Environmental summit takes aim at water waste

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

The best way to make the best use of water is pretty simple: cut down on what drains senselessly away, and do it one drop at a time.

“We want people to understand what they can do with conserving and protecting our water for the future,” said Brook McDonald, who helped organize the eighth annual DuPage Environmental Summit, held Wednesday at Benedictine University in Lisle.

Advocates insist that small efforts — things like replacing showerheads or toilets, or using rain barrels to collect water for washing cars and watering gardens, or watering only when the yard and flowerbeds are truly thirsty — can add up to big impacts if enough people do them.

In his role as president and CEO of the Conservation Foundation in Naperville, McDonald spreads the gospel of resource stewardship every day. This year’s water-conservation theme was an especially good fit for the foundation, which spent much of the last year putting together a demonstration project spotlighting rainwater harvesting. The event, a gathering of more than two dozen agencies and vendors with backgrounds in keeping the flow low, offered myriad suggestions.

“We’re not asking people to use less water, just to waste less,” McDonald said.

The aim soon could take on new currency for county residents, who are expected to see their water bills rise as a reflection of planned increases in the rate charged by the DuPage Water Commission for delivery of Lake Michigan water to its member communities. The higher rates will reflect the phasing-out by 2014 of the quarter-cent county sales tax originally implemented to fund construction of the pipeline.

County Board Chairman Dan Cronin, one of the summit’s speakers and a primary force behind the overhaul in process at the mismanagement-plagued commission, said the tax receipts have come to “subsidize” unrealistically low rates now paid by the system’s customers. He thinks conservation will be a beneficial side effect of the rate hike.

“Frankly, I think if people paid at a rate consistent with what it costs, it would motivate many to conserve water,” he said.

As the county’s top elected official, Cronin takes his example-setting duty seriously.

“Conservation is just as important as fiscal restraint, just as important as openness and transparency,” he said.

It’s important to those involved in regional planning initiatives as well. Tim Loftus, Ph.D., who oversees water resource planning for the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, said the recently completed report, “Water 2050,” offers more than 240 recommendations aimed at encouraging conservation through policy making at the county and municipal levels. CMAP estimates that Chicago and its collar counties will see a population growth of 38 percent between 2005 and 2050. Loftus said with full compliance to the conservation advisories, water demand could go up as little as 7 percent.

“Now what we need is the political will and the buy-in by everybody to get behind the recommendations,” he said.

Time could be of the essence. According to Mary Ann Dickinson, president and CEO of the Alliance for Water Efficiency, 40 states expect to experience water shortages by 2013. Dickinson displayed a map showing areas that currently aren’t seeing serious drought, but suffered from significant dry periods in the past couple of years.

“Shortages come and go, and what water efficiency does is it enables you to cope with those shortages,” she said.

Unless habits change on a broad scale to harness the growth in demand, the country could face an estimated infrastructure funding shortfall of $533 billion by 2020, Dickinson said. The $6 billion earmarked for water system upgrades in the $787 billion federal stimulus bill didn’t begin to cover the need.

“That’s a drop in the bucket,” she said.

But reversing the drain on a once-abundant water supply will need to happen that way: drop by drop. McDonald thinks it can be done.

“As long as they realize they don’t have to do it by themselves, that they’re part of something bigger,” he said, “it makes people feel good.”