Water
Project tackles green infrastructure
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The Great Lakes Commission wants to integrate conservation into communities’ water management plans.
Echo
Environmental group: States drop ball on Great Lakes water use deadlines
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Great Lakes states have blown deadlines two and a half years after negotiating an historic water protection agreement, according to a Natural Resources Defense Council report.
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Conservation rates: Bad for business?
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Many Great Lakes cities are discouraging water use by setting conservation water rates.
But utility providers can lose money if rates aren’t set correctly.
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Survey shows Great Lakes trend of water rates that encourage conservation
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A Great Lakes Echo analysis shows many cities are hiking the per-gallon costs of water to encourage water conservation, especially in large metropolitan areas.
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What Chicagoans can do to conserve water
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What can you do? Advocates recommend Chicagoans take these actions to help ensure the future of regional water:
Disconnect downspouts and install a rain barrel to use to capture water for watering your lawn or washing your car. Buy a $40 rain barrel at mwrd.org or to the Department of Environment Web site at cityofchicago.org for more information. Go to Metersave.org and to set up a time for them to install a water meter in your home. Don’t use automatic sprinklers.
Echo
Long-forgotten water cistern adds to Dominican’s sustainability effort
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(IL) Chicago Tribune – Through a dim hallway, past a huge chamber filled with chugging generators and wheezing boilers, the jewel in Dominican University’s green crown sits quietly in a dank antechamber dappled with sunlight. It’s an ancient concrete water cistern, and for more than 90 years it has studiously collected rainwater runoff from nearby buildings. Overlooked and forgotten for decades in the basement of one of the oldest buildings on campus, the old reservoir is now the centerpiece of the River Forest-based university’s green initiative. The story of how the ancient cistern was put back into use at Dominican is a combination of fortuitous discovery and sensible sustainability. More
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It’s Now Legal to Catch a Raindrop in Colorado
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(NY) The New York Times – For the first time since territorial days, rain will be free for the catching here, as more and more thirsty states part ways with one of the most entrenched codes of the West. Precipitation, every last drop or flake, was assigned ownership from the moment it fell in many Western states, making scofflaws of people who scooped rainfall from their own gutters. In some instances, the rights to that water were assigned a century or more ago. More
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On Golf Courses, Sensors Help Save Water
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(NY) The New York Times – In seven years of overseeing every root and blade of grass on the grounds at the Merion Golf Club in Ardmore, Pa., Matt Shaffer has built a reputation on innovation and conservation. An early advocate of course playability over aesthetics, he long lived by the maxim “the drier, the better.”
But when a stifling heat wave threatened the club’s greens before the 2005 United States Amateur Championship – a record 17th U.S.G.A. championship at Merion – Shaffer turned to his old boss, Paul R. Latshaw Sr., for advice. Latshaw told him there was one way he could continue to cut down water use while keeping his turf dry and as fast as a microwave: sensors. More