Greywater -- a second step towards reviving sustainability instincts in Salem

Cover via Amazon - but for best sustainability results, try the library, the author, or your locally owned bookseller

Sooner or later Salem will (again) permit households to keep some laying hens. The next step towards allowing, if not encouraging, sustainable behavior might be revising the city codes to permit collection and use of "greywater" (used kitchen sink, dishwasher, and clothes washer water).

Like electricity, greywater is not without hazards. And, like electricity, it's perfectly safe if used intelligently and "in the open." The danger comes when the law forbids (and, therefore, drives underground) valuable, useful activities by presuming that we are all children who must be controlled and protected by eliminating any activity with any risk. (Considering how the hen debate has gone, thank goodness the Salem City Council isn't considering whether to permit electricity here for the first time!)

We need to retrain our elected officials to remind them that we are at least as intelligent as the pioneers and the natives in this place, who had an ethic of not wasting much and of getting as many uses out of each thing as possible. While the brief period of unprecedented affluence that is now drawing to a close has dulled our instincts for acting sustainably/economically around the home, those instincts are still there, waiting to be developed and employed again.

(Of course, budget problems have a way of cutting through red tape. The more greywater that Salem households use on their flower gardens, shrubs and trees, the less has to be chlorinated and delivered to the house and the less that has to be pumped and put through wastewater treatment facilities.)

Greywater reference
Create an Oasis with Greywater

Greywater is the term for all household wastewater except for the toilet and kitchen sink. This is the only comprehensive book I know of on the subject, and in this fifth and expanded edition, Art Ludwig explains how to choose, build, and use a variety of simple greywater systems. There are clear drawings for sending washing machine water into the garden (with or without a drum), for putting diversion vales on bathtubs or showers, for creating "mulch basins," for ultra-simple setups like "Garden Hose Through the Bathroom," and "Dishpan Dump (Bucketing)" -- the latter of which I've been practicing lately to the great benefit of both septic system and compost piles.


There's a large section on branched drains -- splitting the flow and dispersing greywater to a number of mulch basins in the garden -- using gravity flow, no pumps or electricity. Mistakes made in greywater systems over the years are documented here, along with suggested improvements, and there's a two-page System Selection Chart with a comparison of 18 different systems.

-- Lloyd Kahn

[Complete plans for one of the book's most broadly appealing projects -- a Laundry to Landscape Grey Water System -- are available, free, on the Oasis Design site. -- ES]

The New Create an Oasis with Greywater
Art Ludwig
2006, 144 pages
$21

Published by and available from Oasis Design
http://www.oasisdesign.net/greywater/createanoasis/