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ENVIRONMENT Water recycling as a way of life
Greywater Guerrillas see reusing home water as a moral issue
By GREGORY DICUM
NEW YORK TIMES OAKLAND - Laura Allen's modest gray house in the
Oakland flatlands would give a building inspector nightmares.
Jerry-built pipes protrude at odd angles from the back and sides of
the nearly century-old house, running into a cascading series of
bathtubs filled with gravel and cattails. White PVC pipe, buckets,
milk crates and hoses are strewn about the lot. Inside, there is
mysterious -- and illegal -- plumbing in every room.
Allen, 30, is one of the Greywater Guerrillas, a team focused on
promoting and installing clandestine plumbing systems that recycle
gray water -- the effluent of sinks, showers and washing machines --
to flush toilets or irrigate gardens.
To her, this house is as much an emblem of her belief system as it
is
a home. Although gray water use is legal in California, systems that
conform to the state's complicated code tend to be very expensive,
and
Allen and her fellow guerrilla, Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, are out to
convince the world that water recycling can be a simple and
affordable
option, as well as being a morally essential one.
They are part of a larger movement centered in the West --
especially
in arid regions like Arizona, New Mexico and Southern California --
that includes both groups that operate within the law and ones that
skirt it. The goal is the reuse of home gray water as a way to live
within the region's ecological means. Using their own experience and
contributions from others, they have just published a do-it-yourself
guide to gray water systems that is also a manifesto for the
movement,
"Dam Nation: Dispatches From the Water Underground."
"A lot of people that care about water try to conserve it,"
said
Allen, an elementary-school teacher who installed several gray water
systems after buying this home -- which she named the Haut House,
for
House of Appropriate Urban Technology -- four years ago with a
housemate. "But this is about changing the way you interact with
it."
Use full potential
Woelfle-Erskine, a writer and teacher who lives on a houseboat with
a
gray water system in San Pablo, 10 miles north, added, "It's
about
trying to use resources to their full potential and interact with
ecosystems in a beneficial way."
In 1994, California became the first state to establish guidelines
for
gray water use -- as most other states have since -- and it has
become
a leader in building industrial-scale gray water systems. The town
of
Arcata, for example, has an extensive system that serves the entire
population of 17,000, and even the state's oil refineries have gray
water systems.
But many gray water advocates say that California's plumbing code --
which stipulates things such as pipe sizes, burial depths and soil
tests based on rules established for septic systems -- is
prohibitively complicated for private homeowners interested in
recycling gray water, and that its requirements are prohibitively
expensive.
"The code is so overbuilt that I'm beginning to think it's better
to
just have everyone do it bootleg," said Steve Bilson, the founder
of
ReWater Systems, a company that has installed around 800
code-compliant gray water systems at a cost of about $7,000 each,
and
who worked as a consultant on California gray water legislation in
the
1990s.
As a result, many homeowners have installed unpermitted, illegal
plumbing, relying on techniques developed by covert researchers like
the Greywater Guerrillas. (It is difficult to know how many, since
these systems are not registered with any government or
organization,
but Allen said that based on her observations, there are probably
around 2,000 homes equipped with gray water systems, a few legal but
most illegal, in the Bay Area alone.)
Plants as filters
On a recent afternoon, Woelfle-Erskine stood in the back yard of the
Haut House and explained how one of the half-dozen gray water
systems
there works. A pipe running from the house deposits shower and sink
water into an elevated bathtub in the yard that is filled with
gravel
and reeds, and the roots of plants begin filtering and absorbing
contaminants. The water then flows into a second, lower tub, also
containing a reedbed, before flowing into a still-lower tub of
floating water hyacinths and small fish.
"We've had the water tested," Woelfle-Erskine said, "and
it's clean --
there's just a little phosphorous left, which the plants in the
garden
actually like." Through trial and error, Woelfle-Erskine and
Allen
have found what they say is the best way to spread wastewater into
the
gravel beds (through a screened milk crate) and which plants best
clean the water while not growing so vigorously as to block pipes
(cattails).
