Greywater

Recycling and reuse of greywater raises issues of pollution at the percolation level based on cleaners used by the household. A UCLA report writes: "The state revised 2007 California Plumbing Code has now eased previous permit requirements for certain untreated graywater delivery and distribution systems. Permit requirements are now based on daily discharge volume, number of household sources, and number of graywater system fixtures. According to the Draft 2010 California Plumbing Code proposed by the California Department of Water Resources expanded indoor and outdoor uses of graywater (e.g., toilet flushing, spray irrigation, etc.) are also possible if the source graywater is treated to meet the California Department of Public Heath statewide uniform criteria for disinfected tertiary recycled water. This implies that, for expanded use graywater (i.e., besides in underground irrigation systems), water quality of treated graywater from small-scale, on-site residential treatment systems would be held to the same regulatory standards as large-scale, centralized municipal water treatment plants."


Permitting greywater can lead to a number of benefits
- Shows an awareness of the toxic problem which until now is unaddressed

- May not be a problem at all if the average person is not growing anything.

- Localizes the pollution problem from what people use for cleaners. This will form a layer at where the water percolates into the soil. If toxic cleaners are used then vegetables should not be grown with this water. Fruit trees which get water from a deeper root system are ok. And over time the percolation layer would need to be aerated so that anaerobic bacterial process can deteriorate the polluted layer.
However note that localizing the pollution source means that greywater (toilet is black water) does not pollute the larger water bodies like the Bay and Belmont Creek.

- Provides an incentive for growers to shift to organic and bio degradable cleaners

- expands the market organic and bio degradable cleaners so that these products can be competitive or lower cost than toxics.

- Reduces the amount of water that needs to moved around the region. Landscape uses the same amount of water as interiors for single family homes (5% each of total freshwater.) In Multifamily homes interior use is 3% of total and external use is 1%! Water movement accounts for 30% of energy use. Reducing demand improves availability and energy efficiency.

Is garbage hauling sustainable?

Caveat: this is not a Recology problem even though they are the only named entity.

There are more than twice as many garbage trucks, 179,000, in the US as there are transit buses. These refuse hauling monsters get an average of 2.8 miles per gallon. Garbage trucks move at an average speed of 10mph, an incredibly inefficient pace for a combustion engine, but one that's necessary because of the garbage trucks duties. The average garbage truck guzzles 8600 gallons of diesel fuel a year. Together US garbage trucks use 1.5 billion gallons of fuel, about 4% of all the diesel used in the US, accounting for billions of dollars sent overseas. (from $20 per gallon by Christopher Steiner page 162.)

Now these trucks will also get to go load a train, with garbage from from the Peninsula to Marin, because we don't price out what we throw away. Senator Reid can fix this with a federal tipping rate fee of $100/ton. For the role of tipping fees see Understanding Dynamics of Landfill Gate Rates by Cary Pecket, page 32f. BioCycle, August 2009. Higher tipping fees enable business from recycling including home deconstruction. The money should go to Fish and Wildlife for enforcement of the Clean Water Act since a secondary problem of any dump is toxins leached into the water table.

The primary problem is garbage service as a mechanism to expand sprawl in existing polluted corridors; and roads into openspace, including the road to nowhere, which ends up creating a community by the dump (Steiner's point in the opening quote.)

Recology trucks in the Belmont area are biodiesel. But as Stanford Professor Jacobson showed, when their fossil fuel production component is factored in, biofuels are worse in most metrics.
Since Belmont just signed up with Recology (formerly Norcal) this article could be titled: Belmont boards for burial at Burning Man.

Michael Cabanatuan, Chronicle Staff Writer

In the dusty Nevada desert, about 30 miles east of the playa where Bay Area artists and hipsters gather annually to build a temporary city at the Burning Man festival, a San Francisco garbage company wants to build a dump for Bay Area trash.

But a group of residents in the Winnemucca area, near where Recology seeks to build the 1-square-mile landfill, wants the company to leave the desert alone - and California to keep its garbage to itself.

"The notion that Nevada is some sort of wasteland because we don't have Ponderosa pines covering it is repugnant," said Jim French, retired wildlife biologist from the Nevada Department of Wildlife and a member of Nevadans Against Garbage, a group opposing the planned dump.

Article continues

A food shed on a walking perimeter

City Government has spent the last 60 years building bigger faster roads to the far reaches of the city with all the water and sewer and garbage that can be efficiently and unaffordably moved around. And now we can't walk and bicycling is too dangerous and look: we find ourselves chained to Al Queda and Saudi Arabia and unable to grow old in our own neighborhoods. So lets retire to the Sierras and leave it to another generation to figure out what to do with the bad air water and oil soaked soil.

Council members says that the roads are now too dangerous to bike and can we build separate bike paths- ceding the public space to Bush and Al Queda. Another network is needed to get around slowly without pollution and in peace.

But how to grade separate this new facility? And connect community scattered to the outer reaches of our jurisdiction? It will be expensive, so do we have to live with what we got? One way is to move services into the neighborhoods on an 1/8 mile walking radius and then connect these great neighborhoods via bicycles boulevards. Ideally Transfer of Development Rights would restore the food shed on a walking perimeter of a complete neighborhood. I suggest we think big how we want to use the FARTP and use ABAG's and MTC's priority development and conservation areas monies to get us started repairing our world in the next 25 years.