Green Up! Flushing Toilets with Gray Water

-

Hi Friends,

Whenever I make a suggestion on how to Green Up, I make sure I'm practicing what I'm preaching, if at all possible. So, this week, I've incorporated a new routine into my home for Blaze and me.

I put a dish pan in the kitchen sink, and a steel bowl in the bathroom vanity, to collect gray water instead of allowing it to go down the drain. I dump them in 5-gallon buckets I keep in the bathroom. Blaze and I can't lift them, so we use a gallon pitcher to dip out the gray water to flush the toilet. It has to be at least a gallon of water, and you have to pour it fast, all at once for it to force the waste down the drain.

I've never understood why toilets are hooked up to clean drinking water. Several years ago, I visited friends in Belgium, and as they were showing me around their house they showed me the bathroom, warning that the toilet might startle me. In Belgium, toilets are not hooked up to clean drinking water lines, but pull untreated water directly from their rivers, so it is not clear.

I will never forget that; I thought it was brilliant. With drinking water in short supply around the world, why waste it on human waste? But I knew it would never go over in the States, because being the good little consumers that we are, greenish or brownish water in our toilet bowls would never, ever do, right?

If I could hook my toilet tank up to a storm drain or directly to untreated water, I would do it in a heartbeat. So, the Green Geezers are doing the next best thing. I collect dishwater, laundry water (I do our laundry by hand), shaving (Blaze) water, and handwashing water, dump it in the buckets and use it to flush our toilet.

I just started that this week, and it's really no big deal. There are added bonuses:  flushing manually with a gallon of water saves a bit of water each time. Scooping a gallon of gray water and dumping it in the toilet gives us a little exercise beyond flipping a handle. Soapy water, especially the laundry water with a little oxy clean in it, keeps the toilet cleaner.  

Graywater flushing, folks! Easy way to Green Up this Saturday!

 

© Terri DelCampo 2022 – all rights reserved.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Welcome to the Green Geezers Blog!

-
  Hi friends, So you found Green Geezers. Welcome! "Be the change you want to see in the world" is a profound maxim that I took to heart for two reasons: 1) Talk is cheap and 2) because sometimes I'm looking for a way to help despite my physical disabilities and limited finances. Since that particular obstacle course hasn't been widely addressed by existing organizations or programs, I thought it was time to get creative. I'm a physically disabled writer living well below the poverty line.   Attending demonstrations? Not happening. Publicizing the work of organizations, foundations, and individual environmentalists? Hell yes! I'm all in.   Hence the Green Geezers blog.   Who we are: I am a horror writer, as is my husband, Blaze McRob. We post daily links and sample chapters of our books on social media. And extend that publicity to other writer friends of ours. While we donate to certain charities and causes as much as possible, we wanted to do mor...
Read more

Did You Know About Tar Sands?

-
 Tar sands are the most land wasteful, all around filthy, horrible for the environment, life-threatening form of energy in existence right now. Here's why I say that: What are tar sands? Tar sands, or oil sands, are a mixture of mostly sand, clay, water, and bitumen , which is what all the fuss – and filthy, water polluting, soil polluting, toxic process – is about. Bitumen is made of the same molecules as liquid oil and the same fossil fuel products are made from it. What is so bad about tar sands? The process of getting the bitumen out of the tar sand is complicated, filthy, dangerous, and expensive. Far more so than drilling for liquid oil, which is bad enough. The two ways of mining bitumen:               1)       Surface mining: The tar sands are collected, transported to a refinery, and the bitumen is separated from it 2)       "In-situ" mining: Bitumen is changed...
Read more

Green Geezers Environmental Link Dump

-
  Hi Friends, In this series of articles, I plan to periodically provide you with contact information for various individuals, groups, and organizations concerned with environmental and wildlife causes. These particular blogs will be ongoing and cumulative, so if you're interested, you can build a directory of your own. I do have more in-depth profiles of environmentalist individuals and organizations coming up soon, but these "Contact Dumps" will provide a slew of information all at once to be detailed later. I hope you find these blogs helpful in locating information you need to become involved in environmental causes. There's a lot riding on our involvement in these causes – including avoiding our own (human) extinction. Hopefully with this information all in one place you can decide on some organizations to donate to, or, like I do, familiarize yourself with their activities and take part in some way – either by showing up at functions, sharing their informa...
Read more