permaculture

[Saor Stetler <sstetler@earthlink.net>]

May 31, 2007


 The Dirty Water Underground

By GREGORY DICUM

OAKLAND, Calif.

LAURA ALLEN'S modest gray house in the Oakland flatlands would give a 
building inspector nightmares. Jerry-built pipes protrude at odd angles 
from the back and sides of the nearly century-old house, running into a 
cascading series of bathtubs filled with gravel and cattails. White PVC 
pipe, buckets, milk crates and hoses are strewn about the lot. Inside, 
there is mysterious -- and illegal -- plumbing in every room.

Ms. Allen, 30, is one of the Greywater Guerrillas, a team focused on 
promoting and installing clandestine plumbing systems that recycle gray 
water -- the effluent of sinks, showers and washing machines -- to flush 
toilets or irrigate gardens.

To her, this house is as much an emblem of her belief system as a home. 
Although gray water use is legal in California, systems that conform to 
the state's complicated code tend to be very expensive, and Ms. Allen 
and her fellow guerrilla, Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, are out to persuade the 
world that water recycling can be a simple and affordable option, as 
well as being a morally essential one.

They are part of a larger movement centered in the West -- especially in 
arid regions like Arizona, New Mexico and Southern California -- that 
includes both groups that operate within the law and ones that skirt it. 
The goal is the reuse of home gray water as a way to live within the 
region's ecological means. Using their own experience and contributions 
from others, they have just published a do-it-yourself guide to gray 
water systems that is also a manifesto for the movement, "Dam Nation: 
Dispatches From the Water Underground."

"A lot of people that care about water try to conserve it," said Ms. 
Allen, an elementary-school teacher who installed several gray water 
systems after buying this home -- which she named the "Haut House," for 
House of Appropriate Urban Technology -- four years ago with a 
housemate. "But this is about changing the way you interact with it."

Mr. Woelfle-Erskine, a writer and teacher who lives on a houseboat with 
a gray water system in San Pablo, Calif., 10 miles north, added, "It's 
about trying to use resources to their full potential and interact with 
ecosystems in a beneficial way."

In 1994, California became the first state to establish guidelines for 
gray water use -- as most other states have since -- and it has become a 
leader in building industrial-scale gray water systems. The town of 
Arcata, for example, has an extensive system that serves the entire 
population of 17,000, and even the state's oil refineries have gray 
water systems.

But many gray water advocates say that California's plumbing code -- 
which stipulates things like pipe sizes, burial depths and soil tests 
based on rules established for septic systems -- is prohibitively 
complicated for private homeowners interested in recycling gray water, 
and that its requirements are prohibitively expensive.

"The code is so overbuilt that I'm beginning to think it's better to 
just have everyone do it bootleg," said Steve Bilson, the founder of 
ReWater Systems, a company that has installed around 800 code-compliant 
gray water systems at a cost of about $7,000 each, and who worked as a 
consultant on California gray water legislation in the 1990s.

As a result, many homeowners have installed unpermitted, illegal 
plumbing, relying on techniques developed by covert researchers like the 
Greywater Guerrillas. (It is difficult to know how many, since these 
systems are not registered with any government or organization, but Ms. 
Allen said that based on her observations there are probably around 
2,000 homes equipped with gray water systems, a few legal but most 
illegal, in the Bay Area alone.)

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Woelfle-Erskine stood in the backyard of the 
Haut House and explained how one of the half-dozen gray water systems 
there works. A pipe running from the house deposits shower and sink 
water into an elevated bathtub in the yard that is filled with gravel 
and reeds, and the roots of plants begin filtering and absorbing 
contaminants. The water then flows into a second, lower, tub, also 
containing a reedbed, before flowing into a still-lower tub of floating 
water hyacinths and small fish.

"We've had the water tested," Mr. Woelfle-Erskine said, "and it's clean 
-- there's just a little phosphorous left, which the plants in the 
garden actually like." Through trial and error, Mr. Woelfle-Erskine and 
Ms. Allen have found what they say is the best way to spread wastewater 
into the gravel beds (through a screened milk crate) and which plants 
best clean the water while not growing so vigorously as to block pipes 
(cattails).

