Would you pay $10,000 for a sandwich?

Unless you're Russell Simmons and like to buy ridiculous things for ridiculous prices (Gold Toilet on MTV cribs...) I'm guessing the overwhelming majority of people would say, "No, that's silly!" And that's what I did too while watching this video in preparation for our very exciting field trip to the Harrisonburg Water Treatment plant (I'll come back to this in a minute). The point was to show how silly spending $1.50 on a bottle of water is when that Dasani is just tap water from Harrisonburg that you can get almost free (it costs the treatment plant $1.25 per thousand gallons...).
So back to the water treatment plant! It is about 10 minutes from campus and supplies all the water for the tanks in Harrisonburg which hold 8 million gallons of water total. The one I drink out of is conveniently tucked away in the arboretum.
Basically we get free water from Raleigh springs in the mountains which flows down from the mountain letting gravity do its job. They put some chemicals in it to make sure there is no bacteria then it sits in a tank until the other tanks get low and it is distributed to those tanks.
The treatment plant is capable of treating 12 million gallons of water per day but has not yet had use for its capacity due to demand. Speaking of demand, it SKYROCKETS when students swarm Harrisonburg after a summer away. The water some students take 1 hour showers with in dorms and flush every day is potable water; water the town has spent a lot of money to treat is used to flush a toilet or wash a car or excessively water the football field in the middle of the day. How very silly. Because we use so much water, Raleigh Springs is not enough so they have to then use very costly thousand horse power turbines to pump water from the North River.
Sounds pretty unsustainable and bleak. But alas, a ray of hope: One building on campus that is making a change is the newly renovated Wayland hall which is currently up for the Platinum LEED certification meaning it is completely self-sustainable. How? One way is the use of rainwater to flush the toilets... genius!
I learned a lot at the plant today and it prompted many new questions (which I intend to answer with a bit of googling!), just thought I would share some of the fun with you all!