By fnord12 | July 30, 2014, 7:53 PM | Boooooks & Comics & D&D & Godzilla & Liberal Outrage & Movies & Science & Star Wars & TeeVee & Video Games | Comments (1)| Link

Grey water

Min's post below, especially the part about the 50 liter flush, reminds me that at this point in my life i had really hoped to be living in an Earthship somewhere out in the wild. For a variety of reasons (including, but not limited to, inertia and risk aversion), that never happened. But one of the interesting things about an Earthship is the grey water system design, wherein the water from your sinks and shower don't go straight out to the sewer (and/or septic tank), but instead feed your toilet. Because your toilet water really doesn't need to be pristine. So let's take the moderately dirty ("grey") water from washing your hands and showering and use it to make that 50 liter flush a little less wasteful. It's something that i could see being useful even in a "regular" house. The only challenge is figuring out where to store the excess grey water. In an Earthship it's filtered through an in-house plant feeder first. But in a regular house it could go into a tank next to your hot water heater, i suppose.

I imagine this would never actually happen since local planning boards would probably think that reusing the sink water is squiky. But it's something to think about as the water situation situation continues to get worse. Although if Peter Brabeck continues to go the full Eco Protectorate (unlike Min, Solarbabies instead of Tank Girl is my dystopian water scarcity sci fi film of choice), we may first want to consider the Earthship's rain water collection system.