Sustainability's Gold Mine: Grey-Water Recycling

By Jay Berstein

With sustainability becoming today’s mantra, it is a contradiction that society has yet to embrace all the technologies that allow us to, you know, live a genuinely sustainable lifestyle.

Hybrid cars have caught on, and the governmental incentives tacked onto them have favorably catered to the profit-margin for companies that manufacture and sell them. Who doesn’t want to drive alone in the carpool lane on LA’s 405 freeway at 4:30 pm? Often times, all it takes to spark an inadvertent sustainability revolution is to provide the final user with incentives.

But low and behold, many other pieces of technology, whose necessity cannot be exaggerated enough, have yet to become a household commodity.

Take grey-water recycling systems, for instance. Grey-water recycling has been around for over a decade. Implementing a grey-water recycling system not only reuses perfectly good water for its fitting purpose, but it also simply makes sense.

Instead of allowing reusable water (and your money) to literally go down the drain, use it for toilet flushing and irrigation purposes. It effectively reduces a household water usage by 30 percent, which surpasses California’s government declared water cutbacks due to drought.

The biggest issue is this: There are no real incentives for implementing these systems (other than maybe looking like you care), and the red-tape that comes with installing a system is reminiscent of any other diplomatic inconvenience. There are no sort of tax breaks for having a system for your home, as where you can implement a certain shower-head or sprinkler-head and get write-offs. The issue then becomes: What saves substantially MORE water and is not being given governmental incentive to become a household commodity?

Other complications for installing grey-water systems come from improper piping. Without the necessary connections (and a crawl space), implementing a grey-water recycling system isn’t the seamless process that it is more than capable of being. With the potential of future mandates deeming grey-water recycling systems a necessity and a construction boom, the process of utilizing new structures to their fullest potential is extremely easy, and we won’t have to rip the floors up or do any drastic reconstruction of a home’s plumbing to effectively install a system. It is through governmental mandates that grey-water recycling systems can become part the American household vernacular.

What’s most enticing is that the golden state is the perfect place to implement and showcase this sort of technology and its startling efficiency. California is the ideal guinea pig. For one, the drought is not exactly news. Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency for California’s water supplies back in April 2015, demanding a statewide cutback in water usage. The lack of rainfall since has only made the necessity for grey-water technology more prevalent. That being the case, why not demand that new buildings in California be equipped with grey-water recycling systems, or at least be piped so the installation of a system is seamless?

As of early August 2015, it became known that commercial construction activity in California has risen to its highest level since 2001. Thanks in part to available financing, low cap rates and other incentivizing factors, the industry boom for California construction has been as unprecedented as the mandatory water cutbacks.

Grey-water recycling systems are not only a necessary part of today’s infrastructure, but the inevitability of a beneficial profit margin is evident. The technology is more than suitable for reusing and saving one of our most valuable finite resources. With all the above taken into account, it’s time we look into grey-water recycling technologies and how they are a genuine game changing solution that satisfies all three Ps: people, profit and planet.

To find out more about grey-water recycling systems, and the successful implementations of such systems, take a look at Water Recycling Systems, LLC.

Here is a showcasing of one of our bigger system installations in Santa Monica, California. Yes, we're proud.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LEdn8nJJk8

Jay Berstein directs social media marketing for Water Recycling Systems, LLC.