Students’ Recycling Idea Wins Laurels

East Valley Tribune
By Ryan Gabrielson

Scottsdale hires consultants to examine everything short of residents’ favorite color. The city, however, is not used to those consultants being more concerned about grades than a six-digit check. Sen. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Tucson, has sponsored a bill to give tax credits to homebuilders and homeowners who install [gray water systems]. “Phoenix and the greater metropolitan area just has to be smarter about their water usage. I’m not necessarily advocating that people tear up their lawns,” Giffords said. “If people can irrigate using gray water, it’s kind of a win-win situation.” If passed, the bill would offer developers a $200 tax credit for every home they build with a gray water system. When someone moves into one of those homes, the resident would get a tax credit worth 25 percent of the system’s cost.

Earlier this month, the Scottsdale City Council was lobbied by four eighth-grade students from Our Lady of Perpetual Help Elementary to alter the city’s building code. Arizona is in a drought and must change its building practices, argued students Mary Linker, Meagan Pagels, Megan Wells and Elizabeth Sydnor.

Their solution: Require all new homes built in Scottsdale to install gray water systems, which funnel water used in a home outside to the lawn or plants rather than to the sewer. They estimate more than 91 million gallons of water could have been saved each year if Scottsdale had mandated the waterrecycling systems for all 911 building permits granted in 2003.

They turned the supporting data over to the council members, who responded enthusiastically to the students’ idea. On Tuesday, the city’s Environmental Quality Advisory Board gave the students an award.

All this started last fall when Debra Magish, a teacher at the Catholic elementary school, assigned her eighthgrade students to find a competition to enter. Linker, Pagels, Wells and Sydnor formed a team and chose the Christopher Columbus Awards, which challenge entrants to solve a problem in their community.

“They decided that gray water systems were a way of possibly solving the water crisis,” Magish said. “Then we hit the Internet.”

The students found a great deal of information online on how gray water systems work and that laws and policies are changing to allow them.

Gray water has been most popular in rural areas, particularly mobile home parks, said Harvey Bryan, an architecture professor at Arizona State University. The way mobile homes are designed, with their plumbing accessible under the structure, simple systems could be built to funnel sink and bath water to the garden.

For many years, however, such systems were illegal in Arizona.

“There was a feeling that there was going to be crosscontamination, certain bacteria getting into possibly the soils adjacent to the house, kids playing in the yard putting their hands in their mouths,” Bryan said.

A recent study by University of Arizona researchers and commissioned by the state found that gray water from most sinks and bath drains was safe. Kitchen sinks should be excluded from such a system because of the risk that certain bacteria and other undesirable substances would be released into the ground and air.

The students found few people knew anything about the conservation systems. Of 203 people surveyed by the students, 71 percent had never heard of gray water systems, which already are used at Scottsdale’s golf courses.

Sixty-four percent of respondents said they would support a state law making gray water systems mandatory in all new homes.

The state Legislature may not take that hard a line, but Sen. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Tucson, has sponsored a bill to give tax credits to homebuilders and homeowners who install them.

“Phoenix and the greater metropolitan area just has to be smarter about their water usage. I’m not necessarily advocating that people tear up their lawns,” Giffords said. “If people can irrigate using gray water, it’s kind of a win-win situation.”

If passed, the bill would offer developers a $200 tax credit for every home they build with a gray water system. When someone moves into one of those homes, the resident would get a tax credit worth 25 percent of the system’s cost.

Finalists in the Columbus Awards will be announced in April, Magish said. Should her students win, they would receive $25,000 to continue pushing their proposal. In short, these consultants may not be going away.

“You know, there’s nothing that says they have to stop with Scottsdale,” Magish said.

Larry Person, a Scottsdale senior environmental coordinator, said a couple of city departments were already looking at gray water before the students began their project.

However, it was the four students who brought it to the council’s attention, Magish said. “They’re off to take the next step and what happens after this just depends on how far they’re willing to carry it.”

Contact Ryan Gabrielson by , or phone (480) 970-2341