, there is disturbing new evidence that the New Normal is far less construction that we’ve been used to and, with that, less business for design and construction firms. The ENR report on US construction through the end of May shows disturbing trends. Top that with the expected disaster in refinancing commercial office loans coming due through 2012 and you have a distressed situation that won’t go away anytime soon. (See you again in 2015?)
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