World Water Day: Wastewater

Want to understand and perhaps reduce your personal wastewater footprint? Let’s dive in for a closer look at wastewater, including wading through the obvious contributions like general household wastewater, and spashing a bit deeping to take a look at some of the other footprint contributors, like food and consumer goods. Ready? Let’s do it.

World Water Day's Focus on Wastewater

It’s easy to be complacent about water living in an area with an abundance (over abundance in our recent weather) of clean safe water. Many people around the world aren’t nearly so lucky. We’re taking a detour from the garden for World Water Day. When this post was first created, wastewater was the annual theme. That’s long past, but we kept the post when we moved to our new website. Being conscious of what we use and what we waste never really expires.

Drops in the Bucket

Wastewater comes from all sorts of sources, including residential, commercial, industrial, and agricultural development. And, according to the stats back when this post was first shared, a whopping 80% of the world’s wastewater was entering the environment without any sort of treatment. Yikes! How can individuals like you and I have any impact on such a big problem? Every little bit helps. Individual efforts may feel like just a drop in the bucket, but it all adds up!

Understanding Your Wastewater Footprint

Understand the Water You Use and Dispose of at Home

Household water may include both potable (drinking/cooking/washing) and non-potable (gardening, cleaning) water sources. How these waters are sourced, used, reused, and offloaded can alter your footprint. Improvements might even save you some money, too.

Most modern residential homes create greywater from general uses like washing, blackwater from human/animal waste (either separated or mixed with the grewater), and redirect naturally occurring stormwater from rainfall. What’s your set-up? Where do these go from your home? Where/how are they processed from there? How reliable and effective are those systems?

Understand the Water Footprint of Your Food

Understand where your food comes from, how it’s grown or created, processed, and the different impacts and implications. Even the fresh food that we grow at home has a footprint.

Agriculture is a big consumer of water, but there are a lot of hungry mouths on the planet. New Zealand has a lot of local agriculture, far more than is needed for our domestic population, partly thanks to being blessed with a temperate climate, good rainfalls, and good soil. These are naturally great conditions for growing food and/or for raising livestock.

Fortunately, most of our farming is not the forced, irrigated, confined, and/or horror livestock factory farming that is plaguing many places; however, it does alter the environment and risk run-off of fertilisers, effluents, etc. People like to slag “dirty dairying” but the environment is a heavy focus area for local farmers, the corporations they supply, and the government. All farming, be it plant or animal, comes with risks and responsibilities.

Understand the Water Footprint of Your Consumer Goods

Understand the water and waste implications of your consumer goods (and more). Although agriculture, food, and beverage production is something many people think about when it comes to water, there are many major users – some of which might surprise you!

Sourcing/processing materials, product manufacturing, and other supply chain activities can use an enormous amount of water and, of course, with enormous use often comes enormous wastewater. Sometimes with pollution as well. Water Footprint Network has a number of very interesting articles and resources on consumption, pollution, and waste.

Reducing Your Home Wastewater Footprint

Look for Easy Efficiencies to Use Less Water

It’s a bit of a no-brainer, but if you use less fresh/clean water, then you’ll create less waste water. Here are NZ’s Smarter Homes resources on water and waste, and we’ve created a Water Wise board on Pinterest to collect inspiration.

What’s your favourite water saving tip? From turning off the tap when not in use, chilling water in the fridge instead of running the tap, emptying partial glasses or pet bowls onto plants, there are a lot of very tiny changes that are easy to make and quickly add up to less water use and/or create less water waste. And save money too, if you’re paying for metered services.

Improve Water Usage Efficiency of Appliances and Fixtures

You can modify/replace appliances and fixtures to use less water. This isn’t as quick, simple, or inexpensive as the easy efficiencies above, but slowly over time if/as things need replacement or other opportunity allows, you can look at modifying or switching to lower-flow items.

Avoid Dumping to Stormwater

Say no to drain dumping. Storm drains often enter the ecosystem as-is. Never pour household waste liquids down the storm drains. It’s illegal in many places, but it still happens. Most local/regional councils have websites with suggested clean-up and disposal options, and some offer drop-off points. Unfortunately, these often aren’t conveniently available, which leads to people skirting the rules. Lobby your local council to offer easier access and better alternatives.

Reduce the Contaminants in Your Outgoing Wastewater

People tend to be a little more cautious with what they pour and flush in their homes. Perhaps that’s more for the sake of their plumbing than for the environment… But people still dispose of unwanted pharmaceuticals, paints, pesticides, herbicides, cleaners, and other chemicals down their drains and toilets and into their domestic waste water.

In addition to that kind of direct dumping, lots of everyday soaps, cleaners, detergents, etc and other not-so-nice stuff flows out with our domestic wastewater. A lot more than you might think. By choosing products carefully and moderating the amount used, you can make a difference.

Reuse Greywater for Non-Potable Purposes

Greywater from your showers and sinks can be reused for non-potable purposes, like flushing toilets or watering the garden. This can range from a simple collection bucket in the shower to a fully plumbed system. If you are reusing greywater, take extra care with the types of soaps, detergents, and cleaners as not all are greywater-friendly – especially for use in the garden.

Collect and Use Rainwater

Gathering rainwater for use instead of direct-to-drain is another option to save wastewater and/or give it a second purpose before it becomes wastewater. It can save you money too, if you’re on a metered system. Instead of funnelling your property’s rainwater into the storm drain system, you can gather rainwater for use. The simplest collection is for garden use, but rainwater can also be collected for non-potable household use or purified for general use.

Support (and Shop) Sustainable Initiatives

Support Sustainable Business Practices

Recognise the efforts going into enhancing efficiency and sustainability within supply, manufacture, retail, services, etc. If this is important to you, then show your support for these businesses and their efforts to help them sustain and progress their initiatives further. Understand that these safeguards, improvements, and innovations often come at a cost to the supplier. Perhaps that means a cost to you as the consumer, too.

Support Local Sustainability Programs

Here in New Zealand there seems to be a lot of focus on farming whenever this topic arises. That does merit attention and effort, but many of our farmers are actually already working hard and investing a lot of their own time and money into better water and waste management.

On the flip side, the rest of us carry a hefty footprint, too. I have to say that I actually notice a heck of a lot of “dirty humaning”, included frequent river/steam/ocean “accidental sewage discharge” warnings from local councils. Not cool! Our homes, workplaces, factories, shops, restaurants, etc. are all feeding waste into these systems. And if those systems are shoddy or worn out, then we’re all feeding the wastewater problem. Don’t turn a blind eye or hide under a urban greenwash umbrella when it comes to your contributions to the wastewater issues.

Support Global Sustainability Programs

You can also choose to support global efforts to enhance wastewater reduction and treatment. From sustainable supply chains for the products you buy, to supporting programs which help to foster environmental initiatives around the world, to supporting government engagement in regulations and targeted reductions, there are lots of ways to save your small drops.