A casual country-wide survey suggests that the success of demand-side water conservation is related to a variety of factors, ranging from geological location and climate to imagination and enthusiasm.
Unfamiliar with supply-side challenges, Atlanta, GA and Raleigh, NC scrambled to catch up in the face of one of the worst droughts in over 100 years. On the other hand, Chicago, IL, very savvy about its Lake Michigan water supply, has been pushing the envelope in water conservation strategies. In Gallup, NM, water conservationist Elizabeth Barriga models the city’s water efficiency programs after larger cities in her region. Still farther west, the East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) has developed a diversified bag of water conservation tricks that includes a coffee table gardening book, while the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) has developed water-saving partnerships throughout its community. Common denominators include getting irrigation under control, targeting business and industry, and engaging residents in seemingly small, but substantive, actions.
With 40 inches of rain a year, the population of Raleigh is not accustomed to conserving water. “It’s easy to talk about water conservation in Tucson [AZ], with cactus outside your window,” says Ed Buchan, water conservation specialist for the city of Raleigh Public Utilities. “But in the southeast, things look green. The first thing we did in reaction to this drought was to restrict irrigation, which was probably costing us 70 million gallons of water a day. Since October 2007, when we prohibited irrigation altogether, our average usage has been between 39 and 42 million gallons a day.”
Raleigh has also initiated a car wash certification program that requires wash-water recycling, and as restrictions are ratcheted up to stage two, as of February 15, 2008, any uncertified car wash facility will have to cease operation. Golf courses have been restricted to watering only greens and stage two obligations will require even this minimal irrigation to be suspended. “Another element of our stage two restrictions is that we don’t allow the pressure testing of new water mains, which, in a roundabout way, puts a moratorium on construction and development, because, if you can’t test the water line, you can’t sell the house,” Buchan says. “We’ve offered builders the option of recapturing the water, which is what we do with our own water quality flushing.
“Water conservation requires a lot of different elements—working with restaurants for example—at the same time, we ask residents to reduce their water use,” he adds. “One thing we’re considering is installing water-saving devices, rather than offering rebates for people to do this themselves. This way, we assure that the devices actually get put in. And, one thing we will be implementing is an irrigation system certification program, using the Irrigation Association’s specifications for water-efficient systems. In the short term, it won’t mean much, because we’re not going to allow irrigation, but, hopefully it will make a real impact on irrigation demand over time. The reality of water conservation is no one specific thing is going to make a dramatic difference.”
Like Raleigh, Atlanta has banned all outdoor watering as a result of Governor Sonny Perdue’s September 2007 declaration of level four drought conditions. “The first thing we did, was stop selling irrigation meters and double the rate on irrigation water for those who already had meters,” says Melinda Langston, Watershed director in the department of Watershed Management’s Water Conservation Programs. “Inside the house, we have funded a one-million-dollar toilet rebate program. Although we’ve had low-flow standards in place since 1993, up to now our toilet rebate program has only been for low-income [residents] and senior citizens.
“In November 2007, we gathered our top 50 largest, large commercial and industrial customers and asked them to help us achieve the 10% reduction the Governor has called for,” she says. “The workshop included top experts from around the country, and participants went back to their facilities; put together conservation teams; and did some real thinking, planning, and implementing.”
Delta Airlines was already ahead of the curve, having initiated a Water Conservation Team in 2002, to focus on opportunities to reduce water consumption. In 2004, the airline partnered with Georgia’s Pollution Prevention Assistance Division, to focus on its plating shop, which used 80,000 gallons of water a day. The first phase of the project included installing water meters to monitor exact water usage and establish employee awareness. Overflow valves were replaced, and a program was implemented to ensure all meters and equipment were calibrated and maintained on a regular basis. Water usage dropped 55% to an average of 30,000 gallons per day, which has saved Delta $510,000 in water, chemicals, and hazardous waste disposal.
In its Technical Operations Center, which handles a majority of maintenance operations and requires a tremendous amount of water to wash aircraft parts, manufacture components, and clean engines (600,000–800,000 per day), Delta invested in flow meters and water-saving equipment, such as more efficient nozzles and piping which cut water usage in half. A water-reduction lead in each department helps monitor water usage; leak-detection and employee-awareness programs were implemented to detect water and steam leaks; and a reporting hotline was established.
 |
 |
Photos: Angel Park Golf Club |
| Angel Park Golf Club replaced its grass to become more drought tolerant, through the help of SNWA that paid $1 per square foot of turf. |
Three years after it began thinking about water conservation, Delta began assessing the feasibility of installing a system to recycle a majority of the water used in the Operations Center. The brainstorming eventually resulted in a system that will come online in late 2008 or early 2009, to recycle 300,000 gallons a day and save approximately110 million gallons of water per year. The company expects to save $2 million dollars annually on this $3.8 million water-recycling investment. The airline has also installed an automatic metering device that will fill a pre-determined amount of water onboard aircraft, and automatically shut off without operator intervention, thereby saving approximately 2.9 million gallons of water a year.
