A story at 11Alive tells us that Gwinnett County will allow landscapers, construction companies and others to take reclaimed wastewater from the F. Wayne Hill Water Resources Center and use it for irrigation, street washing, sewer cleaning, etc.
Once again, it seems that some people don’t understand how things work. From the article:
Every day, 18 million gallons of waste water is treated at Gwinnett’s F. Wayne Hill Water Resources Center until it is clean enough to place in the Chattahoochee River. Until now, the river is exactly where the water has gone, where it has floated gently away from Bradley [local landscaper] and other businesses that need it for watering lawns or street washing.
They make it sound like putting water back into the river is a bad thing, while the opposite is actually true. The more you put into the river, the less they need to release from Lake Lanier to keep the flow rate high enough in Florida. If you put less back into the river, more water will need to be released from Lanier to compensate.
That being said, I don’t think this will make a huge difference. The water can only be taken away by certified tank truck drivers, not via pipes, which will greatly reduce how much is lost. However, it sounds like landscapers are excited to waste their share of water. Bradley Griffin of Russell Landscape Group said:
“The sky’s the limit with just how much our company can use. Multiply that by all of the other landscape companies and construction companies, this is a big deal.”
Yea! Waste as much as you want!
However, water is already pumped from there to two golf courses, a county park, a city park and the Mall of Georgia. According to the AJC, those facilities used 209 million gallons of water last year. That makes a difference.
I’m guessing that those facilities are able to freely use the water for irrigation, since the water was just going to be “wasted” by going down the river. Anyone know what kind of restrictions those businesses are under for using that water?