Marketplace.org: Jimmy Lizama is a bike messenger in Los Angeles. He lives his wife, Josie, and their 2-year-old son in a place called the Eco-Village. It's a building with 40 apartments, whose residents share a mission to reduce their environmental impact.
One day Lizama had an epiphany. He was working on an apartment "doing some really heavy duty work and I was getting filthy."
That day, the water was shut off for maintenance work, so Jimmy had thought ahead and filled up a five-gallon bucket. "So I go to take a shower with my five gallons of water and I used two gallons to become very, very clean," Lizama said.
A typical shower uses anywhere from two-and-a-half to five gallons of water per minute.
"That's a ton of water that can be used to do a lot more than just take shower," Lizama said.
He did a little research and decided to install a system to take the water from his shower to a banana plant in the garden outside his apartment. He chose the banana plant for a reason. Both his father and his grandfather worked on banana plantations in Honduras. Once the system was installed, Lizama explained, "any day I took a shower or did anything where water was taken out of this unit, it was going directly to grow my plants. To grow food, so yeah, it was great."
But then the city plumbing inspector discovered that one of the parts Jimmy used wasn't up to code, so he had to disconnect his system.
California allows residents to install a greywater system without a permit, but only in single-family houses. And since Lizama lives in an apartment, he had to get an exemption. So he went to Osama Yousan, head of the green building division at the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety. Yousan was familiar with the Eco-Village so he granted the exemption.
"You know greywater has been in the city for a long time," Yousan said. "I remember in the '80s, when I first started, there was a pilot program to do greywater, but then it went away."
But when a drought hit southern California in early 2000, it prompted a shift in thinking at the state level.
Yousan said, "The drought that we had, the shortage of water made people come back and say we should have greywater as a means of savings, and that's when the state started looking seriously at it."