Water Recycling

[Shedhand]

...and when theres no water left to collect and tax, the brastrdas will tax our urine.

[outback]

Thats a p!ss poor idea.




Serious question, I don't live in town, so I'm not subject to level 1,2 3, or 15 restrictions, our family are subject to the restrictions I lay down as required.

Now for the question, is level 1 or 2 or whatever the same in Melbourne as it is in Brisvegas as it is in tinylittlecountrytown? What do each of the levels restrict the householder to?

Ok that's two questions, and I'm not adding I don't give a rats ring option either.

[SPIRIT]

l was teaching sustanable agriculture and it came home with a bang how much we need things to look right .the design for the school it was more important how it look than being sustanable there water use was high and a simple design changes were blocked because it changed the view
easy way to save water get a lemon tree they do grow better if you do
on immigration when things dry up more what are we going to do use our planes and tanks to keep them out we as assies use more than our share of the planets stuff
fix the envioment and you fix the water problem

[Stuart]

...and when theres no water left to collect and tax, the brastrdas will tax our urine.

I'll just give them 40% of mine directly. They can do what they like with it then.

[Stuart]

fix the envioment and you fix the water problem

Of course. But we are now in a situation where the environment is going to take decades to fix, and the water resource has been mismanaged into near oblivion. So we need to take steps in the meantime to sustain what is worth preserving until such time as the long term solutions can be (found, debated, changed, bought and buried as bad for business, resurrected, mooted, finally begrudgingly agreed to (typical political ########) and) acted upon.

[Studley 2436]

Waldo half the problem is that farmers block off rivers creeks etc with dams and the like.

Have you heard of Cubby station? They dammed the Darling and made a dam that Sydney CBD all the way to Manly would drown in. They pay less than 1% of the price city people pay for their water. All so they can grow cotton.

Anyway could I pose a different viewpoint. Let's suppose there is no water crisis but should people get worked up about it Government can pretend to be doing big deal stuff when all they are doing is what they should have done some years ago.

Regarding water restrictions here we went level 2 and water use increased by 50% compared to same time last year. This gave Mike Rann a great chance to feature in a TV campaign for level 3 "This is why my govenment etc etc" BUT the great thing is that water restictions increased use and thus the money the state govenment gets from the water company. We all know how much govenments love having money to bribe us with at election time.

So if they just said we will have a water market where everyone buys water we will all pay the one price. Cotton and Rice would have to pay too much for it to be economical. People who get good value from their water will pay the price and home users will have price pressure not to use too much. Then there would be no crisis, the bureaucracy would just set how much water the market could access according to catchments and the like.

Studley

PS I said that I don't do anything to recycle water because I don't but my lawn hasn't had a sprinkler on it for about 8 or 9 months lots of mulch and I like Aussie Natives because they just handle dry weather and wait for the next rain

[Waldo]

Have you heard of Cubby station? They dammed the Darling and made a dam that Sydney CBD all the way to Manly would drown in. They pay less than 1% of the price city people pay for their water. All so they can grow cotton.

G'day Studley,

I know very well the situation re Cubby Station, as my late Dad was a Hydrographer who worked there taking water levels, run off collection etc, and worked on approving the application for it. And nothing meant to you, but what you wrote is a massive misconception. They havn't dammed the Darling, in fact Cubby Station takes no water from the Darling directly, they only collect water that is run off on their land only.

Yes, it collects water greater than Sydney harbour.



"...Aussie Natives because they just handle dry weather and wait for the next rain."

The more people learn that the most efficient way to grow garden is to plant Aussive natives, top plants - pity that most people don't like them.

[martrix]

..........slight hijack, but worthy none the less.

Is it true that an Evaporative Cooler (roof mounted and ducted throughout house) uses close to 30 litres p/hour?

So if one of these was on for 24 hrs during a hot period, thats 720 litres down the tube?

[Waldo]

G'day,

There's a good question from Matrix.

