Water

By Thomas Jones

“Water, water, everywhere, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.”

Water

So wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge over 150 years ago of the Ancient Mariner’s hopeless drift across the seas, and now in the 21st century this parable of woe is coming back to haunt us. There is an abundance of water in this world but only 3% of that is fresh, with only 1% of that available to us for drinking since most of it is tied up underground, in glaciers or in the polar ice caps. And if you think about how much of the remaining water is contaminated, combined with how the world’s population is expanding, it doesn’t leave much to go around, so it’s a no-brainer we start saving for an inevitable non-rainy day.

How do we start? Well, like all change, we start by employing some common sense about what we as individuals can do in our immediate environment. There are three ways to make water go further, recycling, becoming self sufficient or reducing our usage.

Recycling grey water from the shower, laundry and wash basins is a great way to water the gardens and wash the car. These sources of water have a lower faecal count and less oils and fats than other household sources, such as the toilet and kitchen, so they require less in the way of filtration and are therefore easier and cheaper to reuse.

And it’s not just grey water. You can even install a treatment system for your septic tank, which will remove any contaminants and provide you with drinking-quality water for your home. These systems are used in major cities like London and Singapore to supply or supplement water supply to their populations. Nature recycles water all the time, that’s the beauty of the water cycle!

Self-sufficiency is achieved by capturing rainwater and storing it for future use. Many architects and owners are incorporating designs into villas that make it possible, but many existing homes can easily be modified by installing a guttering system and a holding tank, thus reducing the load on the groundwater. This is very doable, it’s easy and it’s affordable.

Reducing our water load is maybe more difficult to achieve as it is not a passive action and requires self discipline en masse. Change to a low-flow shower head, place a brick in your toilet cistern, turn the tap off when you clean your teeth, reduce the time you spend in the shower, replace washers on leaking taps and don’t buy those ridiculously over-sized tropical villa bathtubs that take so long to fill that they are
cold by the time you get in.

Whatever methods are employed we need to improve on our current philosophies, find new ways to make that water go further and make sure we have enough clean, toxin- and disease-free water to go around. For no matter how rich you are, when all the water runs out, it will be easier to pass through the eye of a needle than to buy a case of Evian.