The psychology of water restrictions – new approaches
One of the things that I never understand is why we are not all on national, permanent and maximum water restrictions, regardless of how much rain falls. We are, after all, the second driest continent in the world.
I was in Wagga this week and they’ve taken an interesting approach to managing water usage. The policy is essentially something like: no sprinklers between 10am and 5pm. That’s it.
It turns out that when they had restrictions, such as, ‘only water your garden on certain days’, everyone watered their garden on that day, every time they were allowed, regardless of whether their garden needed it or not.
By relaxing the restriction, the water usage actually went down. Now, I don’t have any actual statistics on that, but that is what some of the locals said. I’m going to do a bit more research next week to find out if it’s true.
It certainly got me thinking about how to effectively implement water restrictions. It certainly warrants systematic investigation and comparison of methods to establish the best way of doing it.
Wagga’s approach (if true) probably works well in that location because people are more water-wise any way. I’m not sure it would work the same way in metropolitan areas until there is a general social awareness and responsibility about water usage.
Every so often, I see people doing crazy things with water that suggest there needs to be an awareness campaign using examples of inappropriate usage of water:
- No watering cars (i.e. washing with a hose)
- No watering concrete
- No use of the water stream as a broom to sweep away leaves
I remember seeing one guy hosing down his car during the period when we had summer restrictions. As I walked past him, I stopped and said to him: ‘Did you know we’re in the middle of water restrictions? You should be using a bucket, if at all.’ His reply: ‘Oh, I’ve finished anyway’. As if the fact that he’d finished made it alright.
We need to do a lot more on restricting water usage. I think the simplest thing would be to increase teh price by 50 or 100 times the current price. You’re probably thinking: No way!!!
If we’re all prepared to pay $1.50 a litre for petrol, I’m sure we’ll pay more for water. Did you know that water is currently around $1.00 for 1,000 litres? No wonder no-one really cares about water usage.
Here are some things that I think should be done for water conservation, some big, some small:
- Don’t build desalination plants as the first option – the power cost can be enormous
- Put in a rain water tank in your back yard with a filter to prepare it for human consumption (people on farms do this all the time)
- Recover grey water for garden usage, supplemented by tank water
- All new properties should have two separate plumbing systems – one for sewage and one for grey water
- Put a brick in your old-style toilet cistern to reduce its capacity and wastefulness
- Recover stormwater for return to the drinking water system
- Full recycling of sewage and for return to the drinking water system
- And follow one of my favourite expressions: ‘If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down’.
It’s one thing for me to ‘preach’ on this. What do I at home?
- I tip our baby’s bath water into the garden for watering(without the baby of course!!)
- I follow the rule ‘if it’s yellow…’
- Only ever use half flushes
- Toilet cleaning with household bleach (much better on the environment)
- I don’t wash the car (somewhat due to laziness,
)
We no longer have the luxury of clinging to false perceptions and prejudices about the ‘safety’ of water recycling.I don’t think people realise that the natural cycle of dumping waste water in the ocean, evaporation and subsequent rainfall is exactly the same thing as water recycling.
General, Opinion, Psychology | Craig Errey | 
May 13, 2007 11:01 am
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