The Dig Co-op is a worker-owned ecological design firm based out of Oakland. www.dig.coop

Imagine your city with lush, green backyards, frontyards teeming with robins and hummingbirds, bees buzzing each purple and white flower. A city where life flourishes. Where medicine can be found growing in your garden, and bamboo for building in your backyard. Greywater could make this vision possible.

“Greywater is great. It deals with waste and turns it into food or medicine,” Tondre said, “You get something from nothing.”

What would have gone down your drain now connects, by pipe, to your garden. As it seeps into the earth, greywater, which has small amounts of soap, food, grease, and pathogens in it, is effectively filtered by the biological action in healthy soil.

“It’s like villains vs. heroes. Pathogens vs. the dark, moist environment of the soil,” Tondre said.

Once naturally filtered, greywater can nourish the roots of plants and fill what was empty space, with green- recycling water that would have gone straight to the sewer.

California has a particularly important role to play in water conservation and recycling. Our state’s economic wealth depends on the water that feeds our cities and food crops. At the same time, our environment’s health depends on enough water in our rivers. With a growing population, ever higher demands on our water supply, and highly fluctuating weather, our water security depends on conservation and innovative methods of recycling.

To highlight greywater as one of those solutions, California passed a law in August 2009 making it much easier to install a legal greywater system. Although, greywater is not a solution for everyone and everything.

Unlike a high-efficiency toilet or a low-flow showerhead, greywater systems have some degree of maintenance involved and are very site and situation specific. The size of your yard compared to the water you use in your house, and therefore send into the greywater system; the type of soil in your yard; and your desired use of the greywater are some of the factors that can determine what design to use and if greywater is a good fit for your needs.

“(Greywater) is not a fix-all solution,” Tondre emphasized. “It’s going to take a lot of approaches to solve the water crisis.”

After years of experience designing and building these systems, Tondre has come to believe that retrofitting your house or apartment with water-saving devices such as faucet aerators and high-efficiency toilets is a more effective first step towards water conservation for most people.

“More people need to save water across the board,” he said, stressing how much water could be saved if just 30 percent of the population installed water-saving devices in their homes. “Your house was a water SUV. Now it is a hybrid.”

Also, in the bigger picture, greywater is just a fraction of the water Americans use.

“The average household uses 30,000 gallons of water a year. That sounds like a lot. But its nothing compared to big agriculture, industrial, and commercial uses,” Tondre said.

Though, he stressed how important it is to do everything we can to conserve water. Greywater can be a small part of the solution to our water woes.

“We’ve got to do everything we can to prepare for the next 20 years’ population boom.”

Tondre also emphasized thinking about greywater in a different way other than as an overarching solution to our water problems.

“Greywater is less of a water crisis solution and more of a green jobs creator,” he said, referring to the creation of jobs for eco-designers and plumbers.

It is also an amazing way to change our relationship to water and to ecology. Getting out of the mindset of ‘out of sight, out of mind,’ and feeding our once-used water to the landscape, actively adds beauty, habitat, food, and oxygen to our world.

While greywater may be only a small slice of our overall water use, “that sliver of a fraction is food security, green space, green jobs, and habitat.”