Well, we’ve presented ways to slow climate change from the ‘intake’ end (see Food), so  now let’s see about it from the ‘outfall’ end.

There’s an old (not so old really) adage about, “if it’s yellow, let it mellow… if it’s brown flush it down”.  That, in a nutshell, is good advice.  The less water we learn to use the safer and more sustainable our societies will be.  As we’ve said in many places, the purification, pumping, and storage of water all take energy.  The treatment and disposal of wastewater is another energy intensive set of steps.  The less water we flush down our toilets and send down our drains, the less energy waste.   The protection of our aquifers, which are being pumped out at unsustainable rates in many places currently, is another colatteral benefit.

In fact, while not socially acceptable in polite society, peeing in the bushes when you are in rural and country settings is perhaps not such a bad idea.  The alternative is the potential waste of a couple of gallons of fresh, clean drinking water expended just to satisfy our society’s penchant for burying the evidence that we have bodily wastes.

This, then is another ‘paradigm shift’ matter.  If we could go from  our perhaps ‘prissy’ toilet etiquette to one that would tolerate seeing another’s urine in the toilet without getting upset, we would save untold millions of gallons of water annually, as well as the energy the lies behind bringing that clean, clear water to the point of use, and carrying it away to safe disposal.

See also Toilet Paper.