Reinvent and Redesign!!!

This exercise has made me realize few very important things besides the obvious fact of water conservation and water reuse.

It made me think about the disconnect between our present and future. And that, we HAVE to look beyond today to realize what is good for us tomorrow. I will always be an avid supporter of the two principals that I think I learned from this personal exercise- 

1. We have to reinvent the products that we use , not for just one product life but for the second or a third one too. I hope in future we can have soaps or body wash, that are not hazardous to us and our environment. I hope a simple filtration system is really enough to reuse our bath water for the plants. The ingredients that are not harmful for our skin are in fact the nutrients for the plants that they wont have to filter out. 

2.Using a home-made filter is definitely an eye opener, but it is most certainly not sufficient for the current times. We have to redesign our systems to  incorporate the technology for "recycle and reuse"  from the very beginning!

That is how, according to me,  we can claim to be "technologically advanced" species. 

consumption-easy, conservation...hmmm...not so easy!

Until now my life was easy. 

I have always used water with utmost care. We have a low flow-flush toilets in our apartments. And the water saving shower head. We mostly take showers than long baths. We keep turning the tap off while brushing the teeth, water our small patio garden only as much needed. And then we realized this was never going to be enough!

The project challenged me with an opportunity to take the water conservation to the next level! What is better than using water carefully? Re-using it! Conservationists have always insisted on recycling and reusing our grey water. Water that we use once for bathing, cooking and dish or clothes washing. Water that we can not drink,  but can certainly use for other purpose, such as flushing the toilets, gardens, washing cars, etc. 


Fact is we can not use this water without at least being filtered once.Good news is its not all that difficult! Researching, reading and building the sand- gravel water filter has been quite educational for me. What I realized was - that was not the hard part at all! The hard part was to use it!


I am not going to lie about how ridiculously inconvenient it is to collect the bath/shower water. To pour it mug by mug into the water filter and keep doing so till the sufficient amount of water is filtered to save at least one flush of potable water. If an average water consumption for a five minutes shower is approximately ten gallons, we should be able to save a number of flushes a day, but due to the water storage problem, lets just say we do manage to save at least two flushes everyday!


Does not look like a lot at this time, however,  I am a firm believer that EVERY SMALL ACTION MATTERS and that is sufficient enough for me to keep going on, for now.

Testing the water filter.

Experiment - 1

Garden soil + Water

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSERWdr757Q

Experiment - 2

Simulated bath water!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISikuENPMOU

While I am quite certain that the water used with method body wash ( after filtration) is perfectly alright for flushing toilets, I can not say the same about using it for the gardens. Even the non-edible ones. 

True, the organic matter in the garden soil can filter many of the chemical elements present in my body wash as mentioned in my previous post, and that my plants are "smart" enough to avoid the chemicals being absorbed in their system to a great extent. But my small patio garden is also not equipped with all the good microbes, bacterias, earthworms, the sun rays, deep layers of healthy permeable soil and many such nature's weapons -the soil ecosystem in totality- to filter the chemical residues in the bath water. 

I would feel a little better if the personal care products that we use for bathing were designed with "the second life of bath water" in mind. For now, the scope of my water filtration project will be limited to using the filtered   bath water to reduce the number of toilets flushes in my household!

Filtering Bath Water.

Baths or showers are the essential to our life style. They wash away the dirt, perspiration and stress collected through our fast paced daily life. Water can have the most soothing and relaxing effects on our tired bodies and mind. But they require using soaps and can consume huge quantities of water!!While we can't avoid taking baths, we most certainly can avoid all that  "gray water" being wasted down the drain. 

Soaps are a major players in our baths. Filtering and reusing our bath water would be really easy as a blink of an eye (well not literally) if we did not use soaps. Millions of tons of soap ends up in our grey water through our baths. Various chemicals and artificial fragrances in soap are not just hazardous for environment, but they have now proven be be injurious to our health. 

Soaps and detergents  brands (that are aware of the water and health hazzard a soap can cause) have launched many environmentally responsible products which are more "natural" and more "biodegradable". Such as the body wash I use, by "method". 

method is now considered a leader in manufacturing greener products, packaged in environmentally responsible containers. Their products are made up of natural substances or derived from the natural substances with approved processes. Here is a link to the further reading for the queries about method label. 

http://www.methodhome.com/behind-the-bottle/natural from their website. 

