How Can you Help Improve Water Quality?
Straight from the USGS Georgia website here are some great tips to helping improve urban stormwater runoff:
- Keep litter, pet wastes, leaves, and debris out of street gutters and storm drains–these outlets drain directly to lake, streams, rivers, and wetlands.
- Apply lawn and garden chemicals sparingly and according to directions.
- Dispose of used oil, antifreeze, paints, and other household chemicals properly, not in storm sewers or drains. If your community does not already have a program for collecting household hazardous wastes, ask your local government to establish one.
- Clean up spilled brake fluid, oil, grease, and antifreeze. Do not hose them into the street where they can eventually reach local streams and lakes.
- Control soil erosion on your property by planting ground cover and stabilizing erosion-prone areas.
- Encourage local government officials to develop construction erosion/sediment control ordinances in your community.
- Have your septic system inspected and pumped, at a minimum, every 3-5 years so that it operates properly.
- Purchase household detergents and cleaners that are low in phosphorous to reduce the amount of nutrients discharged into our lakes, streams and coastal waters.
What are you doing to help water quality? Are there other things you can think of that aren’t included in this list? Personally I own a paint company and we’re very diligent about disposing and cleaning our latex and oil paints - we don’t just clean them out over storwater runoff drains, we take care of it in our shop. It’s a small thing, but it certainly helps.
Tags: Water Quality, Water Runoff
Subscribe in a reader
December 10th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
As Joseph Jenkins says “There are two kinds of people, those who shit in their drinking water and those who don’t.”
The single best thing you can do for water quality is to quit using your flush toilet.
ECO-SAN also reduces water consumption, conserves fertilizer resources, reduces power consumption, reduces heating bills to heat cold water in toilets in winter, keeps your flush toilet spotless, reduces cleaning labor
Just do it. I know you can find a 5 gallon bucket. You were potty trained once. Its even easier the second time.
December 11th, 2008 at 7:51 am
It appears the new record low for Lake Lanier has been cancelled for 2008.
December 11th, 2008 at 8:49 am
Agree, the record low appears to have been averted at least for the time being.
Sorry, Absitively, I’ll be continuing to use my flush toilet. I can handle saving water by peeing off the back deck, but I’m not about to try to recycle my own crap.
December 11th, 2008 at 10:29 am
Eco-san, by itself, won’t solve water pollution problems. There’s the issue of disposing of composted crap. In particular, it’s necessary to ensure that the compost is employed in such a way that nutrients remain on-site. There’s a not insignificant risk that, even with the smaller amounts of manure produced in a composting toilet, the resulting nutrients can overload your soil type & plant composition and produce polluted run-off.
Moreover, the bulk of our nation’s water quality problems these days aren’t due to sanitary sewer overflows, but mostly to stormwater runoff and non-point source runoff. Reducing your sewage output may have a positive effect, but not nearly as much as increasing the percentage of pervious surface on your property and capturing and re-using the stormwater that falls on impervious surfaces.
December 11th, 2008 at 11:18 am
You raise good points Everett, but ecosan is a vital component of our best options going forward.
Most of nutrient runoff comes from factory farms with poor soils that make dead zones the size of small countries in the Gulf of Mexico.
People pour bags of highly soluble concentrated fertilizers on their lawns all of the time, which is fantastically worse than the runoff from managed compost.
There are so many benefits that outweigh the risk of dysentery, beside all municipalities treat water to kill microbes anyway.
Please reconsider all of the energy and resource waste associated with making clean drinking water, defecating in it with a valuable resource that will be lost, and then cleaning the water again using huge amounts of fossil energy.
Humans are way too clever to admit that they are products of nature.
Our species will eventually relearn this truth, but it won’t come from an intellectual awakening, just a brutish feeling of hunger and thirst.
December 11th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/12/11/drought.problem/index.html
Water, not oil, soon will become the most precious commodity for Americans, some climatologists say. Droughts are spreading. At least 36 states will face water shortages within five years, according to a report, and not for the reasons you might think.
December 12th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Would it help to not pee in the shower? Hurry… I need to decide whether to pee in the shower or the toilet!
Full and wet,
Stephanie
December 13th, 2008 at 7:32 am
Stephanie,
Here on the AWS Blaagh they pee in buckets!
BGAWWWKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!
Love,
G.O’Little
December 18th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Saving Water as a resource is possible with a non electric demand regeneration valve, twin tank water softener or whole house carbon filter. These products, which use already softened/filtered water in one tank to backwash the media in the second tank, therefore also use about half the water of a single tank to backwash and/or regenerate itself. In addition, a non electric system generally uses no electricity and about 1/2 the salt to regenerate. The backwash is virtually free of sodium and can even be used to water the plants. Electronic components, which tend to corrode in moist environments and then go bad, are completely unnecessary, so breakdowns happen about 1/3 as much. Finally, the media in the filter tends to last about three times as long, as well, therefore making the product as “green” as even no valve systems that have to have their media exchanged three times as much. The best ones are made by the developer of the technology, Kinetico Water Systems. We install and maintain them. Please call 770-652-0076 for more details.
April 15th, 2009 at 7:34 am
I read your blog for quite a long time and must tell that your posts always prove to be of a high value and quality for readers.