Water quality is affected by our activities.
And as a company, you may have a bigger impact than homes or
other sort of residential uses.
You have to think about two things.
One is are you using chemicals?
Are you using any materials that,
as they go in the water collection sewer system, are going to be hard to treat?
So that the treated water, that eventually is returned for use,
actually isn't pure enough to be usable for human drinking or human use.
There's another aspect to this too,
there's something that we call non-point source pollution.
So if there's something going on outside of your building, fertilizing lawns or
something like that where the runoff goes off onto hard surfaces and
eventually into storm drains, that leads into rivers.
What we're going to see is algae blooms, we're going to see pollution.
It could be actually detrimental to life in the river,
if there are chemicals used to, treat de-icing or something like that.
So we have to pay attention to water quality and our impact on water quality.
We want to be sure that our downstream neighbors have water
quality that's as good as ours.
And we hope our upstream neighbors think of us when they behave so
that our water is as good as theirs.
So for your company, the very first thing you need to do is measure consumption.
How much water do you use?
And then you need to figure out if you can reduce that consumption in-house.
And there's lots of ways to do that.
First of all, leaks.
There's behavioral things about turning off fossils and whatnot?
There is low flow fixtures that you can install at relatively low cost,
almost no cost, that will cause your water use to go down.
Once you've done that, I think the biggest thing you could do as a change agent for
sustainability is think about what's your fair share of water and
that's going to vary from watershed to watershed depending on population,
the quantity of water and whatnot.
But in all areas, we need to be aware that there is some fair share for
our company and we determine that by first determining, what does nature need?
What does this riparian area here need?
What do the fish, minimum flow for fish?
And then what do residents need?