This week, the DJC ran an excellent article from Arthur H. Rotstein with the Associated Press called “Commercial projects in Tucscon must start harvesting rainwater.” The article says that the Arizona city has enacted the nation’s first municipal rainwater harvesting ordinance for commercial projects. The ordinance requires developers building new business, corporate or commercial structures to supply half of the water needed for landscaping from harvested rainwater starting next year.

Apparently, landscaping accounts for about 40 percent of water use in commercial

Water

development and for 45 percent of household water consumption in Tucson. That. Is. Crazy.

The article also mentions that a half-dozen other communities in Arizona are looking at replicating the approach, and that rural Santa Fe County in New Mexico has required harvesting using cisterns or similar structures for commercial and residential development since last year.

Which brings me to the next question: why isn’t this a requirement everywhere? Water is cheap, yes. But even though it is cheap, it still costs money. If Tucscon - which the article says gets 12 inches of rain a year - requires rainwater harvesting, why don’t we? (Other than little details like the state owning the rain that drops down from the sky….) 

Now I know Tucson and Seattle are very different. I know Tucson uses so much water on landscaping because the city is in a desert, which means for most anything to grow, it is going to need extra water. But the underlying principal is the same. Water is a free resource. When water falls on the ground, it flows along roadways, picking up dirty icky things like metals and nutrients, eventually ending up in a water body like the Puget Sound, where it

The new LOTT Alliance project in Olympia will be all about water treatment and water conservation. Lisa Dennis-Perez of LOTT said the more conservation there is, the more the organization can delay the need to build additional water treatment plants.

does real damage or at a treatment plant, where it goes through an extensive process to get clean. So why don’t we, as a country, require that at least some of that water is captured and used for something productive?

It just seems like a really wasted resource.

Where am I wrong here? Please tell me why this would not work.

By the way, water is going to become an even greater issue of importance as more people move to the Pacific Northwest. I wrote this article a couple weeks ago that discusses the challenges between the desire to get off the water grid and traditional infrastructure.

In that story, a number of experts from our region discussed where we are going with water treatment and the difficulties that lie ahead. It covers a range of opinions but all speakers could agree on one thing: water needs to be more expensive for change to happen.

Kurt Unger of the Department of Ecology pretty much spoke for the crowd when he said “Water is too damn cheap… We need to assess a fee on water to enable so many more things to happen.”

This is a guest post by Dave Bennink, owner of Re-Use Consulting. 

I was born in Bellingham and have always lived in Washington. Yes, that means I’m allergic to sunlight and spend 11.23 months a year with extremely pale skin, and the other .77 months with extremely red skin. For me, there is a positive to all that rainfall and that’s river and stream kayaking. Recently, I was able to pay penance for all of that praying for rain. I helped

Items donated to flood victims, photo courtesy Dave Bennink

organize a flood relief effort in Western Washington where materials from buildings that we were deconstructing and salvaging were donated to families around the Pacific Northwest.

The January floods damaged hundreds of buildings around the area and many of the homeowners didn’t have sufficient insurance to cover the repairs. A typical home may have had to replace sheetrock, insulation, wiring, wood flooring, doors, sliding glass doors, cabinets, appliances and more. My clients couldn’t help with the sheetrock and wiring by they donated almost 100 doors, over 40 cabinets and many other expensive items including a large amount of lumber and plywood. The value of these donations was in excess of $75,000!

What was I most impressed with? It was either because they donated them anonymously or

Wood donated to flood victims, photo courtesy Dave Bennink

because they did it in these tough economic times. This project was a real pleasure to be involved in and I met a number of good people that help people in need in all sorts of ways. I would like to publicly thank all of our donors for their generosity and pray that we don’t need to do this again next fall or witner. I do hope it keeps raining though, sorry about that!

When it rains in Seattle (as it often does) water flows along city streets and sidewalks, picking up toxins, before it is sent to a storm drain and eventually ends up in Puget Sound. This is the largest polluter of the Sound, sending 52 million pounds of pollutants into it every year.  That’s a conservative estimate but it’s nothing new. 

What is new is a map, produced by a team of GIS students from the University of Washington that shows where the storm drains - that send the water into Puget Sound - are. Turns out there are 4,500 public manmade storm drains, according to the team. The map was produced for People for Puget Sound, a nonprofit that advocates for healthy policies for the sound. The map also includes 2,123 natural drainages that receive inputs from the watershed system of additional drains, and 297 storm drains from the Washington State Department of Transportaion and 70 bridges. Industrial and private drains were not included in the project.

What poisons end up in the sound? Yummy things like copper, zinc, mercury, flame retardants, PAHs, and petroleum hydrocarbons. Some of these pollutants, like phthalates, which are found in plastic bottles and packaging, get dissolved in stormwater, making them hard to remove, if not impossible.  Pleasant.

Why should we care? Because, on a very base level, the Puget Sound is a huge economic driver that helps support our local economy. Not to mention the environmental aspects. 

So what does the image look like? Here it is…

Courtesy People for Puget Sound

Bruce Wishart, policy director for People for Puget Sound, said the map shows the enormity of the stormwater problem which impacts the sound.

Heather Trim, urban bays and toxics program manager for the organization, said the students went well beyond their class project to create a terrific map that advances knowledge of stormwater inputs. “We have been told by agencies that it would be years before we could get this map and yet the students have produced this tremendous resource.”