Although this Rube Goldberg setup, known as a constructed wetland,
cost only about $100 to build, it represents a pinnacle of gray
water
system design, which is usually far more modest, according to Art
Ludwig, an ecological systems designer in Santa Barbara. (Ludwig's
Web
site, graywater.net, offers a practical introduction for
do-it-yourselfers.) The vast majority of systems, Ludwig said,
"cost
less than a hundred bucks -- it can be just a hose." For example,
a
hose connects the sink to the toilet tank to create a gray-water
toilet in one of the Haut House bathrooms.
In spite of the ad hoc nature of many illegal systems, Ludwig said,
he
has "never heard of a single case of health problems from using
gray
water, ever." Similarly, Simon Eching, the chief of program
development at California's Department of Water Resources -- the
body
that drafted the state's gray water code -- said he knew of no
health
issues arising from gray water use in California.
But Ludwig's Web site also points out that there are a number of
potential pitfalls. He strongly discourages ponds of exposed water
like the one fed by the constructed wetland in Allen's back yard,
for
example, because they can draw mosquitoes that carry disease.
He cautions against crossing plumbing lines and contaminating clean
water; using gray water in sprinkler systems or on fruits and
vegetables that are eaten raw (it should only be used to irrigate
roots); and allowing water contaminated by toxic cleansers, soiled
diapers or contact with people who have infectious diseases to enter
the gray water system.
Hacksaw modifications
Not even the Greywater Guerrillas would now condone the first system
they built, in 1999. Back then, they were living with six housemates
in a rented house in a rundown part of Oakland.
After receiving a water bill showing that the house was using 241
gallons a day despite their conservation efforts (the figure was
actually less than half the national average of 70 gallons per
person
per day), the two headed to the basement with little more than a
hacksaw and righteous enthusiasm. "We didn't have a plan,"
Allen said,
"and we didn't even have the materials. We were dumb,
really."
Their initial efforts dumped used shower water into the basement,
forcing their housemates to forgo bathing for days. But before long,
they were building a gray water system.
Two years later, as the Guerrilla Greywater Girls, they published a
"Guide to Water," a crude sheaf of photocopies held together
with a
rubber band that combined plumbing instructions and design tips with
an argument that water systems such as dams and aqueducts were
instruments of greed. "Dam Nation" is an expanded and less
breathless
descendant of the guide, with contributions from movement members as
far away as Thailand.
Thousands of copies of the original were circulated while the
Greywater Guerrillas honed their skills up and down the West Coast,
installing systems from Seattle to Los Angeles for friends and
like-minded people (and occasionally for hire) and connecting
interested homeowners with plumbers willing to do illegal work.
(Allen even took a plumbing course at a community college; she said
that when the instructor began to sense what she was up to, he
stopped
answering her questions.) Four years ago, they worked with Babak
Tondre, a co-founder of a demonstration home in Berkeley called
EcoHouse, to install a gray water system there.
"When the Greywater Guerrillas came over, I didn't really know what
I
was getting into," said Tondre, 37. He was soon forced to remove
the
system when the nonprofit Berkeley Ecology Center, which runs the
house, objected: "The board flipped when they saw it. It was
totally
illegal."
Irrigate trees
Tondre then applied for a permit from the city. The resulting
system,
a more robustly engineered constructed wetland, funnels shower and
laundry water underground, through a deep bed of gravel contained
within a pond liner, and into a pipe at the other end of the gravel
bed. More buried pipes direct water to the roots of plum, pear and
cherry trees.
The system -- which Tondre believes is the first and so far only
residential constructed wetland in California built with a permit --
cost $4,000, using volunteer labor. It can convert a maximum of
27,000
gallons of gray water into irrigation every year, enough for six
fruit
trees, along with the marsh plants in the wetland itself.
If gray water is starting to gain public acceptance, the Greywater
Guerrillas are staying well ahead of the mainstream. At the side of
the Haut House, next to a chicken coop, twin plastic barrels hold
hundreds of pounds of waste from composting toilets inside the
house.
While chickens pecked around her bare feet, Allen plunged a giant
corkscrew into one of the barrels to mix the contents and speed the
yearlong composting process.
"Smell it," she said. "Not bad at all."
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