You might want to check out the expensive treatment systems required by Taumata Arowai as part of their acceptable solutions. There is also the assumption that there will be treated/safe water to supply you in a dry summer - its a bit like putting solar and battery on your house. If you want to be totally self sufficient then you will ha…
You might want to check out the expensive treatment systems required by Taumata Arowai as part of their acceptable solutions. There is also the assumption that there will be treated/safe water to supply you in a dry summer - its a bit like putting solar and battery on your house. If you want to be totally self sufficient then you will have to be prepared for outages.
Storing rainwater for non-potable uses has merit.
Having individual wastewater collection and treatment assumes that everyone will comply with good practice and there will be no accidents. The waterborne disease burden that public sanitation systems have reduced to damn near zero will come back with a vengeance. You can also expect to lose a lot of exports, humanure is a big no-no for these - we've just had issues with berries, and remember what happened with lettuce in Europe a few years ago
rain water is fine if you run it through a standard 10micron/1micron filter bank and then through UV disinfection - if you get really picking you could use a reverse osmosis (membrane filtration) system . You can get your fluoride from your toothpaste. I presently live on a restricted rural water supply - the supply provides 900l/day at around 0.6l/minute - it is an excellent scheme with water of the highest quality delivered economically to all of the rural towns in our district from a source over 50km away we are required to have three days storage (5000l is preferred) - there is no reason why a system like this couldn't work in tandem with roof catchment storage. These systems have huge advantages - no need for metering - no ability to waste vast amounts of water, and there is NO PEAK LOAD! Few people understand the impact of peak loads on out networks but just check the motorways - water sewer electricity and telecoms have the same problem - it is cheap to spread demand for a water supply that act alone would transform the capacity of existing networks.
Humanure is simply a matter of how you handle it there is no particular issue with sterilising it - simple composting can do that - the major point that I am making here though is that organically available phosphate is the primary limit to sustaining life on earth - and that is a very limited resource - the we presently flush into the ocean. Without superphosphate NZ wouldn't have a viable agriculture based economy. The reason why we are taking controversial phosphate from contested parts of Africa is that material from this source is free from cadmium contamination which in mamy parts of NZ is no reaching the maximum WHO levels for human exposure through the use of cadmium contaminated phosphates for Nauru.
the second point around this is that the days of flushing everything into the ocean/river/rubbish dump/atmosphere has to stop because lots of what we discard is essential to life and limited in extent - its not a matter of whether you might get a disease from eating food contaminated by sewage- it is that you just might not have any food FULL STOP as there will be no phosphate left to replace what has been discarded. This is not that hypothetical either - globally we consume 250,000,000 tonnes annually there is about 300 years supply left the U.S. Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries, January 2022 notes that : There are no substitutes for phosphorus in agriculture. A lot of the resource are also contaminated with heavy metals so maybe of restricted usefulness - there are deposits on the ocean floor however deep sea mining is both expensive and controversial.
You might want to check out the expensive treatment systems required by Taumata Arowai as part of their acceptable solutions. There is also the assumption that there will be treated/safe water to supply you in a dry summer - its a bit like putting solar and battery on your house. If you want to be totally self sufficient then you will have to be prepared for outages.
Storing rainwater for non-potable uses has merit.
Having individual wastewater collection and treatment assumes that everyone will comply with good practice and there will be no accidents. The waterborne disease burden that public sanitation systems have reduced to damn near zero will come back with a vengeance. You can also expect to lose a lot of exports, humanure is a big no-no for these - we've just had issues with berries, and remember what happened with lettuce in Europe a few years ago
rain water is fine if you run it through a standard 10micron/1micron filter bank and then through UV disinfection - if you get really picking you could use a reverse osmosis (membrane filtration) system . You can get your fluoride from your toothpaste. I presently live on a restricted rural water supply - the supply provides 900l/day at around 0.6l/minute - it is an excellent scheme with water of the highest quality delivered economically to all of the rural towns in our district from a source over 50km away we are required to have three days storage (5000l is preferred) - there is no reason why a system like this couldn't work in tandem with roof catchment storage. These systems have huge advantages - no need for metering - no ability to waste vast amounts of water, and there is NO PEAK LOAD! Few people understand the impact of peak loads on out networks but just check the motorways - water sewer electricity and telecoms have the same problem - it is cheap to spread demand for a water supply that act alone would transform the capacity of existing networks.
Humanure is simply a matter of how you handle it there is no particular issue with sterilising it - simple composting can do that - the major point that I am making here though is that organically available phosphate is the primary limit to sustaining life on earth - and that is a very limited resource - the we presently flush into the ocean. Without superphosphate NZ wouldn't have a viable agriculture based economy. The reason why we are taking controversial phosphate from contested parts of Africa is that material from this source is free from cadmium contamination which in mamy parts of NZ is no reaching the maximum WHO levels for human exposure through the use of cadmium contaminated phosphates for Nauru.
the second point around this is that the days of flushing everything into the ocean/river/rubbish dump/atmosphere has to stop because lots of what we discard is essential to life and limited in extent - its not a matter of whether you might get a disease from eating food contaminated by sewage- it is that you just might not have any food FULL STOP as there will be no phosphate left to replace what has been discarded. This is not that hypothetical either - globally we consume 250,000,000 tonnes annually there is about 300 years supply left the U.S. Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries, January 2022 notes that : There are no substitutes for phosphorus in agriculture. A lot of the resource are also contaminated with heavy metals so maybe of restricted usefulness - there are deposits on the ocean floor however deep sea mining is both expensive and controversial.