1d ago

I hate golf

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I don’t play except once every couple of years... and poorly. But it isn't as wasteful on water as you think. They often use some form of recycled water, and once it is on the ground it doesn't just go away. Much of it goes deeper into the ground, getting filtered naturally, and ends up back in an underground aquifer. The "loss" is just in evaporation. Which of course eventually comes back as rain. Some percentage of that ends up in the ocean. That part is more or less lost as drinkable water. But recycled water often wasn't drinkable to start with.
It's really the fertalizers that are the problem I believe.
- Lots of golf courses also use or are part of the waste water system in the area.
- I was an irrigation tech at a 27 hole golf course a while back. We had the reclaim system you're talking about and a retention lake that we would pull from. During the winter (Florida) it was pretty close to a stable system. There wasn't much loss to evaporation and our lake didn't need to be refilled. During the summer and especially in droughts, more than half our water was city water supplementing our lake. We would pump about 1 million gallons of water per night normally. In the summer and drought seasons it could be closer to 2 million per night and half of that was city water. We were a smaller course too, some of the PGA 36 hole courses could easily double those numbers. Golf courses are a blight on the land and a giant waste of all kinds of resources.
  
  27 hole is not small. The majority of courses out there are 9 or 18. And the recycled water I was talking about came from outside the course. Usually part of the waste water system in the area. That's probably less common in Florida though. I am amzed you could be stable in the winter. I didn't know reclimation could be that effective.
  
  My mistake, I hadn't considered the recycled water would be supplied by the city like that. Where I was it was mostly retention ponds like I mentioned. As for being stable in winter, that really depended on rain. If we got a decent rain a few times a month it would mostly even out, but even then we still needed topping off from time to time.
  
  Yeah, even though they can treat sewage enough to make it safe to drink, most people don't want to anyway. So they often send it to golf courses, water features, sometimes very large companies will use it if they have a lot of grass on thier campuses. It's just a matter of piping it most of the time because they can't just release the sewage untreated, so it's there for the taking. But piping isn't cheap if it is an urban area.
- There’s no point trying to be rational, whoever made this meme clearly has no idea about actual golf. Most golfers aren’t rich, most golf courses are pretty cheap. It’s just a way for people to drink and have fun with buddies.
  
  Probably true. The courses I have played on were far from high end. And of the ones I know of around me, there is like 8 budget places for each "nicer" one. And I think there is only 2 super high end ones on my side of portland.
- Every golf course is a dead ecosystem pretending it’s alive.
  
  Well, they sure aren't helping the ecosystem, but I wouldn't say dead. I live near a golf course, lot's of wildlife visiting it in the odd hours. And that is just the bigger stuff I can see.

57 comments