Onto each city, some rain must fall. But we can be smarter about how we deal with it. Most of the time rainwater is treated as a nuisance or a threat, something to be quickly swept away and dumped into rivers or lakes so that it doesn’t end up in our basements. But what if, instead, that water was treated as a resource, to be captured and put to use along that path to the lake?
That’s going to require a major change in attitudes, said Kevin Mercer, founder of the RainGrid smart rain barrel company. The cheapest and cleanest way of dealing with rainwater is to capture it at the source, but “engineers are completely obsessed with the end of the pipe,” he said. Read more in Water Canada.