Rethinking Water to Safeguard the Future

CONTRACTOR: Tell me about the new emphasis on building plumbing systems as part of the Rethink Water Initiative. Why now, and what does PMI hope to accomplish? 

Stackpole: It’s shifting the focus to the men and women who are going to be tasked with really addressing the question of water scarcity and the cost of water going forward.

Many of them are focused on what I call the long view, looking 20 or even 30 years out. However, there are some opportunities like legacy product replacement that could help communities in the near-term.

The obvious example is if you pull out a 5 gallon per flush toilet and replace it with a 1.28 GPF toilet. Do that today and we get water savings by dinnertime. So, the 30-year view is good, but we think the legacy product replacement focus is better to get the kinds of immediate results some communities really need.

CONTRACTOR: Is there a sense that in the drive towards greater water conservation, some policy makers might be overlooking possible drawbacks or complications? 

Stackpole: The short answer is yes. And a lot of it has to do with policy makers not really understanding the impact of the policy they’re setting. For example, if you lower the flow in a showerhead or a faucet the impression is that we've done something. We've saved water, and that's a great thing. And they're not wrong. But the challenge is that some of our systems are not designed for all of this low-flow technology.

I live in a house built in 1971. You know, it's all 5-gallon flush infrastructure, it was built for a much greater flows of water. So, if you mandate a .8-gallon flush toilet, for that house, it sounds like a good idea, but here's what's going to happen: the water is not going to make its way down the sewer pipe because there's not enough flow to move it. Likewise, the reduced inflow and large pipe means the water is going to sit in the pipe longer, which creates that opportunity for opportunistic pathogens.

So sometimes policy makers are making decisions based on a goal without consideration of, you know, will this actually work?

Now I want to be clear, we don't question anybody's intentions. We understand that everybody wants to do the right thing, but we also recognize that the right thing requires a little more study and a little closer examination in some instances. If you're in a new development and you've right-sized the pipe flows, then you know cranking down water flows might not be a problem.

But when you're talking about all the legacy neighborhoods in the cities and the towns, old buildings that are still maintained by the original piping, it becomes problematic. 

Our goal here is really to help policy makers see the big picture. Here's a way to work on [water conservation] and address it with products that have been tested and have demonstrated high performance and definitely meet the desire that policymakers have to reduce the use of water.

CONTRACTOR: In the wake of the Chevron decision, it looks like legislators are going to have to write more detailed regulations, instead of relying on agencies like the EPA to interpret laws. Is part of the new initiative going to be educating these lawmakers? 

Stackpole: It is about education and building awareness. And also about ways to address what is really a pretty crucial problem: continued water scarcity. 

We have certainly been engaged with policymakers in different cities and towns and counties where they have good ideas based on their experience. But when we ask, well, have you thought about what this might mean to your water treatment facility or your sewage treatment plant? They kind of look at you like, What? What do you mean? And you have to walk them through.

The fundamental mission of Rethink Water is to ensure clean, safe drinking water for future generations, and one of the ways we do that is to educate policy makers, regulators and to some degree consumers about how they can make good choices and how they can make an impact. 

You know, it's not very often in our lives that you or I can make a significant impact on social good. I mean, yes, we can volunteer in our communities, we can help in our churches, but actually doing something in your home where you can save water, you really are contributing to an overall social benefit, and it won't make things any worse for you, the end user. 

That's the great thing. You can help the problem, and in return your water costs will go down. Your electric bill will go down (because there is that energy and water nexus). From our standpoint, it's a win-win.

To learn more about Rethink Water, visit https://www.safeplumbing.org/advocacy/rethink-water.