In a completely opposite direction, Georgia Aquarium has applied its particular brand of creativity to the challenge of water conservation. The aquarium, which is the largest in the country and was largely funded by Home Depot cofounder Bernie Marcus, is housed in a 550,000-square-foot building that contains 8 million gallons of water and houses over 100,000 animals—from fish to penguins. “We started going through the operation side to see what kind of new, innovative, and cool ideas we could come up with to save water,” says Mike Hursc, vice president of engineering and operations. “The water coming into the building is city water, and all of it goes through carbon filters that remove chlorine and heavy metals to make it safer for the animals. The filters are set up to automatically backwash, and, when we dug into it, we realized they were backwashing longer and more frequently than was necessary.”
Hursc says by reprogramming the computer and foam fractionators (where city water rinses foam off the top of a unit), the aquarium saved a considerable amount of water per year. “We took one unit and started playing with it, and learned that we could back off the frequency of these wash downs and still not impact water quality for the animals. Then we wanted to start getting into bigger things,” he says. “We identified our big consumers in the building, such as air conditioning. When you have a chiller and a circulating cold water loop system, you’re sending water through large rooftop towers at the same time you’re sucking air through them, because you’re ultimately cooling water down with air, and you have a huge evaporation loss. So, we decided we had to figure out another means of make-up water, rather than using city water on these towers.
“And, while we were up on the roof looking at all of this moisture coming up off these fans in the cooling towers, we looked at the air conditioning units,” he adds. “When you cool air, you create condensation. So we had this condensation running off all these air handlers, and down the drains. We figured we had a piece of equipment over here that needs water, and equipment over here that’s discharging water, why not take the water to the equipment that needs it?”
Hursc acknowledges that the project was approximately $40,000, “but now we collect all the condensation off of those air conditioning units and pump it back into the cooling towers, which saves us between 1 million to 1.5 million gallons of water a year. That’s one we really like to toot our horn about. Because, when you think about it, the humidity is coming from the air inside the building, a lot of it from the exhibit tanks. So, if you look at the full circle, we’re adding fresh water to exhibits to make up for the evaporation and re-condensing it in our air conditioning unit. Now, we collect it and take it back to the cooling towers, which means we’re not using as much city water for make-up on our air conditioning.”
In Denver, CO, the Pepsi bottling plant partnered with Denver Water to achieve rebates that helped implement a series of water-saving programs. This includes using recycled water on seal water liquid ring pumps, installing a reverse osmosis (RO) permeate flush water reclaim system and a RO brine concentrator, and reclaiming backwash and rinse water from its activated carbon and bottle-rinse system.
According to Jeff Dahncke, director of public relations, the Pepsi Bottling Group is saving 10% more water across all its operations during the purification process, by upgrading RO systems and a million gallons of water per plant annually, through optimization of equipment-cleaning processes—add to this another 13,000 gallons a day on certain high-speed lines, by replacing package-rinsing water with air rinsing.
 |
Photo: Legacy Golf Club |
| Golfers appreciate the changes being made at the courses, because balls don’t get lost in the long grass—speeding up the game—and they like the new look. |
Dahncke attributes water efficiency success at Pepsi’s Denver plant to this multifaceted approach that includes: 1) The recycling of water used as seal water on liquid ring vacuum deaeration pumps; 2) The RO system that previously sent the permeate flush water down the drain is now recycled back to the feed water tank (the plant also decreased the amount of concentrated waste water by approximately 50% by adding a brine concentrator; 3) Reclaiming water from backwashing the air conditioning unit; and, 4) Capturing bottle-rinsing water to use as part of the make-up supply to the evaporative cooling system. All in all, it adds ups to a total annual water savings of approximately 25 million gallons.
Also in Denver, Xcel Energy has developed and is operating a unique district water-cooling system to supply downtown buildings with chilled water. “What Xcel did, was that, in addition to building a plant for chiller capacity, it installed two 750,000 gallon tanks with ice cores,” says Steve Kutska, who currently runs the company’s Denver District Cooling Chilled Water Plant. “This allows us to make ice in the evening, and then during the day flow water across the ice, melting it and producing chilled water,” he says. “Making the ice at night allows us to flow generally colder water, than what you would get from normal chillers, which helps improve the cooling performance of the buildings downtown. If I did this in the middle of the day, I would be using, on average, about three gallons of water to dissipate the equivalent Btus of 1-ton hour of cooling, which is 12,000 Btus. Instead, my average is about half that amount—1.4-1.5 gallons. Denver Water recognizes those savings and gives a rebate to our customers, based on the number of projected-ton hours in their first year using our system.”
