Water

I just finished the book Unquenchable: America's Water Crisis and What To Do About It by Robert Glennon. I think the author does a better job at presenting the problem of how to allocate our water resources than its various solutions but it was the problem more than the solutions that I was interested in (as research for Now & Then: The Water Princess, coming soon). Nevertheless, it does provide much food for thought such as harvesting runoff, planting less water needy landscaping, capturing and reusing household waste water, cutting down shower times, installing instant hot water heaters, and - in the extreme - composting human waste. That’s just household use. Consider use at the municipal level and how we allocate water to parks, highway medians, the environment, households, developments, manufacturing, and agriculture.

Take, for example, coffee -  a topic near and dear to my heart. It takes a good deal more than a cup of water for me to make a cup of coffee. I know this because I put the drain plug in my kitchen sink once before I prepared my morning coffee. By the time I was finished, including clean up,  I must have had at least a gallon of water in the sink which I scooped in a pitcher and used to water a flowerbed outside.

The thing is, I do this everyday and on weekends I treat myself to a second cup. Except for the experiment mentioned above, this extra water goes down the drain which must get captured and cleaned by my local water district which then redistributes it back to me just so  that I can flush it down the toilet. (The issue of flushing potable water down the toilet is a topic in itself that warrants its own discussion.) It would be better if I could capture all the water from my “cup” of coffee and use that to flush my toilet instead, not that I necessarily want to link coffee with flushing my toilet even though that seems to be the case anyway.

If my coffee maker had indeed died the other day, I would be faced with having to replace it and I would have to consider more water efficient methods of obtaining my morning brew. Instant coffee would use only the cup of water needed to make the liquid gold plus the amount required to clean the cup but that would still be a good deal less if you don’t count the amount of water required to manufacture the crystallized substance in the first place and I have no idea how much that is. A french press would probably takes less water to clean the carafe than many pieces of an over priced extraction device (aka espresso maker).

Of course, I could give up coffee. Or, hot showers. Or, flushing my toilet. But I’m not going to and neither are you, are you? Or, are you? Are we?

It’s worth thinking about.