Householders to be Charged for Each Flush of Toilet
February 17th, 2009Why flush at all? Use a composting toilet (free older edition online).
Via: Times of India:
Householders in Australia would be charged for each flush under a radical new toilet tax designed to help beat the drought, reports Perth Now.
The scheme would replace the current system, which sees sewage charges based on a home’s value — not its waste water output. CSIRO Policy and Economic Research Unit member Jim McColl and Adelaide University water management professor Mike Young plan to promote the move to state and federal politicians and experts.
“It would encourage people to reduce their sewage output by taking shorter showers,recycling washing machine water or connecting rainwater tanks to internal plumbingto reduce their charges,’’ Young said. “Some people may go as far as not flushing their toilet as often because the less sewage you produce, the less sewage rate you pay.’’
Young said sewer pricing needed to be addressed as part of the response to the water crisis. “People have been frightened to talk about sewage because it is yucky stuff, but it is critically important to address it, as part of the whole water cycle,’’ he said.
Plans like this are stupid.
– Cost of installing poo-meters on everyone’s sewerage connection = $$$
– Cost of building and administering the IT side of a poo-monitoring system = $$$
– Cost of paying poo-meter-readers = $$$
– Cost of a poo-manager to manage the whole poo-bureaucracy = $$$
Since this is a public system, all this money comes out of various taxes and produces no productive gain and minimal water savings because people need to flush the toilet and they sure as hell wont have any money left over after their poo-bill for practical solutions, such as:
Composting toilets, rainwater collection, greywater re-use… all these things are cheap and actually lead to a greater total water supply.
The only problem is that govt wont have control.
Composting toilet covered with biochar instead of leaves/sawdust. Biochar reduces methane production and holds in the nutrients better. And, we all know that charcoal absorbs odor!
BTW, this isn’t for the masses. God FORBID they have to manually carry their shit out to a compost bin that their community association has outlawed.
Bloodnok
We all know there are better ways of dealing with shit but that’s not going to happen in a hurry, city wide, in a place like Perth. The council will not need to install crap meters – they simply charge a percentage of the water going into a house, making the assumption that 70 or 80 % of it enters the waste water system. The houses will already have water meters.