Decentralizing the Water Infrastructure: How Attitudes and Behaviors Must Change
No one wants to poison their own well. Special care is taken around one's own well. A similar set of attitudes must be taken by one who wants to recycle their own water. One must be particularly careful about what they put into water that they intend to use again in the future. This is a major attitude and behavior shift from what is common practice in today's world. Modern life is fast-paced, self-centered and highly consumptive. In the process, people tend to carelessly put a lot of things in their water that they wouldn't, if they knew that they had to directly reuse it. The modern attitude tends to ignore down-stream problems in favor of personal convenience and interest. The result is that the modern world has too many poluted down-streams.
Water recyclers take a completely oposite view on just about every aspect of water use:
- They want transparency in their processing systems. They want to see everything working in real-time and observe the process closely. The typical household simple flushes or washes the dirt and other materials down the drain; and delegates the handling to some centralized plant or uses a version of an onlot septic system. In both cases, much of the system in buried and hard to observe. Problems can go unnoticed for years.
- They are extra careful what they put into the system. They avoid deliberately contaminating the water during use; because con taminants may be difficult and costly to remove. Or worse yet, they may never be removed. They shop more strategically, and become more analytical about what is in things and their larger connections. Modern consumers care little about the affect their soaps, detergents, household chemicals and other contaminants of modern life. They are driven by the smell, sex-appeal and other lesser motives played upon them by Madison Avenue. Today's revenous consumer typically thinks little about the water that goes down the drain, and on to the next town.
- They gain a better respect for other people's water; and what it takes to keep healthy and useful. Current comsumers are not very plugged-into the down stream delemma; unless, of course, they are the ones downstream or near the site of the next treatment facility.
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Further Thoughts on the Realities of Decentralization
Don't expect to see many decentralization ideas coming from the establishment. The establishment has a vested interest in more centralization and getting bigger and more powerful. Decentralization is too often assumed to be the antithesis of what it takes to build a powerful organization. Ideas about decentralization come from below where there is desperation, discontentment and revolutionary thought. Centralized, top management tends to think about decentralization as an after-thought, or when forced into open thinking. Therefore, decentralization ideas invariably must come from decentralized areas of the organization of from outside entities. Take the popular decentralization idea of "getting off the grid". Many consumers desire to revolt against the large, centralized utility companies (mostly the electric industry). They view them as unreliable, oppressive, inefficient, impersonal and anti-American. Many new products and systems are emerging to help consumers get off the grid (e.g., solar, wind and water generation options); but few have been innitiated by the industry, itself. Often when meaningful small-scale ideas emerge, the industry fights against them and stonewalls efforts to advance them. The botton line is that it is very difficult to actively think about centralization strategies as well as decentralization strategies. Thus, decentralization ideas generally come from decentalized innovators.