I'll put my hand up and say I'm guilty of that, if it's true. But like they were asking on the news last night for anyone to turn off non-essential power points etc. SWMBO justly said to the effect of, "Can't do, have to keep our little (13mths old) girl cool and comfortable in the house on a hot day" such as yesterday was at 41º.

I am gulty your honour.

[silentC]

Can't do, have to keep our little (13mths old) girl cool and comfortable in the house on a hot day

How do you reckon they got by before air conditioners were invented?

Actually, I lived in Sydney for 16 years and only ever lived in two houses that even had air conditioners. The sparky tried to talk us into putting one in here in the new place (600kms North of Melbourne) but we decided it wasn't necessary. I grew up here and the most we ever had was a table top electric fan for the really hot days.

[Studley 2436]

Fair enough Waldo
Either way regarding Cubby they don't pay market rates for their water if they did they would either not use so much or find a more efficient use of it.

Same goes for everyone. If cotton and rice are so bad they would stop in a day if they had to pay full price for their water. If they are OK they would just keep on doing it.

Too much politics water rights and the like in it. Markets do this stuff so much better it is not funny. If it was in the market stuff would be grown that made money without needing a subsidy. Stuff that wasn't effective would be forgotten and bought more economically from other places.

Farmers would see their water expense rise or fall in direct relation to how efficiently they used it. Good farmers would prosper bad ones have to shut up shop, but there is nothing like the hip pocket nerve to stop all of us wasting water.

Studley

[journeyman Mick]

..................So if they just said we will have a water market where everyone buys water we will all pay the one price. Cotton and Rice would have to pay too much for it to be economical..................

The trouble with this approach is that it assumes that agriculture sources its water the same way as domestic users: ie the government or a central body like a water supply board builds the infrastructure to collect, store, treat, distribute and charge for water. If you want a truly level playing field then either someone pays for the infrastructure to pipe water to every farmer's gate, or we get rid of all the infrastructure and everyone collects, stores and treats their own water. I'm fine with the latter, I do it already.

Mick

[journeyman Mick]

Studley,
unlike domestic wastage of water which is pretty effortless (ie, you leave a tap running) wastage of water by farmers generally requires them to run a pump or something. So I'd say that direct waste by farmers is pretty minimal. Some crops (like rice or cotton) do use a lot of water, but I wonder how it compares to lawns and European style gardens that people insist on having? If people who wanted to water lawns or grow water dependant gardens were forced to collect and store all their garden water requirements how many would continue to do so? Most farmers pay for their own infrastructure for water collection and storage and most of this is water that would not have found its way into domestic water supplies but would have run down the river and into the sea. Now I'm not saying that water running down the rivers is wasted, I do know that some river systems don't have enough flow to keep them healthy. But this is a seperate issue to the "user pays" issue.

Now if somehow we end up sourcing all water intensive crops (rice, cotton,sugar cane, most fruit etc etc etc) from overseas because it's "cheaper" what happens when rising fuel prices make it uneconomical to import them and there's no local producers anymore?

[Stuart]

Gets back to my point. There is no way a desert country should even consider growing water intensive crops such as rice and cotton (didn't know cotton was so demanding). There are plenty of countries that can and do, and on a global scale, we should be buying from them, and providing to them things we can do well.

Pity that is too utopian to work.

As to fuel prices making importing water intensive crops uneconomic, the cost of fuel would have to get so high, that we'd be in a situation that the current fuel type would have been abandoned.

If there was a sudden huge demand, then like bananas, within 12 months the local growers could respond to that demand. It's not like having to regrow 10 year old trees.

[Grunt]

Buy organic rice as they use considerably less water to grow in then the big ag rice growers do.

Cotton should be replaced with Hemp. It improves the soil, you get to use the majority of the plant for making cloth or paper therefore an acre of hemp will produce significantly more usable fibre than cotton and it uses about 1/4 of the water.