I am extremely happy that I do not put parabens, phthalates, triclosan, EDTA or animal by-products in my system when I use this product. However I kept wondering  how on earth was I going to filter-

sodium lauryl, 

glucose carboxylate, 

lauryl glucoside, 

coco/sunfloweramidopropyl betaine, 

coco glucoside, glyceryl oleate, 

glycol distearate, 

glyceryl stearate, 

oryza sativa (rice) germ oil, 

oryza sativa (rice) bran extract, 

althaea officinalis extract, 

guar hydroxypropyltrimonium chloride, 

glycerin, 

benzyl alcohol, 

olea europaea (olive) fruit oil, 

dehydroacetic acid, 

phenoxyethanol, 

benzoic acid, 

dmdm hydantoin, 

sorbic acid, 

fragrance (parfum)

..... and many such substances that are present in this body wash!

I might need all theses chemicals to clean myself if I pig-wrestled in a knee deep mud every day. Why do I HAVE to use all these chemicals on my skin which nature would most certainly filter out? 

Building a Sand-Gravel Filter.

Got a water container from a friend which was otherwise going in a recycle bin. We then cut open the upper top for a wider rim. 

 A short wash to the pebbles picked up from a friend's garden. 

There goes the first layer- big stones/ pebbles

Then the second layer - small stones/pebbles

The third layer- fine natural sand, which was available in Home Depot for $5.00 a bag. 

The fourth and most expensive layer of the project- activated carbon, available at pet store for $ 9.99

Fifth and optional layer- aquarium filter, available at pet store for about $7.00

My first ever home made sand-gravel water filter. Ready to be tested with simulated bath water. 

My foster kitty Grobin made sure the filter- building went smoothly :)

How Does Nature Filter Water?

The water on Earth has been existing for millions of years and will exist for the next millions of years. Its the same water that rained down upon our ancestors that we use today, and it will be the same water that our future generations will use thousand years from now. Nature has been working extremely hard to use this water over and over and over through its hydrological cycle. 

I think that most important thing to remember is that - Nature does not offer us polluted water. 

Nature has created a brilliant water filtration system for the water that falls on the ground. Water is naturally filtered through the natural filter pads of dense, deep layers of dirt, gravel and sand.When the raindrops fall through various forests, deserts, wetlands, and many such "living filters", they absorb excess minerals,  nutrients and impurities from the water. The remaining water then seeps in the ground. As the gravitational force pulls the water deeper, it passes through layers and layers of gravel and soil. 

Soil is an awesome natural filter which performs three very significant tasks- 

1. Restore the PH balance of the water- sands help stabilize acidic particles in waters and restore its natural balance. 

2. Filtration of the solids- air gaps between the sand particles literally trap the solids allowing only water to seep through. Some soil particles or clays have an electrochemical attraction to water and can lock up some of the chemicals on their surface through this electro-chemical reaction. 

3. Biological treatment - As water seeps deeper, the soil layer becomes very dense , the air gets thinner.Oxygen gets lesser. This loss of oxygen  kills any biological contamination surviving in the water and sterilizes it off unwanted bacteria.

By the time water seeped in the ground reaches its destination water source, it is filtered by the ground it passes through. And without giving a thought to this delicate system nature created for us, we engage in various activities that destroy living filters such as forests and wetlands, degrade and contaminate the soil structure, contaminate the water sources with our non biodegradable, hazardous, chemical wastes. And makes the natural water purification process that much harder!!!

  

How Does Nature Balance Water?

Our Earth and atmosphere are primarily made up of water. 

Water evaporates  from the ocean with the natural solar heating, and water vapor is carried everywhere in the atmosphere by air currents. Eventually, at a certain height it cools down and water droplets in the vapor condense to form those beautiful clouds. If a cloud grows large enough, it gets heavy and moves down with the weight. That is when the droplets coalesce and fall as precipitation, mostly as rain, or sometimes as snow or ice. Most of the water evaporated into the atmosphere falls as precipitation on the ocean, and remaining most of it falls on the ground. The water that falls on ground has various paths to chose from. Some of the water runs into streams, lakes, and rivers, which return the water to the ocean. Some of the water is absorbed by the plants, while  some just seeps into the ground and becomes groundwater. 

In any case, our mother Nature strives really hard to maintain the precious Hydrological Cycle which is essentially a closed loop cycle of water from the ocean to the atmosphere to the land and back to ocean and other reservoirs. We have to realize that hydrological cycle is one of the most intricately designed system that helps sustain Our Life on this planet Earth.