Do you have a leaky tap or an old toilet? When it comes to water conservation, every drop saved counts. That’s why Waterloo Region is expanding its water-saving programs to identify leaks and help residents and businesses reduce their water consumption.
The region has earmarked $170,000 to expand the Water Efficient Technology (WET) programs, which target homeowners, multi-residential property owners and commercial businesses.
The decision comes after deliberating with a working group of organizations with diverse perspectives, including the Waterloo Region Home Builders Association and Reep Green Solutions. Of 165 water conservation measures analyzed, the recommendation to expand the current programs was deemed the most efficacious and cost-effective.
“We considered everything, and then presented to the group the ones that seemed to have the most viability initially,” said Dan Meagher, supervisor of water programs at the Region of Waterloo.
Patrick Gilbride, executive director of Reep Green Solutions, said he thinks the direction is a positive trend.
“I think we do need to dispel the myth that we’ve done all we can around water conservation. That is a key strategy, not the only strategy, but a key strategy to meet our communities’ drinking water needs,” said Gilbride.
Expansions to the WET programs will include increasing the number of free water-saving audits offered to homeowners and providing additional funding to help owners of apartment and condo buildings collect baseline billing data, identify leaks and install water-efficient fixtures.
The current WET home water review program offers free water audits for high water users, helping homeowners identify issues such as leaks and see where they can save money and conserve water. Currently, the region cannot keep up with the demand for audits.
“We had enough budget to do about 350 of those per year, but we were finding demand far higher than that, so this expansion will allow us to meet that demand,” said Meagher.
Compared with residents of other municipalities in southern Ontario, Waterloo Region residents are among the most efficient water users. The average person uses 154 litres of water per day in Waterloo Region, much lower than the national average of 223 litres.
According to Meagher, expanding water conservation programs is more about maintaining the community’s good water-conservation practices.
“It’s really important that we keep our foot on the gas with conservation, so that the community keeps looking for ways to cut down or at least not expand their water use, because that really helps us plan for the future, knowing what our average consumption is,” said Meagher.
Gilbride added that while water conservation is important, the region can’t put all its eggs in one basket.
“There’s a need for engineering solutions,” said Gilbride.
This is a sentiment already on the region’s radar. Meagher acknowledged that water conservation alone won’t fix the water-capacity issue.
“It’s kind of a bigger scope and scale that we have to try and address through other means, but conservation is a good mitigating measure to help. If we help keep that current usage down, that helps attack the capacity constraint. So, while it won’t solve it, it does help, and the capacity constraints, I think, are just a good reminder for our community of how important it is to be conservative with our water use and be water-wise and all those things. It’s a great reminder to go back to look at those things as well.”
Beyond expanding the water conservation program, Meagher said the region has other ideas in the works, but they want to carefully consider them to ensure they are cost-effective and realistic.
He added that municipalities have a role to play, given their authority in planning.
“There are measures that the area municipalities can take; they might incentivize developers if they put in grey water or rainwater systems. There are measures like that that just require a little bit more discussion, planning and research before they are implemented,” said Meagher.
“Then there are some things that the environmental group suggested as well that we can look into. These would be more like community-based social marketing programs, like other initiatives we can do with lower-income settings that don’t have as much access to programs and incentives, because often that’s where we find the older fixtures, the things that really do need to be replaced.”
In the coming months, the working group will continue to collaborate on water conservation efforts.
“It’s tricky, because everyone’s got their hearts in the right place, everyone wants to do the right things, and has all these ideas, but when you actually look at what might work, what might be cost-effective to do and achieve water savings, it actually becomes a pretty limited scope of things that we can actually do. Not everyone likes hearing that,” said Meagher.
“If they want to solve all the world’s problems quickly, finding out sometimes there are reasons why those things aren’t the magic bullet they think they are. It is tough, but it’s a good process to go through.”
