This year, Congress can simultaneously promote cleaner water and save the United States billions of dollars. Impossible? Not if lawmakers add a "best-buys-first" approach to water treatment when they reauthorize the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act.
The path toward cost-effective water supply and pollution control is straightforward, but legislative efforts to date are missing it. The more efficiently we use water, the less treatment capacity we have to buy. Water utilities should exhaust cheaper water-efficiency options before spending taxpayers' money on expensive expansions of drinking water and wastewater treatment systems.Do not confuse water efficiency with rationing, Navy-style showers or other unpleasantries of California droughts. Water efficiency means using new devices and techniques that save water while providing the high-quality services people want - invigorating showers, sparkling dishes, pleasing landscapes - without significant lifestyle changes. And it's not just for arid regions.
Over the next several years, New York City will spend $240 million on rebates to customers who replace old 5- to 7-gallons-per-flush toilets with 1.6-gallons-per-flush models. Why? Cutting municipal water flows will eliminate the need for $800 million in wastewater plant expansions and a new $1 billion pumping and filtration station for drinking water. Increasing water efficiency is obviously a best buy for New York.
Besides generating treatment capacity savings, greater efficiency often improves water quality. More water is left where it started, improving river flows or reducing inflow of seawater or other pollutants to overdrawn aquifers. Capacity freed up at existing sewage plants reduces the occurrence and duration of combined sewer overflows due to storm-water surges. Home septic systems perform better. And money that would have gone to building new plants can be spent upgrading treatment at existing plants instead.
Many utilities have little understanding of water efficiency and are accustomed to managing infrastructure, not demand. The availability of federal dollars has often led utilities to throw money at capacity expansions rather than seek savings in their communities' water use. Now Congress plans to increase the pot without addressing whether the United States is getting the most bang for its water-quality bucks.
Lawmakers can promote greater water-use efficiency when they reauthorize the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act by using economic incentives to motivate integrated approaches to water planning. First, make state revolving loan funds available for efficiency improvements that displace expansions. Second, require utilities seeking federal funding for capacity expansions to first implement cost-effective water-efficiency measures.
The conventional approach to water problems - pour more concrete - is untenable in an era of dwindling budgets.