How about it readers, is this image a tad surprising? Or is it what you would have expected?

This week, I covered the giant new Thornton Place develoment next to Northgate in the DJC here.

The nine-building project is 109 condos, 278 apartments, 50,000-square-feet of retail and restaurant space and a 14-screen movie theatre with two IMAX theatres. There’s a 143-unit senior living center on the site called Aljoya, developed by Era Living, and a large portion of Thornton Creek that has been daylighted by Seattle Public Utilities.

It’s targeting LEED silver certification under LEED for Neighborhood Development. Its buildings are also shooting for separate LEED NC silver certification. Green features include easy access to transit, project walkability, water efficient and energy efficicient features, and extensive daylighting. For more info, see its Web site here.

The story got a lot of press - in the DJC, the Stranger, and the Seattle Condo Blog, for example - so if you want more info on it, you can read about it there. I’ll get straight to the photos.

A view of the piazza. Developers say they need to do something with this roof, though they aren\'t sure what!

An inside view of a condo unit.

The area where Thornton Creek will flow.

View of the park-and-ride from inside an apartment unit.

Era Living\'s Aljoya project

An inner pathway.

Being a reporter, I get hundreds of e-mails a week. A good chunk of them are about eco-friendly products that are new, nifty and will “save the worrrllllldddd!” A couple of them are kind of nifty. But the majority of them aren’t… and are obviously motivated by business interests and the desire to make more green.

So when I received an e-mail this week about two entrepreneurs who founded an

Is greed good?

educational campaign promoting tap water, and then just happened to sell over 400,000 BPA-free, reusable water bottles from their Web site, it piqued my interest, precisely because it was addressing the money issue.

These two people - Eric Yaverbaum and Mark DiMassimo - are asking the public in a poll whether they are “greedy entrepreneurs,” “selfless environmentalists,” or both.

Now, both of these guys work in advertising or marketing, so this survey could very well be - and likely is - a marketing ploy. But even so, it’s interesting because it touches on the nebulous and often contentious connection between money and the environment.

The environmental movement isn’t completely comfortable with the notion that people make money off of things that are eco-friendly, especially because not everything that says it’s green really is (this is called ”greenwashing”). But really, the only way to get practices accepted on a large scale will be if someone, somewhere turns a profit in some way.

These two guys are making money but in the process they’re also getting their message - that buying bottled water is bad - out there to a broader audience. So is greed ok if it has a point?

What do you think - are they greedy or selfless? To answer the poll or to see results, click here.

After a tumultuous year, the zHome project has started off on a new foot with its Monday groundbreaking. The project is a 10-unit townhome development in the Issaquah Highlands that uses smart design and technology to create all the energy it consumes. It plans have net zero carbon emissions and cut water use by 60 percent.

I first wrote about the project last December here when Noland Homes was the

Courtesy of David Vandervort Architects

builder on the project and planned to develop it at its own cost. A lot has changed since then: namely Noland dropped out and Howland Homes came on (and will develop it at its own cost). But the project has finally broken ground and, as Brad Liljequist, zHome project manager for the city of Issaquah, says in the project’s inaugual blog post (yes it has a blog here) it “takes my breath away a little bit” to be at this stage in the project’s life.

zHome has a nifty Web site that can answer all and any of your questions from what materials are being used to how they’re doing it to how to buy into it. For more information, visit it here.

Courtesy of David Vandervort Architects

This solar panel from the groundbreaking comes wrapped in a bow!

The latest rendering

Though a necessary part of life, we don’t do much talking about toilets. However, in the last week I’ve been hearing a lot about toilet efficiency, toilet brands and how to test them.

This product could be yours!

So when I got a press release for the Brondell Swash Ecoseat, I wasn’t surprised but rather perplexed. The Ecoseat bills itself as an ”ecofriendly” way to save trees. Rather than flushing 100,000,000 rolls of toilet paper worldwide per day representing 55 million trees each year, the press release says, you can do simply buy this product and wipe all that eco-guilt out of your life.

The product is a battery operated “dual wand seat with an integrated bidet which features adjustable water pressure (for a refreshing feminine and posterior wash) and push button controls.” In other words, it uses water rather than paper to clean you off.

Is it really environmentally friendly or are the company’s claims eco greenwash? In June, the Washington Post carried a story by Blaine Harden about how energy use in Japan is soaring and how one major factor is high tech toilets that “warm one’s bottom, whisk away odors with built-in fans and play water noises.” They also play relaxation music like “Ave Maria.” But they also consume energy at an alarming rate because they are always plugged in. The article says people are also using the toilet more, because it’s a comfortable space. Some even get addicted to it.

Here in the U.S, old fashioned toilets are getting more and more water efficient.

This is what your toilet would look like

Recently at a water conference i attended, Water Expert Roger Van Gelder told attendees that new super efficient systems using 1.0 gallons per flush or less can be just as strong or stronger than older models that used seven gallons. The water use of a toilet doesn’t make it a better toilet and stronger toilet, he said, instead it’s the product’s systems that do the job.

But with all toilets, he said, you have to actually test the toilets to see how well they work. “Anything that you get, you can’t really believe what it says on the box.” 

So how about believing the Swash Ecoseat’s box. It is battery operated so it doesn’t plug into the wall. But it still uses energy. What do you think readers, is it greenwash or a green solution?