Greywater Guerrillas

The Dirty Water Underground: Greywater Guerrillas

Excerpt:

LAURA ALLEN’S modest gray house in the Oakland flatlands would give a building inspector nightmares. Jerry-built pipes protrude at odd angles from the back and sides of the nearly century-old house, running into a cascading series of bathtubs filled with gravel and cattails. White PVC pipe, buckets, milk crates and hoses are strewn about the lot. Inside, there is mysterious — and illegal — plumbing in every room.

Ms. Allen, 30, is one of the Greywater Guerrillas, a team focused on promoting and installing clandestine plumbing systems that recycle gray water — the effluent of sinks, showers and washing machines — to flush toilets or irrigate gardens.


Comment: Be sure to check out the pictures associated with the NYTimes article. The following comments are from Gray Water Central

Question: What is graywater?
Answer: Any water that has been used in the home, except water from toilets, is called graywater . Dish, shower, sink, and laundry water comprise 50-80% of residential "waste" water. This may be reused for other purposes, especially landscape irrigation.

Question: Why use graywater ?
Answer: It's a waste to irrigate with great quantities of drinking water when plants thrive on used water containing small bits of compost. Unlike a lot of ecological stopgap measures, graywater reuse is a part of the fundamental solution to many ecological problems and will probably remain essentially unchanged in the distant future. The benefits of graywater recycling include:

1. Lower fresh water use
   
2. Less strain on failing septic tank or treatment plant
   
3. Graywater treatment in topsoil is highly effective
   
4. Ability to build in areas unsuitable for conventional treatment
   
5. Less energy and chemical use
   
6. Groundwater recharge
   
7. Plant growth
   
8. Reclamation of otherwise wasted nutrients