"There's No Such Thing as Waste Water"
As an undergraduate economics major thirty years ago, I wrestled hard with the concept of waste as an externality not priced correctly by the market. We were living in the aftermath of the 1973 spike in petroleum prices and I had recently returned from an extended journey through Europe, where retail gasoline prices far exceeded those in the U.S. (We coasted our VW Microbus down hills to save gas.) I was in school in Southern California and there was a fear that lead from car exhaust was going to reach deadly levels very soon in the San Gabriel Valley. I worked hard on the idea of how one could accurately price the impacts of combustion engine waste.
So, when I read a quote the other day from Josiah Cain of Design Ecology , I was struck by the idea that water is somewhat different from the other natural resources that we like to refer to as "commodities." Cain was explaining why our single use of water—washing our face with it, putting it down the drain, conveying it to a place where it is treated with chemicals, and then dumping it into a river—makes no sense. The quote: "There's no such thing as waste water." Think about it. We struggle hard enough with accounting for the costs associated with our many wastes in the pricing of consumer products. We adopt environmental laws and regulations to assist with many wastes. For example, EPA is considering adoption of a carbon score for fuels that would account for all emissions from biofuel production: fuel combustion, fuel distribution, refining emissions, tractor and fertilizer emissions, and land conversion. This biofuel carbon score could then be compared to the carbon score of other fuels.
But what do you do with a concept like, "There's no such thing as waste water." What is a lawyer or a lawmaker supposed to do with that? Certainly a good start is found in ordinances promoting living roofs, living walls, rainwater harvesting, and gray water reuse. We may need to take our lead from the design build profession, and not so much from economics.