Kutska adds that “only about half a dozen of the 40–50 commercial district cooling systems in the country make ice in the off hours and melt it during the peak time. We help Denver Water’s customers calculate how much ton hours their customers are going to use, as well as proving information on how much our actual production was, so they can calculate their customers’ rebates.”
SNWA has pioneered water-saving partnerships across a broad spectrum of commercial users. Casinos are removing turf, recycling water, and installing super-high-efficiency toilets. The Clark County School District has gotten into the act, with new measures in school design, and a local Ocean Spray plant has switched from water washing to compressed air. Less glamorously, Mission Industries Inc. has used SNWA’s rebate program to realize savings of over $900,000 in its light soil plant. The plant currently recycles about 55% of the water it uses, which is about 530 gallons a minute—feeding back into the facility’s hot and temperate water tanks.
According to Director of Engineering Ralph Barbosa, increasing the amount of usable recycled water was as easy as installing a new filter system at the plant, which cleans 8 million pounds a week of sheets, towels, washcloths, pillow slips, chef pants, shirts, and coats. “We want to do our part for our community, and we want to be a good business partner for the city,” Barbosa says. “We’re one of the city’s biggest water users, but we’re also one of its biggest reusers. Probably 60% of what’s in our water, we put into it as an additive or suffocate to clean the product.
He says that the water from drainpipes first goes through a shaker screen to get it down to a certain grade of microns, and then through Aquatex 360 filters, taking it to 5 microns. Finally, it goes through six of the company's new Aquatex Ultra ceramic filters, to end up at 0.02 microns. “From there, the water is put through advanced oxidation, which polishes and disinfects it for reuse,” he continues. “The process is designed to filter particles in the arrange of 0.02 microns, to 0.04 microns, and up to 130 degrees Fahrenheit, which allows for surface washing about once every two weeks for about four hours. Backwash water is produced and stored by the unit. And, we add a neutralization chemical that adjusts the pH of the reclaimed water back to about 7.5. Both of these waters then go back in our hot-and-tempered water tank as needed. We also have a UV light that we push the water through in its final phase to insure that we’re not getting any unwanted microorganisms.”
Wastewater Resources Inc. designed Mission Industries’ system, and qualified for a SNWA rebate of $150,000. SNWA has also developed a model program that offers residents and business cash for taking of turf.
But what’s it like to tear up your grass and replace it with something more drought-tolerant? A challenge, but certainly doable, says Bill Rohret, Director of Maintenance and Golf Course Superintendent at Angel Park Golf Club. “First, they were going to pay us 50 cents per square foot to take up 13 acres, which wasn’t economically feasible, because it would cost us too much to take out the old irrigation system and bring in heavy equipment to dispose of the turf,” Rohret says. “And then, we’d have to replant and go back in with drip irrigation for our trees. But when they offered $1 a square foot, we could do it. First, we identified 70 acres that were not in play, visited other courses, and then planned what we wanted to do.
“Some of the other courses hauled away their old sod, but instead, we scraped off the turf, buried it, and made mounds and new features, which changed the way the course plays,” he adds. “The locals like it, because now, if they splay their ball off into the fall distant area, they don’t lose it in the long grass. It’s helped speed up play, and the golfers like the new look.” In another dramatic gesture, the course filled in a 20-million-gallon lake that Rohret says “did nothing, but looks pretty.”
And, while commercial and industrial accounts have demonstrated sound water efficiencies, the city of Chicago has assembled demand-side programs aimed at residential consumers. For example, according to Commissioner Suzanne Melec-McKenna, the city initiated a rain barrel program in 2004. “Roll Out the Barrel Days” was a joint project with Greencorps Chicago, a work program for former criminal offenders who actually manufacture the barrels. So far, according to Sarah Beazley, natural resources and water quality project coordinator, the city has sold almost 4,000 rain barrels that have ranged in price from $25 to $40 each, which is well below market price.
 |
| The turf was scraped, buried, and then made into mounds, to create new features. |
 |
Photos: Angel Park Golf Club |
Rohret says the new renovation changed the
way that the course plays. |
Chicago is partnering with the Metropolitan Reclamation District to take the program outside of the city into the suburbs. “We’ll sell them until nobody wants them and we’re also involved in a pretty detailed cistern initiative,” Melec-McKenna says. “We’re working with a lot of our public facilities to develop large-scale cisterns to capture water and reuse it. Our Chicago Center for Green Technology has a 12,000-gallon capacity onsite that is linked directly to the landscaping. The system allows us to capture more than 60% of a one-inch rainfall in the cisterns. Any additional rain is then captured through our vegetative swales and treatment wetlands.”
