Water

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Can You Get by on Just 5 Gallons of Water a Day?

By Sophie Morris, Independent UK

Full marks to those who keep a tight rein on their carbon footprint, but don't relax just yet: water is the new carbon, and our engorged water footprints need to be scrutinised before the rivers really do run dry. At the World Economic Forum in January, the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, warned that water and food shortages would be the crises of 2008. Last week we watched the escalating food crisis reverberate around the globe. Conflicts fuelled by water shortages may well be next, triggered by climate change, population growth and poor water management.

The phrase "water footprint" was coined to describe the embedded or "virtual" water in a food or industrial product -- the real volume of water used to create that product. It is difficult to avoid using products which have not been involved in a water-intensive process somewhere along the line, and the figures are staggering: it takes 1,760 litres to get one pint of milk out of a cow and into your fridge; a kilogram of cheddar swallows up 5,000 litres.

There is also, of course, plenty of water embedded in everyday activities other than eating, such as washing, cooking and cleaning. The average Brit splashes about 155 litres of water each day, compared with 20 litres for most people living in sub-Saharan Africa. Water might flow freely from our taps, but our small island is not immune to global shortages. Water is a limited commodity, and is becoming more expensive as its supply grows more difficult to guarantee.

How do we get through almost nine times more water each day than someone living in Africa? Thirsty Planet, a bottled water brand which donates part of its profits to the charity Pump Aid, challenged me to survive on 20 litres for 24 hours to find out.

I discovered pretty quickly that we waste the larger part of those 155 litres, by leaving the tap on while brushing our teeth, over-filling kettles (this wastes electricity, too), luxuriating in hot baths filled to the brim, and running the dishwasher or washing machine half-empty. These bad habits seemed easy to fix, though, and I was confident surviving on the 20 litres would prove a doddle. My "preparatory techniques" (you might call this cheating) were to shower and wash my hair the evening before beginning the challenge, and to skip washing any clothes or dishes for the day.

When I wake up, I fill a measuring jug with one litre of water, which I use to wash in, and clean my teeth. I boil about 250ml for a cup of tea and drink a glass of water. As the morning wears on I need to go to the toilet. A single flush of a toilet consigns between six and 10 litres of clean water to the sewers, and I fear this is where I may come unstuck as the day progresses. Instead, I duck out of the loo without flushing and substitute hand washing for a squirt of hand gel.

"If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down," advises Thirsty Planet on the toilet flushing issue. I pretty much follow this rule in my own home anyway, but not at work or in someone else's home. No way. As I buy my lunch from the office canteen, I don't use any of my water allowance for cooking. I factor in a couple of litres, hoping the salad I eat has been washed. I have no way of knowing if it was given a quick rinse in a small tub of water or waved under a running tap, which gushes out five litres a minute. Forget indulgent toilet flushing, the water "embedded" in all food items is the real culprit.

Growing a bag of mixed salad in Kenya, where a good proportion of the UK's vegetables arrive from, uses about 300 litres of water. That is before the leaves have been washed, processed and packed in the ready-to-use bags of which we're so fond. It takes between 2,000 and 5,000 litres of water to grow just 1kg of rice, 1,000 litres for 1kg of wheat, and 500 litres for 1kg of potatoes.

Local water crises all over the world -- remember last summer's floods? -- are already having a knock-on effect, affecting ecosystems and contributing to water scarcities. Rising prices show that water is already an expensive commodity in the UK, and monitoring usage and installing a water meter could reduce your bills considerably.

Despite Britain's reputation as a rain-sodden nation, hosepipe bans in the South-east have been a feature of recent summers. Thirsty Planet raises money from the sale of its bottled water to support Pump Aid, which helps rural African communities dig wells and install water pumps. A noble idea, yet bottled water such as Thirsty Planet and Harrogate Spa Water, both produced by Waterbrands, are part of the false economy of branded water itself.

Bottled water consumption has increased one thousandfold in the past 20 years and the global market is now worth about £25bn annually. Each year the world glugs down 180 billion litres of bottled water, two billion of those in the UK, where a litre costs about £1, roughly the same as petrol. Seven litres is wasted just to produce the bottle itself -- but designer waters with unproven health benefits continue to sell well. Bling H2O, for example, costs £20, with a Swarovski crystal-studded bottle thrown in.

I'm feeling rather good about the challenge as the day draws to a close, but at the eleventh hour, the toilet flush gets the better of me. Stuck in a shop at 9pm with just the manager, I use the toilet and am too ashamed not to flush, taking my consumption way above the prescribed 20 litres.

