Every time you flush...

Depending how things work out a few years down the road, every time you flush your toilet you might be helping put some decent revenue into the local city coffers.

See this article for what I'm referring to.

From that article...

KINGMAN - The Kingman City Council on Monday chose not to adopt a new policy regulating the sale of reclaimed wastewater, opting instead to indefinitely continuing the item until additional parts of the policy are clarified.

City staff drew up the new policies with assistance from the engineering firm Brown & Caldwell in anticipation of its eventual completion of upgrades to the Hilltop Wastewater Treatment Plant northeast of town.

Once the plant is finished in 2011, it will be capable of producing up to one million gallons of high-quality effluent water each day, which in turn could be sold as a cheaper substitute for potable water to businesses such as golf courses or certain industrial and agricultural companies.

The policy proposes charging $0.643 for every 1,000 gallons of reclaimed water purchased from the city.

Read the rest if you'd like -- for now though nothing is settled on the subject.

Still, I find it pretty interesting that we know of one particular party that expressed the wish to use what we all flush down the toilet (talking about a certain solar power plant).

Until some other interested parties start showing up, wanting to buy our 'crap', I thought I might add some mathematics to see if there would be any benefits to the community.

I think back to all the fuss the water worry warts espouse about a solar power plant wasting water to the tune of 4,000 acre feet a year or so and have decided that the figure is worth this exercise.

The other figure I'll use is the $0.643 per 1,000 gallons of purchased reclaimed water (as noted from the article pasted above).

So let's begin...

There are 325,851 US gallons in an acre foot of water (the article mentions that us folks in Kingman produce nearly a million gallons of waste a day that could become reclaimed water, or approximately 3 acre feet a day).

So we multiply 325,851 US gallons by 4,000 acre feet to total 1,303,404,000 US gallons a year.

Now we divide the 1,303,404,000 figure by 1,000 to arrive at 1,303,404 units of purchase.

The rest is simple, again multiply 1,303,404 times $0.643 to arrive at $838,088 and some change per year. Seems like a nice revenue shot to me, of course though I have no idea what the costs and such are to derive at a profit margin.

So what could be done with a percentage of the revenue?? Not for me to decide, but my idea would be to put some of it towards the costs to develop future water resources to the area in one form or another. But paving some roads wouldn't be such a bad idea either... or a new Interstate interchange... or simply to help balance the budget if need be.

In any case, if all this comes to pass and Kingman figures out a way to capture some revenue in this manner -- I guess I'll leave the water running when I'm brushing my teeth. Everyone's gotta do their part you know.