Category — Water and Energy

This fountain is in the Carter Lane Gardens, across from St. Paul’ s Cathedral in London, and it’s part of the city’s “Refill on Tap” program (you can read a bit more about the fountain here). Would you fill your bottle here? Do you think the fountain should also have a place to sip water, for the container-less population? (Thanks to Annie Bolitho for the photo.)

That’s a question I’ll probably answer another day. For now, I present yet another mockumentary on low-density polyethylene containers,  “The Majestic Plastic Bag,” narrated without irony by Jeremy Irons and presented by Heal the Bay.  (“Over the course of its miraculous migration…”) Best watched in conjunction with Ramin Bahrani’s short, “Plastic Bag” (about which I posted on March 26, 2010), voiced by the inimitable Werner Herzog.

The Telegraph reports that — surprise! — we humans are consuming our natural capital  (food, fuel, and other resources) faster than the earth can either replenish them or absorb our wastes. Last year, we began eating into our capital on September 23; this year’s Overshoot Day will fall on August 21 (according to the New Economic Foundation, humanity first went into global ecological debt on December 19, 1987). For a fuller explanation of this grim metric, read here.

Here is someone seriously tone deaf to the growing backlash, in the U.S. and Canada, among other places, against bottled water. Michael Gerbitz has just introduced Genesis: Living Waters of Israel – bottled in Israel and shipped to the Americas, with a portion of profits benefiting Israeli “victims of terror.”

“Americans drink lots of bottled water – especially in the summer,” Gerbitz is quoted in a news release that I was hoping is a hoax intended to embarrass easily provoked bloggers. “Why not buy water from Israel and help Israel economically, socially and politically at the same time?” Let me ask: is it really in Israel’s interest to export a totally unnecessary product in bottles derived from a resource—oil—that likely comes from Israel’s enemies, and then send them around the planet using even more of that oil? (And yes, reader, I know that I buy and burn my own share of Middle East oil, and I realize the amount of oil consumed by bottles and their associated production and transport is minuscule in the larger scheme of things, but still: we’re talking about a totally unnecessary product!)

The Genesis website offers a rationale for the business:  “In the Book of Jeremiah, the Creator is called the Source of Living Waters. Just as water continuously flows, the Creator showers us with endless streams of kindness and blessing. We gratefully acknowledge the Creator as the ultimate Source of life’s blessings and believe it is our role to emulate His kind ways by giving to others and sharing life’s blessings.” Leave aside the fact that Gerbitz is selling this water, not giving it away (it wouldn’t be the first time blessings are sold), and let’s ask if the Creator would really want all those bottles winging their way around the world and ending up… oh, just about anywhere. (The vast majority of water bottles in the U.S. are not recycled.)

Around the world, religious leaders are working to apply biblical principles of stewardship to the environment– in a movement known as Creation Care — and many communities of faith have pledged to eliminate or reduce consumption of bottled water. Mr. Gerbitz: you might want to rethink your business plan.

Australia sends a lot of ships, laden with iron ore, to Japan. Then the ships head back to Australia, carrying seawater as ballast. Australia is a dry country, in dire need of fresh water. Japan currently discharges almost all of its treated sewage, which started as fresh water, into the sea. Do you see where we’re going here? Read this article in Asahi Shimbun, which describes how and why Japan may soon be selling its treated sewage to Australia, for use in those iron-ore operations (and replacing the use of fresh water expensively derived from sea water).

This is a pilot project, and I’m sure there will be some kinks to work out, but I believe we’re going to be seeing a lot more of this water reuse and recycling in the future. (Transporting water, which is heavy, ain’t cheap: but in this case waste water is replacing sea water on a ship that’s got to get back to Australia anyway.) Fresh water is a precious and finite resource. Yes, it recycles and cleans itself as it moves from one physical state to another, but with more and more people on the planet, polluting water faster than we or Mom Earth can clean it, there’s less of the stuff to go around. Why discharge expensively treated wastewater into the ocean when it can be used yet again in industry or — depending on its level of treatment — for agriculture or human consumption? (For that matter, why use expensively treated drinking water merely to flush away human waste?) To see how Orange County, California, cleans its waste water to a level fit for drinking, check out my article in the New York Times Magazine.)

Seattle Public Utilities just announced that by July 1st, 2010, “all food service products designed for one-time-use must be replaced with one-time use products that are either compostable or recyclable.” Yahoo. The rule covers restaurants, grocery stores, delis, coffee shops and institutional cafeterias. But since many Seattle recyclers already accept plastic clam shells, yogurt cups, berry boxes, and so on, I wonder how many food outlets will go to the additional expense of purchasing compostable containers.

The city collects food waste already, so the service ware and food scraps will now go into the same bin. Is collecting and processing biodegradable material less energy and water intensive than collecting and processing materials for recycling? I don’t know. But the end product – fertilizer or mulch – seems like an unmitigated good (so long as there’s an outlet for the material), while the consumer products made from mixed plastics (T-shirts, carpeting, strapping, sleeping bag filling, etc.) will merely be landfilled at the end of their useful lives.

Still, the recycled plastic is replacing virgin plastic…. Have you checked out the live feed from the BP spill lately? Start here.

