How to use laundry water to irrigate plants.

This is a simple way to recycle graywater from your washing machine for irrigation.Household wastewater from washing machines, bathroom sinks, showers, and bathtubs is considered “gray” because it is only lightly soiled and poses a minimal health risk. When you’re only putting biodegradable products down the drain, graywater is perfectly safe for irrigating plants. Kitchen sink water is technically considered graywater as well, but because of its grease content it often requires additional treatment before being used for irrigation. Blackwater refers to what you flush down the toilet and this requires intensive treatment before it may be reused in the landscape.Laundry machines are equipped with a pump to push the wastewater out of the machine and into a sewer pipe. The brilliance of this system, first developed by Art Ludwig of Oasis Design in Southern California, is that is uses a washing machine’s built-in pump to distribute the wastewater through a system of subsurface pipes to irrigate individual plants around the yard. The water flows out into mulch-filled basins around each plant, where the roots can access the moisture. more