Two City bureaus handling water is a waste

I am not a water expert other than to say that snow runoff in the high Rocky Mountains is probably the best water in the world — given what it takes to get a drink of it. (Hint: a lot of hiking.) But I do know that a drop of water does not change its nature, whatever humans do to it. From earth to sky to pipes and faucets and back out into the sewer, H2O is H2O. We make a big mistake, I think, treating municipal water as a series of separate systems. We need to remember what water is and utilize it more efficiently, effectively and sustainably within a single system.

As I said, I’m not a water expert. I do understand that water picks up contaminants, but those are not part of water itself; they become fellow travelers as water moves through our infrastructure. The water we flush is still water; it just happens to be carrying away some other things (the water in our urine is, in the same way, still just water). If it was easy to separate water from the stuff we mix it with, urban management would be much simpler, but that’s the beauty of and problem with water: the same ease with which it can be used to flush our toilets and wash our dishes makes it terribly difficult to separate the water from the “waste” products.

Treating water as separate “before and after” products doesn’t help, however.

Graywater is a great case-in-point. Not all “wastewater” is necessarily harmful. The water used to wash clothes and dishes, for example, would not be good to drink but, if you used it on your rhodies and marigolds, they’d probably be just fine. This is what graywater is: the water we use for household tasks like dishes and clothes, and rainwater coming off the roof, that could be used for other productive purposes instead of just being dumped into the sewer system. Of course it’s not that simple — the wrong kinds of soaps, for example, can accumulate in the soil and poison it — but the basic principle is sound: We add this potentially useful water source to that which we properly flush down the toilet as if they require the same treatment. They do not, and it’s an expensive, wasteful misuse of a precious resource.

Systems exist to gather and treat graywater so it can be reused. In the same way that recycling, solar energy and insulation reduce costs by utilizing resources we had previously thrown away or ignored, graywater has the potential to reduce “original source” water and help keep costs down. Seeing how much water and sewer rates are rising in the Portland area, where we have an easy abundance of water, imagine the potential for areas that lack our access to this vital resource. Like, say, most of the American Southwest and Midwest.

The City of Portland, in coordination with Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas Counties, Metro and the State of Oregon (and perhaps Clark County and Washington State), should look at forming a single water resource-and-use bureau. Bring the wastewater and stormwater functions of the Bureau of Environmental Services into the Water Bureau, not to expand the latter’s institutional (and bureaucratic) power but to treat water as water — not a bunch of different, conceptually separate things. Focus on water itself, not what we want to use it for. The goal is to have as much water as available as possible for human use while minimizing our impact on the natural world. If we can reduce our need for “waste”water systems by using water smarter, then we benefit both ratepayers and the planet.

A single bureau would help this process. But a more holistic (sorry) view of water is more important. H2O is, after all, just H2O.

Until we piss in it. Then it’s a toilet bowl. Or the Willamette River.