Water Reuse Becomes Builders' Selling Point

One way to think about offsetting water rate increases is to reuse the water being consumed. For example, instead of paying $100 a quarter and using the water flowing out of faucets just once, what if you as a homeowner could treat that wastewater on site and reuse it to irrigate the lawn, wash the car, or flush the toilets? This would effectively cut the water bill in half every time each drop of water was reused.

As Bob Rebori, President of Bio-Microbics, explains in this exclusive Water Online Radio interview, water reuse applications are moving from the commercial world into the residential. “Last year, I was focusing on the commercial reuses of water because that’s been a strong market,” said Rebori. “This year we’ve seen a revolution. Reuse is becoming a selling point for a home, the same way the stairway or the handrail or the kitchen appliances are. It’s a real selling point.”

Rebori sees a future where individual homeowners will be recycling their grey water for a variety of applications. Stormwater will be captured and filtered for reuse or simply piped into the ground to recharge aquifers.

Bio Microbics manufactures low-cost, on-site treatment systems and has installed 50,000 operating systems in over 67 countries. A good example of the type of technology Bio-Microbics supplies would be the drain joint that they launched at WEFTEC 2015. “The drain joint absorbs water on a sloped surface,” explained Rebori. “The minimum rating for this is two gallons per minute per linear foot of drain joint. Because it’s so inexpensive, people can use two or three times what they might need for that 100-year storm that seems to come around every five years.”

For more on the drain joint and decentralized wastewater treatment, click on the audio player below: