Alternative solution: fuck lawns. Really, [30% of people's (clean, drinkable) water](http://www.epa.gov/WaterSense/pubs/outdoor.html) use is devoted to keep a useless piece of grass alive in a generally dry area, and half of that water is wasted due to inefficiencies.
Let's have this discussion, with the understanding that my experiences in wastewater treatment do not jive with many of the facts listed in this article. 1) I've never seen any municipality oppose water treatment in theory. They're big, beautiful public works projects that are always paid for via municipal bonds. They're sold as jobs projects and think of the children. Infrastructure is an easy sell at the local level because they allow job creation through borrowing without costing much if anything to the local elected officials. 2) I've never seen any locality agree to water treatment in practice. NIMBYism rules the roost in water treatment of any kind because it's (A) loud (B) smelly (C) is most effective at the water table which means treatment plants are usually on the shoreline, where property values are the highest. 3) Localization is going to be even trickier considering water districts have nothing to do with any other boundaries most of the time, and water boards make their money by buying and selling water rights and the like from each other. "Localization" pretty much means the annihilation and reset of an entire industry because the places with lots of water are seldom the places with a need for lots of water. But yes. fuck lawns. And fuck the laws against drilling wells, installing cisterns, rainwater catchment and all the rest. It's an industry in dire need of annihilation, but that doesn't mean it'll happen any faster.
Good idea. A similar note about my understanding of the issue: I am quite limited in my knowledge of water management that isn't Dutch, so part of my understanding comes from Wikipedia. Do you refer to this part? NIMBYs become a secondary problem when an entire city depends on a couple of people living near something that smells. Isn't it important enough for the city to overcome some locals? I get that there are a lot of local factors at play here, but I mean, if we can do it like this... there must be a way. Sidenote: holy balls y'all use a shitload of water. The average daily consumption in America is 340L (90 gallons) per capita. Even the rainiest state, Louisiana, still uses 300L (80 gallons) per capita. Average Dutch person uses 140L (33 gallons) per day... 3) I also had my doubts about the decentralisation part. Economies of scale are often undervalued. I do find it ridiculous that you can't install cisterns. Are rainwater barrels illegal, too? STORY TIME: Researching this topic reminded me of a fun story about Dutch water boards. Water boards were the first forms of local government here, some going all the way back to the 13th century. Farmland kept getting flooded, so farmers got money together, built dikes around their lands and managed the water. This required agreement between the farmers: who's paying to build the dikes, and to keep them up? Hence the birth of water boards way before anyone had ever heard of Willem the First. Later, with the invention of the windmills, we went on a goddamn poldering spree. Build a dike around a lake, dig a canal to the nearest river, put some mills on the edge and you have the most fertile land in western Europe. Half of the country (and I mean this literally) was poldered. This was the area north of Amsterdam before polders came into picture: And this is after. Notice the complete lack of lakes? Thus there were hundreds of water boards, all protecting their polders. The massive poldering and canal-digging led to amazing crop yields, which led to the Netherlands becoming super awesome in trade and which led to a Golden Age in the 17th century. But the more industrialized the country became (we're skipping three centuries here), the more water boards merged. There were 2500 water boards in 1950. Now, there are only 25: So, you know, all the smaller water boards merged into bigger ones, right? Well, not all of them. See that no. 25 all the way in the North? That reaaly small square next to it? That is Waterschap Blija Buitendijks, which controls an area of a staggering one square kilometer. They've existed for over a hundred years, and didn't want to merge because they wanted to take a different direction in water management, for their one square kilometer. So they still have an office in the nearby village, and can still act completely independent of all the other water boards. Their office burned down last year (something something irony) but they got it rebuilt. It's like a small village in Gaul that just won't bulge under the pressure of the Romans. I love these kinds of administrative oddities.So now we're entering a period where many of the water pipes and treatment plants built throughout the 20th century are falling apart and need to be replaced at almost the exact same time. This puts a tremendous financial strain on our water utilities, and they're really limited on how much they can raise our water rates, because no one likes their water bill going up.
