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December 5, 2005Residents find ways to conserveEDITOR'S NOTE: Conserving water is a way of life in much of the world, but historically it hasn't been a high priority around the Great Lakes. Now, fear of losing water to outsiders is leading some people in this aquatically blessed region to embrace the principle of thriftiness. In this last part of a three-story package, The Associated Press examines this trend. See the sidebar for links to the other stories in this series.Priority placed on saving Great Lakes resource - December 3, 2005 Cities fighting upstream battles - December 4, 2005 
A waterless urinal built is shown at the new Grand Rapids YMCA. State and federal agencies have a wealth of advice on saving water around the house: • Fix leaky faucets, toilets, appliances, sprinklers. • Install high-efficiency toilets, shower heads, clothes washing machines. • Take short showers instead of tub baths. Turn off water when soaping up. • Don’t leave water running when brushing teeth or shaving. • Instead of dumping water down the drain, look for other uses, such as watering plants. • Compost food waste instead of using garbage disposal. • Choose outdoor plants that don’t need much watering and are suited to local climate. • Got a swimming pool? Cover when not in use, to prevent evaporation. • Never use the toilet as a wastebasket. OK, you'd probably rather not. But think about this: The typical urinal in a public building - office, school, department store - uses 1.5 to 2 gallons of water per flush. About 40,000 gallons per year, according to industry studies. Multiply by all those bazillions of urinals out there and the trickle becomes a flood - or, shall we say, a great lake. Which explains why the new YMCA building in downtown Grand Rapids, designed to qualify for certification as environmentally sustainable, features no-water urinals in its bathrooms. "Anywhere we can conserve, we've done it," says Donald McCarthy, the Y's chief operating officer. "We also have water-constricting shower heads." Such gadgetry has been around for years where water is scarce. But now it's showing up in the Great Lakes region, as a budding conservation ethic and the age-old desire to save money inspire efforts to use less water without sacrificing productivity or quality. Water-saving technology and methods are being tried in widely diverse settings, from big-city stadiums to farm fields, from assembly lines to golf courses. That's fine with Skip Pruss, deputy director of the Department of Environmental Quality in Michigan, where the governor and legislature are debating long-delayed regulation of water withdrawals. If voluntary conservation reduces the need for government mandates, Pruss says, so much the better. "No one size fits all for conserving water," he says. "It should evolve from best-management practices developed by those who actually use the water and understand their needs and control measures, not from bureaucrats who prescribe standards." Gaston Gosselin, maintenance director at Michigan State University, has installed more than 70 water-free urinals on the East Lansing campus. "We've got them in about 10 buildings now," Gosselin says. "We've used them to solve water problems - where the pressure's not good enough to flush, or where the drain couldn't take all the flushed water. And in one place, we used them to replace regular urinals because people wouldn't flush and we had an odor problem." Instead of water, the contraptions use liquid filters to trap odors as the urine flows into the drain. Reaction has been mixed. Custodians aren't happy about having to replace the filtering devices periodically. "That's kind of a yucky, smelly job," Gosselin says. Other critics just don't believe urinals can be sanitary without flushing. "People have a hard time adapting to new ideas," he says. "In Europe, this is a 30-year-old technology. They've been using them out West - California, Arizona - 10 to 15 years. But around here, people say, 'Why are you trying to save water? We don't have a water shortage.' I say why use all that water to flush a little urine down the drain." McCarthy, the YMCA official in Grand Rapids, says he's heard no complaints: "People appreciate our efforts at conserving water." Falcon Waterfree Technologies, supplier of the Y's urinals, does most of its business in dry climates but is seeing more interest in the Great Lakes area, marketing director Randy Goble says. Among its customers are the Palace of Auburn Hills and the Samuel T. Dana Building at the University of Michigan. The huge clouds billowing skyward from General Motors Corp.'s Orion Assembly Facility in Oakland County's Orion Township are a touchy matter for the company because they're often mistaken for smoke. Actually, they're steam. Steam rises from the plant as cooling water meets heated machinery. Recycling water in the cooling tower is nothing new for the plant, but the process has been refined over the years so that the same water is used many times, says Susan Kelsey, GM's environmental manager for southeastern Michigan operations. "The more cycles you have, the greater the savings of water you have ... and the lower your costs of purchasing and treating that water," she says. GM also has developed ways to capture steam elsewhere in its operations - even in office buildings where it's used for heating. As the steam condenses, it becomes water, which is piped back to the power house for reheating. "You can lose 30 to 70 percent of the water used in steam heating if you don't collect it after condensation," Kelsey says. "And because the water is already warm, you don't need as much energy to bring it back up to steam. That's more savings." Grayling Generating Station isn't a big-time producer of electric power, but has a reputation for environmental sustainability in the industry that uses more Great Lakes water than any other. The station generates 36 megawatts of power a year for Consumers Energy by burning old tires and scrap wood - bark, treetops, limbs, chips - from area sawmills, providing a solid-waste alternative to landfill dumping. It also teams with the city of Grayling in an innovative water recycling project. The power station takes 120 gallons of nonpotable water per minute from the city's sewage treatment plant for use in the station's cooling tower, which lowers the temperature of the power generator, condenser and other equipment. Ordinarily, water left over after the cooling process - about three-fourths of every gallon - would be dumped into a pond or other surface waterway. But none is available for the Grayling station, leaving options such as injecting it into the ground or spraying it on the surface. Instead, the plant returns it through a 3-mile-long pipeline to the waste treatment plant, where it is cycled back into the system for further use. "It was a lower-cost option for us and it conserved water," plant manager Phil Lewis said. "Sometimes you can do a good thing for the environment and save money, too." More than 90 percent of the water withdrawn from the Great Lakes and its tributaries is used for electric power generation. Nearly all is returned to the source, except what is lost to evaporation. To a conservation advocate, few things are more annoying than watching lawn sprinklers whish-clicking away in the middle of a rainstorm. Tom Smith understands. As executive director of the Michigan Turfgrass Foundation, he preaches water stewardship to lawn care professionals, golf course superintendents, park directors and even cemetery operators. "There's a lot of interest in conservation practices, trying to be part of the solution when we look at stormwater issues, water quality and water quantity," he says. Smith is a member of a DEQ water policy committee that developed a set of best-management practices for the turfgrass industry. Among them: encouraging installation of sensors that will cut off sprinklers when it rains - or when a line or nozzle is broken. Like most business and industry groups, the turfgrass foundation contends voluntary measures are preferable to government mandates. Smith offers several examples of golf courses with innovative water-saving designs and technology. The Lochmoor Club in Grosse Pointe Woods developed a network of retention ponds that collect enough stormwater to supply 80 percent of the course's irrigation needs. "A traditional approach would have been to ... let it flow unfiltered to the St. Clair River," Smith says. "By retaining it on the course, it's naturally filtered. Some of it will seep back into the aquifer and help recharge it." Groesbeck Golf Course in Lansing was modified to retain stormwater and provide wildlife habitat, part of a larger project that also created a community wetland park. Five monitoring wells are tested periodically at Forest Dunes Golf Club in Roscommon to measure its effect on groundwater. Buffer strips and natural vegetation are preferred over heavily maintained turf, and the maintenance facility recycles rinse water.
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