Although this Rube Goldberg setup, known as a constructed wetland, cost 
only about $100 to build, it represents a pinnacle of gray water system 
design, which is usually far more modest, according to Art Ludwig, an 
ecological systems designer in Santa Barbara. (Mr. Ludwig's Web site, 
graywater.net <http://graywater.net>, offers a practical introduction 
for do-it-yourselfers.) The vast majority of systems, Mr. Ludwig said, 
"cost less than a hundred bucks -- it can be just a hose." For example, 
a hose connects the sink to the toilet tank to create a gray-water 
toilet in one of the Haut House bathrooms.

In spite of the ad hoc nature of many illegal systems, Mr. Ludwig said, 
he has "never heard of a single case of health problems from using gray 
water, ever." Similarly, Simon Eching, the chief of program development 
at California's Department of Water Resources -- the body that drafted 
the state's gray water code -- said he knew of no health issues arising 
from gray water use in California.

But Mr. Ludwig's Web site also points out that there are a number of 
potential pitfalls. He strongly discourages ponds of exposed water like 
the one fed by the constructed wetland in Ms. Allen's backyard, for 
example, because they can draw mosquitoes that carry disease. He 
cautions against crossing plumbing lines and contaminating clean water; 
using gray water in sprinkler systems or on fruits and vegetables that 
are eaten raw (it should only be used to irrigate roots); and allowing 
water contaminated by toxic cleansers, soiled diapers or contact with 
people who have infectious diseases to enter the gray water system.

Not even the Greywater Guerrillas would now condone the first system 
they built, in 1999. Back then, they were living with six housemates in 
a rented house in a rundown part of Oakland.

After receiving a water bill showing that the house was using 241 
gallons a day despite their conservation efforts (the figure was 
actually less than half the national average of 70 gallons per person 
per day), the two headed to the basement with little more than a hacksaw 
and righteous enthusiasm. "We didn't have a plan," Ms. Allen said, "and 
we didn't even have the materials. We were dumb, really."

Their initial efforts dumped used shower water into the basement, 
forcing their housemates to forgo bathing for days. But before long, 
they were building a gray water system.

Two years later, as the Guerrilla Greywater Girls (at the time, Cleo 
Woelfle-Erskine was a woman) they published a "Guide to Water," a crude 
sheaf of photocopies held together with a rubber band that combined 
plumbing instructions and design tips with an argument that water 
systems like dams and aqueducts were instruments of greed. "Dam Nation" 
is an expanded and less breathless descendant of the guide, with 
contributions from movement members as far away as Thailand.

Thousands of copies of the original were circulated while the Greywater 
Guerrillas honed their skills up and down the West Coast, installing 
systems from Seattle to Los Angeles for friends and like-minded people, 
and occasionally for hire, and connecting interested homeowners with 
plumbers willing to do illegal work. (Ms. Allen even took a plumbing 
course at a community college; she said that when the instructor began 
to sense what she was up to, he stopped answering her questions.)

Four years ago, they worked with Babak Tondre, a co-founder of a 
demonstration home in Berkeley called EcoHouse, to install a gray water 
system there.

"When the Greywater Guerrillas came over, I didn't really know what I 
was getting into," said Mr. Tondre, 37. He was soon forced to remove the 
system when the nonprofit Berkeley Ecology Center, which runs the house, 
objected: "The board flipped when they saw it. It was totally illegal."

Mr. Tondre then applied for a permit from the city. The resulting 
system, a more robustly engineered constructed wetland, funnels shower 
and laundry water underground, through a deep bed of gravel contained 
within a pond liner, and into a pipe at the other end of the gravel bed. 
More buried pipes direct water to the roots of plum, pear and cherry trees.

The system -- which Mr. Tondre believes is the first and so far only 
residential constructed wetland in California built with a permit -- 
cost $4,000 using volunteer labor. It can convert a maximum of 27,000 
gallons of gray water into irrigation every year, enough for six fruit 
trees, along with the marsh plants in the wetland itself.

If gray water is starting to gain public acceptance, the Greywater 
Guerrillas are staying well ahead of the mainstream. At the side of the 
Haut House, next to a chicken coop, twin plastic barrels hold hundreds 
of pounds of waste from composting toilets inside the house.

While chickens pecked around her bare feet, Ms. Allen plunged a giant 
corkscrew into one of the barrels to mix the contents and speed the 
yearlong composting process. "Smell it," she said. "Not bad at all."