From the Daily Dish

The West's Water Problem

Charles Fishman bemoans the fact that a foursome in Las Vegas playing 18 holes will use as much water as a typical US family uses in a month. But the city is turning itself around:

It's illegal now to have a front lawn in any new home in Las Vegas. The water authority will pay people who already have lawns to take them out--$40,000 an acre-- and replace them with native desert landscaping. They pay golf courses to do the same thing. ... [T]he Las Vegas metro area now collects, cleans, and recycles to Lake Mead 94 percent of all water that hits a drain anywhere in the city. Essentially, the only water that isn't directly recycled back to the source is the water used outdoors.

No city in the U.S. matches that.

Ben Jervey follows California's water problem, and some of its more novel solutions:

A couple years ago the Orange County Water District opened the world’s largest such wastewater recycling plant. In fact, if you’ve visited Disneyland recently and sipped from a water fountain, you’ve already drunk this “toilet-to-tap” water.