Water restrictions and cumbersome approval systems cannot solve the problem of insufficient water supply to Murray river towns and cities such as Adelaide
Australia, Commonwealth of (Press Release) December 6, 2007 --
Beautiful gardens can use less water than next door's teenager!
Teenagers are renowned for their love of long morning showers. In fact it is estimated that the average teenager spends more than ten minutes of every morning in the shower without even washing their hair!
Assuming that your neighbour has a water saving shower rose their teenager probably uses aproximately fifty litres of water per shower which is eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty litres of water per year!
If your garden has a fifty square metre lawn and one hundred shrubs and is watered once per week from november to march using your low flow pop-up sprays and 2 litre per hour drippers on automatic irrigation system it will use aproximately fourteen thousand litres of water!
Clearly the D.I.N.K.s are being penalised for having a nice garden and no kids!
When the government first proposed restricting watering to buckets and watering cans the community was understandably upset that granny was going to be forced to go outside late at night with a heavy bucket. Government caved in. Their solution was to allow pensioners to water all day and every day if they wished. How is that a sensible solution to the original problem which was about the delivery method not the amount of water being used.
Last night I drove past a home into which a swimming pool was being craned. The pool had a capacity in excess of twenty five thousand litres. More than fifty percent more water than the average garden should use in a full year. The swimming pool industry is allowed to justify its existence by claiming that the owners will install water saving shower roses and dual flush toilets with a pool blanket to stop evaporation!
Rebates are of course available to encourage installation of those water conservation measures but no such refund is available if you have had such things in your house for the last fifteen years. If you have you still have to abide by the same cockeyed restrictions as your neighbour who has no garden just a spa and a twenty five thousand litre swimming pool!
In the meantime industry is allowed to use as much water as they like with no meaningful attempt to conserve water whilst horticulture and agriculture are shedding jobs and going broke as they bear an unfair share of the burden.
Is it not about time that we started thinking seriously in terms of how to get more water from places other than the Murray.
Conserving water is pointless in the face of an ever increasing population. Adelaide's population is targeted at two million. It will inevitably go beyond that.
We need to increase supply not just reduce useage. Continuing down that road leads to third world conditions. Some measures are being acted on but we still dont have an efficient system of investigation and approval of water conservation or recycling measures. Currently an application for water recycling may need to go through SA Water, The Health Dept and your local council before being approved and it might already be approved for use interstate but not have automatic approval in SA. Some applications involve over sixteen pages of needless paperwork. There is no justification that makes any sense to other than a government beaurocrat!
Not only that, but we continue to effectively ignore rainwater as a serious source of supply. New homes are required to put in a one thousand litre tank which is no more than political tokenism. Tanks should be big enough to supply at least all of the winter water-use of the premises to which they are attached. We need to catch every drop from every rooftop including commercial rooftops. We need to charge business and domestic users much more for water and refund them for rainwater pumped into acquifers or consumed by reverse-metering rainwater tanks similar to solar electricity generation schemes. That is, charge say five dollars a kilolitre for mains water used and refund five dollars or more a kilolitre for rainwater used or pumped into an aquifer. This is justified by the savings to the community in mains water use, infrastructure costs and environmental costs. More importantly it makes the purchase of rainwater tanks commercially viable instead of just philosophically desirable.
What we need is bigger thinking not small mindedness.
Teenagers are renowned for their love of long morning showers. In fact it is estimated that the average teenager spends more than ten minutes of every morning in the shower without even washing their hair!
Assuming that your neighbour has a water saving shower rose their teenager probably uses aproximately fifty litres of water per shower which is eighteen thousand two hundred and fifty litres of water per year!
If your garden has a fifty square metre lawn and one hundred shrubs and is watered once per week from november to march using your low flow pop-up sprays and 2 litre per hour drippers on automatic irrigation system it will use aproximately fourteen thousand litres of water!
Clearly the D.I.N.K.s are being penalised for having a nice garden and no kids!
When the government first proposed restricting watering to buckets and watering cans the community was understandably upset that granny was going to be forced to go outside late at night with a heavy bucket. Government caved in. Their solution was to allow pensioners to water all day and every day if they wished. How is that a sensible solution to the original problem which was about the delivery method not the amount of water being used.
Last night I drove past a home into which a swimming pool was being craned. The pool had a capacity in excess of twenty five thousand litres. More than fifty percent more water than the average garden should use in a full year. The swimming pool industry is allowed to justify its existence by claiming that the owners will install water saving shower roses and dual flush toilets with a pool blanket to stop evaporation!
Rebates are of course available to encourage installation of those water conservation measures but no such refund is available if you have had such things in your house for the last fifteen years. If you have you still have to abide by the same cockeyed restrictions as your neighbour who has no garden just a spa and a twenty five thousand litre swimming pool!
In the meantime industry is allowed to use as much water as they like with no meaningful attempt to conserve water whilst horticulture and agriculture are shedding jobs and going broke as they bear an unfair share of the burden.
Is it not about time that we started thinking seriously in terms of how to get more water from places other than the Murray.
Conserving water is pointless in the face of an ever increasing population. Adelaide's population is targeted at two million. It will inevitably go beyond that.
We need to increase supply not just reduce useage. Continuing down that road leads to third world conditions. Some measures are being acted on but we still dont have an efficient system of investigation and approval of water conservation or recycling measures. Currently an application for water recycling may need to go through SA Water, The Health Dept and your local council before being approved and it might already be approved for use interstate but not have automatic approval in SA. Some applications involve over sixteen pages of needless paperwork. There is no justification that makes any sense to other than a government beaurocrat!
Not only that, but we continue to effectively ignore rainwater as a serious source of supply. New homes are required to put in a one thousand litre tank which is no more than political tokenism. Tanks should be big enough to supply at least all of the winter water-use of the premises to which they are attached. We need to catch every drop from every rooftop including commercial rooftops. We need to charge business and domestic users much more for water and refund them for rainwater pumped into acquifers or consumed by reverse-metering rainwater tanks similar to solar electricity generation schemes. That is, charge say five dollars a kilolitre for mains water used and refund five dollars or more a kilolitre for rainwater used or pumped into an aquifer. This is justified by the savings to the community in mains water use, infrastructure costs and environmental costs. More importantly it makes the purchase of rainwater tanks commercially viable instead of just philosophically desirable.
What we need is bigger thinking not small mindedness.
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