Who’ll be a winner or loser as cities crack down on business and industrial stormwater releases? Hint: Think green.

Adding green ways to manage stormwater will save companies money.

Doing nothing and sticking with the status quo — letting stormwater run into storm drains — is the losing proposition. It’s going to cost companies a lot more to rely on this old way of handling stormwater.

The 79,000 businesses in Philadelphia are bracing for huge new water utility fees, and some will be hit really hard — up to $10,000 a month more for large operations like an airport, according to a story in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

But many more companies stand to see cuts in their water utility bills, especially those that can reduce the amount of impervious surfaces on their property, mainly parking lots and roofs. These winners range from chemical companies to hospitals and commercial buildings.

The key to cutting water bills: using low-impact development (LID) designs and other green infrastructure to capture all your stormwater on your property (away from buildings), keeping it out of a storm drain and letting the soil do the treatment work on your property.

To encourage businesses to use green solutions to manage stormwater, the city will base fees on the amount of  impervious surface at a facility. The more a company does to reduce the impervious surface, the smaller the fee.

Some of the green solutions to cutting your water utility fees include adding:

• rain gardens on your property, including in a parking lot
• green rooftops, which not only capture stormwater, but help cut heating and cooling bills, and
• porous pavements for parking lots.

Most cities are spending billions on giant underground concrete vaults to store runoff and treat it after a storm passes.

But Philadelphia has adopted a different approach, one that EPA favors, designing stormwater controls that mimic nature’s way of absorbing most stormwater. For example, hardly any stormwater leaves a forest. It generally percolates into the soil where it falls.

Tags: green infrastructure, green roofs, LID designs, porous pavement, stormwater