Water is on everyone’s mind.Much of the Arizona business community says that there is enough water for the state to continue its rapid growth. Many in the environmental community want to slow down that development to assure that the state never runs out of water.In the middle is the government, which wants to increase the tax base and keep a strong economy growing, but which also wants to ensure that every project will have a supply of water 100 years from now.Where will this water come from? Homes and fields.Low-flush toilets show how efficient we can beFirst, while household appliances are far more efficient than they were 50 years ago, there is much more efficiency to squeeze out of them. The average U.S. household uses 164 gallons per person per day (gppd). By contrast, the average Arizona resident uses 146 gppd.As good as that is, by switching over to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s WaterSense-approved appliances and modifying the look of lawns, Arizonans can bring water use down significantly more.If that sounds harsh or impossible, consider that just 50 years ago, flush toilets were manufactured to use 6 gallons with every flush. Today, toilets everywhere in the U.S. are required to clean on a single 1.6-gallon flush.Yet, there are more savings to be had: WaterSense toilets do the same job with 1.28 gallons. Multiply that third of a gallon by tens of millions of flushes a day — and add in better showerheads, more water-efficient dishwashers and washing machines — and water savings can quickly be had.That is just the inside of the house. By switching to more desert-friendly plantings, most of the 12,000 gallons per month per family used to irrigate lawns also gets saved.Teravalis is leading the way on low water useNone of this is theory.In a project that every water conservationist should be rooting for, Howard Hughes, a national real-estate development company, is converting 37,000 acres in Buckeye into the most water-efficient planned community ever built. It is called Teravalis.The plan calls for 100,000 res …
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