Chicago’s city hall has a new green roof, in part, because Mayor Richard M. Daly believes the best environmental strategy is for the city to demonstrate new
environmental technologies. “[The idea] is to take a few risks and try out these concepts and technologies,” Melec-McKenna says. “If they prove to be successful, we let people know about their potential. When we’ve proven a concept and demonstrated the economics of it, we get the word out and provide incentives. Ultimately, we’ll require that it be implemented if we don’t think the technology or idea is being adopted widely enough.
“For example,” she says, “if you are a publicly-funded, planned development in the city, you have to incorporate a green roof. We now have a green-building permit program, where, if you achieve certain goals, we put you in the front of the line, assign a team to you, and get you your permit within six weeks, with your fees waved. We also have a grants program for residential and businesses for green roofs and cool roofs, which really helps some of the smaller projects that wouldn’t have the advantage of plan development support. We’re in the second year of this program, and we’ve funded 50-60 projects a year that way.”
Chicagoans are also encouraged to take the Water Pledge, another of the mayor’s initiatives, which was launched during Earth Month, 2006. The idea is that residents turn off the tap when they brush their teeth. “It’s about engaging people in the simple things they can do that don’t need to be overwhelming, as well as demonstrating to people that if they combine their efforts with everyone else, they can make a huge difference,” Melec-McKenna says. “Turning off the water when you’re brushing your teeth saves about two gallons of water per person. If you multiply that out to the population of Chicago, it can save enough water to fill 33,000 Olympic-size swimming pools each year.”
 |
Photo: Legacy Golf Club |
| Golf courses have been restricted to watering only greens with minimal irrigation. |
On the West Coast, EBMUD decided it needed to reach consumers with another kind of message—the correct information on gardening with native and drought-tolerant plants. “One of the biggest problems,” says Richard Harris, manger of water conservation in the Water Conservation Division, “is that other professionals, landscape professionals for example, and retail stores and outlets—such as Sears appliance shops—may not be so well-versed on technology, and they’re inadvertently doing us a disservice by unraveling years of education we’ve done during water shortages.
“Our purpose with Plants and Landscapes for Summer Dry Climates, was to develop a book that was both a resource guide and a coffee table book, because we wanted people to see that water-efficient gardens can be beautiful, and lush, and colorful, rather than gray, brown, and drab,” he says. “To do this, we decided we needed to wow people with great photography and a professional book design.”
The result is a four-color guide that features 540 photos of 650 drought-tolerant plants selected by a committee of 50 gardening and resource professionals. The book is available through EBMUD, in selected bookstores, and at www.amazon.com ($39,95 soft cover, $49.95 hardcover). Harris states that they also convinced developers of a 1,400-home development to buy a book and give it to every new homebuyer, as a resource to help landscape their yard correctly. With an initial print run of 42,000, nearly half have been sold, and the district has recouped almost 50% of its costs.
Like a number of other West Coast utilities, EBMUD has implemented water budgets for large commercial customers. The Irrigation Reduction System (IRIS) is a free service that identifies the maximum amount of water a landscape should use during any particular time of year, which clients can then compare to their actual water use. Current weather data, along with the amount and type of landscaping, are used to calculate the budget, which is printed on customer’s water bills. “We do this for our large irrigation accounts and some of our largest commercial mixed users who have indoor and irrigation on one meter,” Harris says. “We’ve taken digital aerial infrared photography of our service area, and mapped about 17 different land-use categories—hardscape, rooftop, open space, turf, trees, etc. Then, we assign these, what amounts to an irrigation index. We’ve used parcel maps to create polygons, so we know square footage for every account in the program, and we ground proof of what we come up with.”
Harris says that meter readers enter the reading information into a database, a process which is essential to the program’s success. Then, “a software algorithm grabs the most recent 24-hour weather information, which is converted to rainfall, and comes up with the water budget that goes onto the customer’s bill,” Harris adds.
