Sunday, April 09, 2006
Reducing reliance on utility supplied water
When I was younger I noticed my grandparents in the village got all their fresh water from a massive underground rainwater collection tank that was constructed on their premises. Back then I was amazed on how full this tank was most of the time, which could be atributed to the sheer volume of rain that fell in that region of Nigeria in the rainy season.
Timbuktu Chronicles has previously covered this topic highlighting the benefits of such a system. Also there is also evidence that shows that we waste water less when we are involved in the process of collecting and storing it atimes.
People might wonder if a borehole is not capable of satisfying all there water needs? Well it could, depending on the quality of the aquifers around where the borehole is located (for Lagos it apparently it has to be more than 250m deep so it can hit the Abeokuta formation), the depth of the bore hole, and the frequency of usage. There have also been a lot of cases especially in Lagos and Port Harcourt, Nigeria were some of the boreholes have been contaminated by seawater or crude oil.
How can we harvest more rainwater in out cities to serve our drinking water needs and how can we recycle used bathing and washing water(reuse water) to flush our toilets?
In Hong Kong they have a system is some areas that uses strained sea water to flush toilets and urinals. Maybe the municipal authorities of the costal cities in Africa could adopt such a system. I don't see the point in spending so much money to purify water only to have it used in flushing the toilet, what do you think?