Recycling rain may create jobs and cut costs

IRELAND’S dream of exporting our floods of rain to parched regions of the world may be pie-in-the-sky. But there are other ways of making money from rain, says Senator Ciaran Cannon of Fine Gael.

He said Germany leads the way with 5,000 jobs created in rainwater harvesting.

He said that more than one third of new buildings built in Germany in 2005 were equipped for rainwater collection, an industry with an estimated €340 million turnover.

“Even very large organisations have embraced the initiative, with the Daimler-Benz plant in Cologne reportedly covering all its ‘greywater’ needs through rain harvesting and a large underground reservoir.”

“Most households in Ireland use a mere 15% of their costly treated water supply for drinking and cooking, with the other 85% being used for ‘greywater’ purposes, such as laundry. With the cost of producing drinking water coming in at close to 30 cent per cubic metre, flushing it down the toilet makes little financial or environmental sense.”

Recycling ‘greywater’ itself is likely to become fashionable among the more environmentally aware. Government regulations are being loosened in some countries to allow waste water from bathing, dishwashing, etc., be used for irrigation or in toilets.

And water footprint tracing is likely to join carbon footprint information on food packaging. It is already on the products of Ravintoraisio, a food manufacturer in Finland.