He says it took work to get the desired results. “We’ve found that most customers appreciate it when we tell them they are over-budget. Irrigation managers are savvy. They know it’s a good thing when everything is looking good and they’re saving money. But, I would caution that this is not the kind of program where all you have to do is connect the dots. The biggest lesson we learned is that it’s very difficult to actually get the parcel size. We hired students to map these polygons, but when you get into the field, you realize, for example, that the line going down the street where you thought the meter was located, is actually irrigating a different property, and the one irrigating the property you’re looking at, is not the one fronting that property.”
 |
Photo: Andy Johnson |
| The Chicago Center for Green Technology has a 12,000-gallon capacity onsite, linked directly to landscaping. The cisterns can capture more than 60% of a 1-inch rainfall. |
He continues to describe the process, and tools needed. “You can do very broad, high-fly-over strokes and get customers at least improved from having nothing” Harris says, “but, if you really want to hone it, it takes a lot more than the technology, including a lot of follow-up, on-the-ground customer service hours. And, you have to take into account the human factor. You can put in a smart irrigation controller, you can put in California-native plants, and you can mulch, but, it doesn’t matter what kind of a system you have, the customer can fail to maintain it correctly, they can override it, and they can under- or over-water.
The next step, according to Harris, is giving customers their budget information, as well as a customized report, in it contrasting their two-year budget with their two-year consumption. He says that both Contra Costa and San Diego, CA, water districts already do this. “What this will tell them, is how many dollars they could have saved. In other words, we will be providing them with a value proposition—we’re talking thousands, maybe tens of thousands of dollars—which is money that could be invested in a new clubhouse or a leaking roof.”
Gallup, NM, is a community of 20,000 that swells to many times that size on most weekends when Native Americans from the Navajo reservation visit town to shop and do errands. Situated on I-40 between such attractions as the Grand Canyon and the resort city of Santa Fe, tourism is Gallup’s major industry. There is no surface water, and, since 2004, Barriga, the city’s enthusiastic water conservation coordinator, has been intent on getting the community to adopt wise water practices modeled by reservation Indians, who aren’t on a water system and must rely on trucked-in water.
“We’ve patterned out strategies after the big cities that have been doing water conservation for many, many years, even though they have much bigger budgets than we do,” says Barriga. “Albuquerque, for example, hires an engineering firm to do water audits. In Gallop, we do it free. We’re targeting services like hotels and motels and apartment complexes, and providing them with information on what they could save on toilets, showerheads, and aerators. It’s a much simpler version than Albuquerque’s—one or two pages—and we also give them some best management practices for irrigation and provide things like conservation signs for their business.”
Currently, Barriga is involved in a new restaurant program funded by the Bureau of Reclamation and administered through the Office of the State Engineer. Using an Albuquerque-based hydrological engineering company, the program, which is called Water Conservation Training Audits and Retrofits for Food Service, will provide audits for restaurants and food service industries that opt to sign up. To encourage participation, the program is offering to install free water-efficient, pre-rinse nozzles, which are calculated to save approximately 50,000 gallons of water a year. The plan is to follow customers for a year to see what strategies they implement from the audit and determine individual water savings.
In addition to Barriga’s conservation audits and toilet rebate program, Gallop also has summer irrigation restrictions, rebates for installing Xeriscaping, and a desert country version of a rain barrel program. Once the city determines it’s been installed properly, residents who use a rain barrel of any type receive a $25 rebate ($30 for two). Barriga says she’s seen some pretty creative models. “They can make it. They can buy it online. It just has to a have a cover on it, so mosquitoes don’t get in, and it has to be childproof. Some people have used plastic storage containers, but, with those, you have to use more than one, because they’re pretty small.”
Of all the work she’s been involved with, Barriga is particularly enthusiastic about Gallup’s water festival, which is patterned after Project WET, and is an annual event designed to educate elementary and high school students about water. The program is held in a high school gym. Students move from station to station, and representatives from the community and outside resource groups present programs and exhibits particular to the area, that demonstrate the role and value of water to people and the landscape. “The water conservation district brings its Rolling River Trailer, which is a regular 5-foot by 10-foot trailer, that uses imitation sand and a re-circulating pump to demonstrate how watersheds work and what happens with erosion,” Barriga says. “Wildlife Rescue brings a presentation about how wildlife relates to water, which is particularly popular. NOAA does a demonstration about clouds. And, the state Environmental Department brings a model of a groundwater aquifer, that uses clear straws and different color dyes to demonstrate how wells work, and what happens when well water becomes contaminated.
“The Gallup children’s water festival is particularly unique,” she adds. “A little bit at a time, and hopefully everybody will change their pictures out, which will make a big difference in our water conservation.” According to Barriga, Gallup’s goal is 10% savings overall citywide, which, as she says, it hopes to accomplish “one program at a time.” “I think the most efficient strategy is to go for all the major big industries, like the hotels, motels, schools, and restaurants,” she says. “In Gallup, we use about 3 million gallons of water a day, and this will make a big impact.