|
Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger |
Flushing out new
ideas to save waterIt's one of Hawaii's little ironies that a state surrounded by water is always so short of it. The annual summer warnings (or whinings) have gone out from the Honolulu Board of Water Supply to CONSERVE WATER. A summer without the CONSERVE WATER warnings would be like a summer without a gecko climbing over your face at night in pursuit of a termite.
But most suggestions for conserving water don't work. For instance, if you go to a restaurant, you are not supposed to order water. So instead you order beer. So for every glass of water you are saving, you are drinking a beer. And for every beer you drink, you are going to the restroom to do "No. 1" and flushing the equivalent of eight glasses of water down the drain. (I'm talking about the water used to flush the toilets, not what's being recycled from the beer you drank.)
It's kind of silly when you think about it. Hawaii toilets use millions of gallons of pure drinkable water simply to transport our bodily wastes a few miles in pipes to sewage treatment centers. And what happens when it gets there? ALL THE WATER IS REMOVED. Then the water that is no longer good for drinking but isn't technically dirty is pumped into the ocean. That's insane.
The only creatures who take advantage of the drinkability of toilet water before it is flushed down the pipes are dogs, and they get yelled at for it. Dogs not only should be encouraged to drink out of toilets, it should be mandatory. And cats, too. (Hint: While training a cat to drink out of a toilet, wear gloves and eye protection.)
We are surrounded by an ocean of clean salt water, and you're telling me nobody can figure out how to use that to transport excrement through pipes instead of pure drinking water? Please.
AND SPEAKING OF salt water, how come we can't drink it? It was only a few million years ago that we were living in it. Then we became land-dwelling animals and evolved to the point where the only salt we can ingest in beverage form is from Gatorade or on the rims of margarita glasses.
Instead of wasting time cloning little green mice, University of Hawaii scientists should be conducting genetic research to devolve people to where they can drink salt water. If only 10 percent of the people of Hawaii could drink salt water, think how much extra fresh water would be available to the rest of us to flush.
The other way to go is to build large desalination plants to convert sea water to fresh drinking water. The technology is there. But apparently it's expensive. Saudi Arabians are the only people rich enough to desalinate water on a massive scale, and they only do it because they find it amusing.
A single gallon of desalinated water costs $47, which, when you think about it, might not be a bad thing. If you're paying $47 a gallon for pure water, you might find yourself down on all fours with your dog lapping it out of the toilet bowl.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com