I recently had a nice chat with KCRW’s Evan Kleiman, host of “Good Food,” about water recycling in Orange County (CA). Take a listen here (I’m up second, followed by pieces on vertical farming, climate-friendly meat, and more).

When I started this blog, I also started a companion site called Bad Water. It was mostly an exercise in data collection, recording boil-water alerts across the nation. I was trying to make a point: our infrastructure needs help. We have more than 300,000 water-main breaks a year in this country (breaks trigger boil-water notices, which many people interpret to mean “buy water”), and the government estimates it will take more than $300 billion (B!) over the next twenty years to repair the clean drinking water part alone, never mind the pipes that convey sewage.

But there were too many boil-water alerts to keep track of, especially in the winter months when pipes freeze and burst, and so I gave up the domain. (Turns out the feds do this better and more efficiently than I could: visit FEMA’s National Situation Update for daily reports on earthquakes, flooding, major pipe breaks, and disastrous weather.)

Today in The New York Times,  Charles Duhigg has another great piece on the nation’s water supply, this time on water-main breaks. Duhigg reminds us that people pay attention to infrastructure only when it fails, that rate hikes are wildly unpopular (meanwhile, people shell out >$100 a month for cell phones and cable tv), and that we’ll continue to pay the price  — burst pipes, toilets that don’t flush, possibly fires that don’t get put out — unless we face the music. (Americans, by the way, pay among the lowest water rates in the world.) Maybe in another article Duhigg will look at other sources of funding – more from the feds, more from major water polluters, more from big water users, and passage of a Clean Water Trust Fund (read the Government Accountability Office’s report on how a trust fund might work here).

The article focuses on George S. Hawkins, a lawyer with no utility experience who was brought in to head Washington’s  Water and Sewer Authority. My favorite line:   “When the Water and Sewer Authority needed a new leader, board members wanted someone familiar with public relations campaigns.” So far, his campaign isn’t working. Sure, fixing the pipes is going to hurt, but what choice do we have? Rain falls from the sky for free, but cleaning up that water and delivering it, isn’t cheap.

not through force but through persistence.” (Ovid)

I’m reporting this waaay late (no one should expect timeliness from this blog), but there are hints of movement on the pro-fountain front in my neck of the woods.  Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer last month released his FoodNYC: A Blueprint for a Sustainable Food System report, which includes a section on water (see pg 29).  Stringer’s recommendations include “Increase access to drinking water fountains while reducing the consumption of disposable plastic water bottles in New York City.” His goal is tripartite: Reduce Bottled Water Consumption; Increase the Number of Water Fountains;  Encourage the Sale of Water Canteens.

I couldn’t have said it better, but it remains to be seen if the mayor will adopt and implement Stringer’s recommendations. Same goes with the report, out on February 1, of the New York City Green Codes Task Force, which convened at the request of Mayor Bloomberg and City Council speaker Chistine Quinn to recommend changes to the laws and regulations affecting buildings in New York and identify impediments to green practices. The report inspires all manner of “who knew?” moments. (If doors on stairways were transparent and were left open, do you think more people would use the stairs? It’s certainly worth a try, if we could rejigger the building codes to allow it.)

As a nonarchitect, and someone who’s never had to think about building codes, I found the report thoroughly interesting. Especially (you knew this was coming) the part about water, a short bit that appears on page 23. “Issue: People buy and consume bottled water and sugary drinks, in large part, because there are not enough easily accessible water fountains. All bottled drinks stress the environment by wasting materials, using energy for transportation, and creating waste. Also, sugary drinks can contribute to chronic diseases. Recommendation: Increase the number of required drinking fountains, and also require that they include faucets for filling
bottles. Do not allow bottled water to substitute for fountains.”

This last part is important, because in some places it’s perfectly legal for bottled-water vending machines or kiosks to take the place of water fountains (sports arenas in Ohio and Florida were clobbered in the media for going with vendors rather than fountains).

So yes, these recommendations are just recommendations. Ellen Honigstock, a friendly neighborhood LEED architect who worked on two committees of the Task Force, told me,  “Various city agencies will incorporate items that can be changed without changes to laws, and various city council members will champion other measures to get them through.”

Drinking fountains aren’t hugely expensive, and private companies may be willing to sponsor either their construction or maintenance. It’s in the mid-50s here today: the thirsty season is nearly upon us.

The Times (U.K.) has a business piece today on the growth of the bottled-water market in India, China, and the Middle East. Sales in the U.S. and western Europe are down, but huge growth (between 18 and 25 percent in the next three years) is expected in places where a) the tap water is bad (that is, insufficiently treated to remove bacteria and industrial and agriculture contaminants) and b) the middle class is growing to the point where bottled-water is seen – as it once was in the U.S. — as a status symbol.

The article concludes with a quote from Simon Powell, head of sustainability research for the brokerage firm CLSA: “It is so striking how the EU and US consumer have abandoned bottled water. Two years ago, if you asked for tap water in a restaurant, you’d practically be shown the door. Now, it’s the done thing. As bottled water emerges as a growth area in the developing world, investors are constantly going to find themselves underestimating the fashions involved.”