So I know about water treatment because I did acoustics for ten years. And since water treatment tends to stink, people tend to hate it. And since it's nigh unto impossible to regulate stink, people tend to find new ways to oppose them. And since treatment plants are also loud and since loud is stupid easy to regulate, acoustical consultants end up doing a lot of work with wastewater treatment plants. For example, the article talks about what a hard time the Pacific Northwest is having getting new wastewater treatment plants and infrastructure. As someone who's in the project pictures for Brightwater, I kinda gotta call bullshit. After all, that's two billion dollars worth of wastewater treatment, built on top of former junkyards. Dutch civil hierarchy isn't American civil hierarchy. Europe, post-war, tends to have a lot more top-down organization (at least, from my understanding). On the other hand, American civil organization is inverted: local rules matter more than municipal rules matter more than state rules and the most stringent rules win. Also keep in mind that localities band together over stuff like this to keep the outsiders out: Part of my gig with Brightwater was taking measurements of existing sites to evaluate environmental impact. And at one locality that really didn't want a 54MGD wastewater treatment plant, I literally had a gun pulled on me by the local cops to get me to leave. As in, they wouldn't let me take my state-mandated measurements and demonstrated their reticence by pointing lethal weaponry at me. (I kept my "service above and beyond the call" plaque for a while after that gig ended) I'm not doubting your figures, but I would like to know where you sourced them. There's a discussion there, too. I mean, water means agriculture. What does the US produce? Corn, potatoes, wheat and soy. What does the Netherlands produce? Tulips. Santa Fe, NM: Rain barrels mandatory. Colorado, 3 hours north: Rain barrels illegal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainwater_tank#Water_supply_augmentation Los Angeles pulled out the rails when Goodyear and Standard Oil wanted to sell cars, and made rain barrels and catchment illegal when they dug the canal. Chinatown in a nutshell. http://www.raingutterprosinc.com/los-angeles-water-harvesting-lawsIsn't it important enough for the city to overcome some locals? I get that there are a lot of local factors at play here, but I mean, if we can do it like this... there must be a way.
Sidenote: holy balls y'all use a shitload of water. The average daily consumption in America is 340L (90 gallons) per capita. Even the rainiest state, Louisiana, still uses 300L (80 gallons) per capita. Average Dutch person uses 140L (33 gallons) per day...
I do find it ridiculous that you can't install cisterns. Are rainwater barrels illegal, too?
Before the Rainwater Capture Act of 2012, residents could only collect rainwater if they received a permit from the SWRCB. Under the California Water Code Section 1200, residents and businesses who did not receive a permit could be penalized for misusing and illegally collecting water that legally belongs to the state.
Yes, that's very true. We had a particularly strong proactive government after the war, as they took the lead in rebuilding the nation and kept their power in the decades after. If the central government really wants to, they can subdue all the smaller governments to push plans of nationwide importance, like our only high-speed line from Amsterdam to Rotterdam, Brussels and onwards. The high-speed line was deemed important enough to cut through multiple protected natural areas and local towns - a big middle finger to any NIMBYs (and we don't have gun laws like yours so that wasn't an option either). I don't see that ever happening in the States. The water numbers are from Wikipedia: this vs this. I think the main contributing factor is that the amount of agricultural land that needs water is much, much higher per person and that it skews the numbers. But it can't contribute for all the difference, right?Dutch civil hierarchy isn't American civil hierarchy. Europe, post-war, tends to have a lot more top-down organization (at least, from my understanding).
It's interesting. One of them is "water use" and the other is "urban water use" but you're right - there's a lot of water use in the US comparatively speaking. Thing is, though, I spent a week in Amsterdam back intheday and I don't recall people using, like, half as much water. So I'm wondering if it's a processing thing?
I've attempted to research this more, but it is quite difficult to pin down why the difference is so huge. This report by the EPA breaks the US water use down to these components: And a similar image I found from my water company, but in liters (4L is ~1 gal): We use 50L for showering, you guys use 100L. We barely use any water for the garden - I think that's in the 1,8L or in the 5,3L slice - while you use 100L. I would assume most of that difference is in the efficiency of the showerheads and washing machines. I've noticed that the toilets here use much more water than back home.
So fully half the difference is the lawn. That figures. The US has steadily been switching over to low-water washers; that'll help, too. And Americans definitely shower more than anybody else. It isn't the showerheads, Americans straight up shower more often for longer. So... explain your toilets. Because I remember the toilets in Amsterdam being the worst design I'd ever seen in my life. That whole "poop on a shelf and hope the water washes it away after like five flushes" thing was really weird to me.
Well, most modern toilets don't use the shelf-thing. But I think it's mainly to prevent Neptune's Kiss. One thing that I noticed about the toilets here that you guys hold so much water in the toilet itself. It's almost a damn swimming pool.