Why conserve water? It’s not just the famous snows of Kilimanjaro that have been decreasing in recent decades. Glaciers that are the ultimate sources of rivers- a main supply of freshwater- have been receding and rivers that were once constant throughout the year have started to occasionally dry up at points. This has even happened to the Amazon. In India, tens of millions of people depend for their water on the Ganges river, one of the world’s largest rivers that has seen its source glaciers in India’s mountains receding over the past few decades. It took nature thousands of years to form these glaciers and they are decreasing due to global warming much more quickly than they formed.
Besides glaciers, another supply of freshwater is groundwater. But due to burgeoning population and mainly the raising of livestock for meat, groundwater supplies, too, are drying up.
But that’s not all. According to Wired:
In California, a fifth of the electrical output was consumed by processing and pumping water. Cutting water usage would reduce our carbon footprint.
Surely, the statistic for California can’t be too different from that of many other places around the world. This is an important point we should keep in mind whenever we read, talk, or write about energy efficiency and the goal of carbon neutrality.
We need to stop seeing water conservation as a minor or uninteresting point of environmentalism and instead as a big problem interconnected with other big environmental problems. The solutions to this problem are well worth keeping in mind and talking about.
Waterless urinals work with a lighter-than-water liquid inside a cartridge. The sealant liquid works like a seal that automatically closes after urination because the sealant liquid is lighter than the urine. The sealant floats above the urine. A graphic on Wired online says that regular urinals use less water per flush than either traditional or low-flow toilets, but that waterless urinals use no water or almost no water. According to waterless.com a waterless urinal saves an average of 20,000 to 45,000 gallons of water a year.
A United States Army base in a water-stressed region of the USA replaced all of its urinals with waterless urinals, and the army corps of engineers decided that all army urinals installed after 2010 should be waterless.
The Wired article also says that a study showed that waterless urinals are cleaner or healthier than ones that use water. The use of water promotes germ growth and the flush spreads the germs into the air. There’s a concern about sewer gases escaping when people replace the barrier cartridge. But it seems to me you could just do a simple redesign of the waterless urinal to solve the problem: put a mechanical valve in the waterless urinal that you use to close the drainpipe when you change the cartridge.
Pics of the waterless urinals show them as pretty compact, too. Maybe the place for legislation to start with have them required for new public buildings, businesses, and homes, and later start a program to have already-built structures fitted with them, maybe on the government’s expense.
They could divide everybody up into different months for when they would be installed, and I guess they would often have to replace your sink or toilet and give you a narrower one.
I must have read about urinals in homes in a home improvement book. You make the urinal not be unsightly by having a cabinet built around it. So when you look in the bathroom, it just looks like something cute and you don’t even know it’s a urinal until you open it.
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