Recycled Water - How to Recycle Water

Water is a precious resource that we should all show more love to by recycling it. Water recycling is a socially, environmentally, and economically practical solution in helping make most of our water resources more efficient.

Here are a few ways you can help by recycling your water: Use rain collection barrels or if you don’t have one get a bucket and place them out in the yard to collect water. The stored rain water can be used for feeding livestock and watering the garden. Using rain water is great because it is free of chemicals.

When watering flower pots put something under them to catch the water drainage and then reuse it to water your garden. You can also save your kitchen water. Water you use to clean the dishes can be reused in the toilet bowl for flushing; your rinse water can be used to water household plants or to use while cleaning floors, sinks, and toilets.

If you would like to reduce the grease in the water, add a couple of drops of dish soap or even baby shampoo to the water. The water used to cook vegetables or pasta can go into the compost pile when it becomes cooled.

Not that many people have time to wash their laundry by hand but doing it will cut down on water and energy consumption. Everyone has heard that less water is used when taking a shower rather than a bath, but in a 5-minute shower you have already used 7 to 8 gallons of water that you cannot reuse like all of your bath water.

If you decide to take a shower, put a bucket in the shower to collect the cooler water when allowing the water to warm up. You can use either bath or shower water to mop floors, clean tiles, wash dirty walls, water the lawn, or even poor into outdoor tree wells.

Soapy water will not hurt your lawn so go ahead and throw it on your grass. While washing your car, turn off the hose in between the wash and rinse. Even better, wash your car in a location where the water runs off in the lawn.

If you own your home, a gray-water recycling system is the way to go. The system filters used household water from sinks, showers, and washing machines. It saves hundreds of gallons of fresh water. The gray-water can be used outdoors for watering lawns, shrubs, and gardens.

Here are a few examples of how companies are trying to be more efficient. Amusement parks in San Antonio use recycled water. SeaWorld, for example, uses water recycling systems. Golf courses are using reprocessed water to do their part. One golf course started saving water in the colder seasons to enable watering their fairways, tee boxes, and greens in the warmer seasons.

A town in Texas last year considered recycling their toilet water for its residents. They were taking treated effluent water and blending it with supplied potable water. NASA has a system in which it filters urine directly to salvage water.

The toilet aboard the U.S. segment of the International Space Station includes a tank that collects and filters urine, and has a well-monitored process to recover water in urine for drinking, cooking, cleaning and other uses. What are you doing?