Green Up! Flushing Toilets with Gray Water

- February 26, 2022

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!