This plan advises everything from watering your lawn in the mornings to more aggressive measures like adding a 300% surcharge to the price of water. Reading through the plan, I was glad to see that “public education will continue year-round to promote the wise use and conservation of water.”

As part of this education, I would argue that we need to offer incentives and rebates to encourage people to conserve water. Rainwater harvesting and gray water recycling are just two ways that people can cut their water consumption by 35% or more. After all, the less water we use today the more water we will have tomorrow, come rain or shine.

If you’re going to sing in the shower, try to pick a song like “She Loves You” by The Beatles, not “Terrapin Station” by The Grateful Dead Live from The Garden ‘91. That’s because, when it comes to water conservation, a two-minute pop song is better than a slow, sandwich-laden jam session complete with musical guests and a laser light show.

The graph above (click to enlarge) shows just how much water goes down the drain during a typical shower. The numbers vary, of course, depending on the efficiency of your showerhead. And your musical aspirations.

For more information, visit the Alliance for Water Efficiency.

With fortunes, water quality and cheap energy hanging in the balance, exploration companies, scientists and entrepreneurs are scrambling for an economical way to recycle the wastewater.

“Everybody and his brother is trying to come up with the 11 herbs and spices,” said Nicholas DeMarco, executive director of the West Virginia Oil and Natural Gas Association.

Drilling crews across the country have been flocking since late 2008 to the Marcellus Shale, a rock bed the size of Greece that lies about 6,000 feet beneath New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio. Geologists say it could become the most productive natural gas field in the U.S., capable of supplying the entire country’s needs for up to two decades by some estimates.

Before that can happen, the industry is realizing that it must solve the challenge of what to do with its wastewater. As a result, the Marcellus Shale in on its way to being the nation’s first gas field where drilling water is widely reused.

The polluted water comes from a drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” in which millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals are blasted into each well to fracture tightly compacted shale and release trapped natural gas.

Fracking has been around for decades. But the drilling companies are now using it in conjunction with a new horizontal drilling technique they brought to Appalachia after it was proven in the 1990s to be effective on a shale formation beneath Texas.

Fracking a horizontal well costs more money and uses more water, but it produces more natural gas from shale than a traditional vertical well.

Once the rock is fractured, some of the water — estimates range from 15 to 40 percent — comes back up the well. When it does, it can be five times saltier than seawater and laden with dissolved solids such as sulfates and chlorides, which conventional sewage and drinking water treatment plants aren’t equipped to remove.

At first, many drilling companies hauled away the wastewater in tanker trucks to sewage treatment plants that processed the water and discharged it into rivers — the same rivers from which water utilities then drew drinking water.

But in October 2008, something happened that stunned environmental regulators: The levels of dissolved solids spiked above government standards in southwestern Pennsylvania’s Monongahela River, a source of drinking water for more than 700,000 people.

Regulators said the brine posed no serious threat to human health. But the area’s tap water carried an unpleasant gritty or earthy taste and smell and left a white film on dishes. And industrial users noticed corrosive deposits on valuable machinery.

One 11-year-old suburban Pittsburgh boy with an allergy to sulfates, Jay Miller, developed hives that itched for two weeks until his mother learned about the Monongahela’s pollution and switched him to bottled or filtered water.

No harm to aquatic life was reported, though high levels of salts and other minerals can kill fish and other creatures, regulators say.

Pennsylvania officials immediately ordered five sewage treatment plants on the Monongahela or its tributaries to sharply limit the amount of frack water they accepted to 1 percent of their daily flow.

“It is a very great risk that what happened on the Monongahela could happen in many watersheds,” said Ronald Furlan, a wastewater treatment official for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.” And so that’s why we’re trying to pre-empt and get ahead of it to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

To read the full article, visit Yahoo News.

Churches, non-profits, retail centers and many small businesses have been hit especially hard, due to the large amount of impervious surfaces on their property. If City Council can’t find a better way to move forward, GreenLink is more than willing to sit down with anyone to discuss how installing one of our rainwater systems can help you earn a credit.

We will examine your current water quality fees, analyze your property’s demands, and then recommend a system that will keep more water on your property (and less in the storm sewers). If we can save you money, we have done our job. If not, we will have at least shared our knowledge about water conservation and met a few good people along the way.