This flushing toilet trap illustrates why anyone living in a developed country will find it incredibly difficult to survive on 20 litres of water a day

In the 19th century, however, most British people did manage to exist on this amount. Clean water was as inaccessible and unaffordable as it is today in sub-Saharan Africa. This all changed with the public provision of clean water in 1852. Sanitation followed a few decades later, and deaths from cholera and other water-borne diseases and infections plummeted as a result. Modern water and sanitation systems are built so that we cannot avoid flushing away tens of gallons of water every day.

Before going to bed I clean my face with cleanser and cotton wool to avoid using any more water. Somewhat pointless considering irrigating cotton crops is one of the most water-intensive processes in farming. The 155 litres of water we use for domestic and hygiene purposes each day is paltry compared with how much it takes to grow crops and get food on to our plates. We produce twice as much food as we did in the 1970s, to keep pace with population growth, but we use three times as much water to do this.

Water is neither free nor unlimited. If we rethink our attitudes to it now, we should be able to avoid every day turning into a 20-litre challenge.

http://www.alternet.org/water/83735/

[willoweyes]

When I was an adolescent, I was enamoured of the novels of edna ferber. I'll never forget a "scene" from the novel "Cimarron" --a rich Southern Belle romantically (how i loved it!!!z) marries a reporter, and they travel to the Oklahoma territories, which were in the process of being re-stolen from the native americans. In any event, they move to a dusty Ok town, and our heroine is approached by the grubby landlady concerning her water needs.

The lovely heroine considers the scene around her, and realizes some water conservation will be in order. She considers various stern and uncomfortable economy measures, and comes up with a rock-bottom figure of 10 gallons a day (or somewhere close, my memory is not THAT good. . . .) In any event, the landlady looks at her like she is from Mars, and walks stiffly away without saying a word, and it takes all the husband's vast powers of persuasion (which were vast, believe me, to get a southern belle to follow him to the OK territories) to soften the landlady's heart and give them a second chance to be reasonable.

That scene stuck with me through the years.

If any of you caught the Today Show's kiss-ass segment on the Bush ranch in Crawford, you would have learned that the Bush home catches all its roof water and then filters and stores it, thus becoming water self-sufficient.

that is what i believe we must move toward--simple technology, that will allow a person to distill energy from their own yard wastes in the backyard (yes, the technology is available right now)--store their own roof water, collect the solar power that falls on their roof, etc.

I'm working on the "humanure" solution for flushing toilets with Doublecross, but he is proving recalcitrant.

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Published on Thursday, September 23, 2010 by Inter Press Service

Rising Energy Demand Hits Water Scarcity 'Choke Point'

by Peter Boaz and Matthew O. Berger

WASHINGTON - Meeting the growing demand for energy in the U.S., even through sustainable means, could entail greater threats to the environment, new research shows.

About half the 410 billion gallons of water the U.S. withdraws daily goes to cooling thermoelectric power plants, and most of that to cooling coal-burning plants, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. One of the things missing from the discussion, then, is the recognition that saving energy also saves water, contends Circle of Blue. (photo by Flickr user Argonne National Laboratory)

The study was carried out by Circle of Blue, a network of journalists and scientists dedicated to water sustainability, and could have implications not just for the relationship between energy demand and water scarcity in the U.S. but elsewhere in the world, as well. "It is not just that energy production could not occur without using vast amounts of water. It's also that it's occurring in the era of climate change, population growth and steadily increasing demand for energy," explained Circle of Blue's Keith Schneider, who presented the findings in Washington Wednesday.

"The result is that the competition for water at every stage of the mining, processing, production, shipping and use of energy is growing more fierce, more complex and much more difficult to resolve," he said. About half the 410 billion gallons of water the U.S. withdraws daily goes to cooling thermoelectric power plants, and most of that to cooling coal-burning plants, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Meanwhile, climate change is leading to decreased snowmelt, rains and freshwater supplies, says Circle of Blue.

One of the things missing from the discussion, then, is the recognition that saving energy also saves water, the group contends.

The U.S. government has not been blind to the conflict between energy and water needs. The first part of a report commissioned by the U.S. Congress in 2005 laid out the consequences of not paying enough attention to water supply issues in increasing energy production. The second part, which would have laid out a research agenda and begun developing solutions, has yet to be made public, says Schneider.

He says the U.S. Department of Energy has declined repeated requests to explain why the report has not been published.

Energy demand in the U.S. is expected to increase by 40 percent as the U.S. population rises above 440 million by 2050. The water supply will not be able to support that growth, Schneider says.

