Ottawa to pull plug on toilet-rebate program
Hee-hee.
A popular program that gave Ottawa homeowners a chance to replace their toilets with more water-efficient models may be going down the drain.
The Ottawa city council planning and environment committee is meeting next Tuesday to discuss changes to the city’s water efficiency plan, including terminating the toilet-rebate program.
The city issued nearly 5,000 rebates last year of up to $75 per homeowner to install the water-efficient toilets, at a total cost of $330,000.
We need to value and conserve water; Pricing water service at closer to its true cost would help pay for infrastructure and reduce waste.Canadians pay far less for water than people in most other developed countries. It’s no coincidence that our per person water use is also among the highest in the world, rivalled only by the United States. With little financial incentive to conserve, we over-consume, and our over-consumption threatens water security, ecosystems and the sustainability of our water infrastructure.
Conservation-oriented water pricing is a rate structure adopted by a water service provider where the costs of providing services are recovered; individual customers are metered and pay for the volume of water they use. A crucial element requires the per unit price charged to individuals is sufficient to affect their decisions and behaviour, thereby encouraging conservation and efficiency.A solution is to begin charging individuals and businesses what water really is worth, based on the volume they use. However, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. According to the most recent Environment Canada data (2006), over one-third of Canadian homes still do not have a water meter and the implementation of metering varies considerably from province to province. Surprisingly, only 32.6 per cent of houses are metered in B.C., 16.5 per cent in Quebec, and less than one per cent in Newfoundland, something that would be unthinkable in other basic utility services such as energy, natural gas or telephone.
The point being that unless homes and businesses start to pay something close to the really value of their water, there is very little incentive – other than for a social “good” – to really conserve or for manufacturers to churn out more “water friendly” wash machines and dishwashers.
—————————————————————————————————————————————————-
Oh, and the following picture may be disturbing for some. It is a graphic shot of a bear that was shot outside a restaurant somewhere in the US of A…
(800)