Harvesting rainwater using rooftops can be incorporated easily into our daily water usage and replace 70% to 90% water use from the municipal plant. A typical 1,500 square feet rooftop collecting 88 inches of rainwater annually can sum up a total of 6,800 gallons of rainwater. Harvested rainwater can be replaced with most household used water supply except for drinking and cooking water. It can replace dish water, laundry water, toilet water, gardening water, and showered water. That’s a lot of water that can be replaced easily by rainwater if one were to harvest it!

Living in a Mediterranean climate should also be a incentive for people to install rainwater harvesting system in every home. The disadvantages of living in a Mediterranean climate is that during summer we can experience drought, requires more expansive irrigated crops, and experience often forest fire. Due to the low amount of rainwater during winter time and the high level of runoff, the groundwater of which we rely on are depleting quickly as we pull what we need and for irrigation, it is important to harvest rainwater so to decrease the amount we pull the groundwater.

Below attached is a website for information on harvesting rain water, installing system, what methods can be used for collecting rain water, what can be done with grey water, condensate harvesting, etc. It provides a variety of ways of collecting water based on your area.


From the website provided, one thing I really liked is the street curb cut. The benefits you get would be more plants, more habitats inviting more species, carbon dioxide absorption, oxygen production, soil stability, reduce soil erosion, reduce risk of flood, visually pleasing, and low maintenance! This should be done all over major cities, especially LA because they get really bad flooding whenever it rains. Plus this would increase the amount of plants even if its desert plants, it would please the eyes and bring liveliness to the city nature-wise. Economic benefits would be that there would less cost to infrastructure repair and recovery.