Saving Money by Saving Rain

In late May, visitors to the Beauchamp Branch Library in Syracuse, N.Y., had a chance to walk away with more than a good book. Plastic rain barrels, which retail for about $100, were available free for those who attended a water conservation workshop, courtesy of Onondaga County’s Save the Rain program, which has distributed about 750 of the 55-gallon containers since 2011. The response to the workshops “has been overwhelmingly positive,” says Amy Samuels, the education and outreach coordinator for Onondaga Environmental Institute, who helps organize the giveaways.

It’s not that the Upstate New York county is parched. The problem is that heavy rainfalls regularly overwhelm its aging sewer system, sending polluted overflow into nearby Onondaga Lake. Environmentalists joined forces with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and filed a lawsuit in the late 1980s to force the county to take mitigating steps. Faced with a court order, local officials responded with a plan that called for four new sewage treatment plants, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars to taxpayers. The first of the plants was built in a low-income, predominantly black neighborhood. Completed in 2007, it drew protests from local residents.