Renewable sources of energy will certainly be a large part of trying to meet that energy demand, but these, too, come with a hidden water cost.

In 2009, the U.S. dedicated 23 million acres of public lands in six states for new solar electricity-generating plants as part of its economic stimulus package, which apportioned nearly 100 billion dollars for clean energy projects. Though the plan appeared promising, environmentalists soon began to point it could have damaging, unintended consequences. Schneider notes that criticism of the impact the water-cooled solar plants could have on water priorities in the U.S. Southwest even came from within the government.

"In arid settings, the increased water demand from concentrating solar energy systems employing water-cooled technology could strain limited water resources already under development pressure from urbanization, irrigation expansion, commercial interests and mining," wrote Jon Jarvis, then head of the National Park Service's Pacific West Region, in a February 2009 internal memo. "Solar generating plants that use conventional cooling technology use two to three times as much water as coal- fired power plants," Schneider noted.

In other countries, the threat of water scarcity is even more pertinent.

Egypt, for example, has a population of approximately 82 million, but an annual water quota of about 86 billion cubic meters - and the population is expected to rise by more than 10 million people in the next decade.

Yet 30 European blue chip companies are set to invest 560 billion dollars over the next 40 years to build solar power plants in North Africa as part of the Desertec Industrial Initiative. Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia have agreed to work with the initiative. Comparing this project with the U.S.'s, Schneider notes that in an environment that faces even greater water scarcity than the southwestern U.S., such projects could prove disastrous. Circle of Blue calls the intersection of a rising demand for energy and diminishing supply water a "choke point", but energy development - whether of the fossil fuel or renewable variety - is just one aspect of the water scarcity crisis that is unfolding in various regions of the globe.

Yemen is widely seen as the place where this scarcity will hit first and hardest.

"Analysts are worried Yemen could be the first country in the world to effectively run out of water," said Christine Parthemore, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, where she studies the intersection of natural resources and security issues. She spoke at a separate event Wednesday.

Yemen, which has no rivers and cannot afford desalination, is drawing water at around 400 times its replacement rate, she says, and this looming crisis is compounding other issues in the region, like the fact that Yemen has become a key recruiting spot for groups like al Qaeda.

"We are about to see water wars in the future," said U.S. General Anthony Zinni. "We have seen fuel wars; we're about to see water wars."

Copyright © 2010 IPS-Inter Press Service

http://www.commondreams.org/print/60664

[willoweyes]

"NHK, the national broadcaster, said that in five hours the filters had accumulated four millisieverts of radioactive material, about as much as was expected to be collected in a month."

". . . . .the utility may again be forced to dump thousands of tons of low-level contaminated water into the ocean . . . ."

well, this makes one WONDER a little, about just how low-level that dumped water was, and it makes one WONDER whether the NYTimes has its collective thumb up its butt.

the NYTimes, June 18, 2011.

Tepco Halts Filtering of Tainted Water at Japanese Plant
By KEN BELSON

TOKYO — The Tokyo Electric Power Company said Saturday that the filtration system it had struggled to put into operation at the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant had broken down after just five hours, a disappointing setback in its efforts to cool the reactors.

The company said that the sprawling system, which is designed to siphon oil, radioactive materials and salt from the water used to cool the reactors, was shut down because it had filled up with radioactive cesium.

The filtration system was built ad hoc and rushed into service because Tokyo Electric, or Tepco, is quickly running out of space to store the tens of thousands of tons of water that have been contaminated after being poured into the reactors and spent-fuel pools.

Some of the tanks, basements and other storage facilities at the power plant have inches to spare and could overflow within days. Tepco hoped to reduce the amount of contaminated water by reusing the newly filtered water. The company is also bringing in hundreds of extra tanks.

A spokesman for Tepco, Junichi Matsumoto, said that the company was working to find the cause of the problem and that it would restart the machines as soon as possible. The filtration system began operating at 8 p.m. Friday, and was shut down at 12:54 a.m. on Saturday.

NHK, the national broadcaster, said that in five hours the filters had accumulated four millisieverts of radioactive material, about as much as was expected to be collected in a month.

Tepco has not discussed alternatives to its filtration strategy. But some nuclear experts believe that the utility may again be forced to dump thousands of tons of low-level contaminated water into the ocean. In April, Tepco poured more than 11,000 tons of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean, prompting protests from neighboring countries, environmentalists and fishermen.

Yasuko Kamiizumi contributed reporting.

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We may never know the true results of what is happening in Japan.