What is Graywater?
Graywater is any water that has been
used in the home, except water from toilets, is called graywater .
Dish, shower, sink, and laundry water comprise 50-80% of residential
"waste" water. This may be reused for other purposes, especially
landscape irrigation. It's a waste to irrigate with great quantities
of drinking water when plants thrive on used water containing small
bits of compost. Unlike a lot of ecological stopgap measures,
graywater reuse is a part of the fundamental solution to many
ecological problems and will probably remain essentially unchanged
in the distant future. The benefits of graywater recycling include:
Graywater legality is virtually never an issue for residential retrofit systems but you should check with your local officials. In recent years concerns over dwindling reserves of groundwater and overloaded or costly sewage treatment plants has generated much interest in the reuse or recycling of graywater, both domestically and for use in commercial irrigation. However, concerns over potential health and environmental risks means that many jurisdictions demand such intensive treatment systems for legal reuse of graywater that the commercial cost is higher than for fresh water. Despite these obstacles, graywater is often reused for irrigation, illegally or not, in older rural construction, simple construction old and new, often consisting of nothing more than a "drain out back" (pipe pointed down the nearest hill).