Shouldn't the headline be more like green ($) is the new green?
Perhaps it’s a sign of how dire the drought has gotten in California: Water-saving projects long on the drawing board, despite being cheap and easy, are finally coming to campuses. Last month at the University of California at Davis, workers rerouted recycled sewer water to the chiller plant, which supplies air conditioning. The project will save 61 million gallons annually, or almost 10 percent of the campus’s potable-water supply.
The investment? $20,000 in materials and two weeks of staff time.
"We never really did it because our water was relatively inexpensive, so there was never a need to make better use of it," says David Phillips, director of utilities. "The drought was the prompt for us."
via chronicle.com
If the value of a gallon of water is $0.01 (one penny) then the annual benefits are $610 thousand. Let's say the staff is 25 workers making $100 an hour. The cost of two weeks of staff time is then about $200 thousand. And let's assume that rerouting only works for a single year.
Even with these ridiculous assumptions the net benefits are $390,000 and benefit-cost ratio is almost 3 to 1.
What sort of inertia causes one to ignore a water-saving project like this one?
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