Water

The drinking-water pipe network in the United States extends more than 700,000 miles -- four times the length of the national highway system. Much of the infrastructure is more than 100 years old. It is estimated by the American Water Works Association that U.S. water utilities will need to invest $250 billion over the next 30 years to replace the aging pipes, many of which leak. That typically involves digging up streets, which is costly. Enter a new platelet technology being tested by Yorkshire Water in the UK. It was developed by a company called Brinker, which was spun off from the University of Aberdeen. (It's estimated that about a third of London's drinking water is lost through leaking pipes.) The technology is already used by the natural gas...

Nobody likes a dirty workspace, but the chemicals splashed onto counters, mirrors and walls often leave a toxic residue that can cause more damage than the grime you clean off. Half of our lives are spent indoors. Who wants to spend that time inhaling unpronounceable chemical ingredients that float through the air? According to California's Green Initiative (a government funded directive) "Each year about six out of every 100 professional janitors are injured by the chemicals in the products that they use. Burns to the eyes and skin are the most common injuries, followed closely by breathing toxic fumes. Repeated long-term exposure may cause chronic illnesses or allergic reactions to workers who are exposed to...

BIOLOGICAL REACTOR AND FIXED-FILM AERATION PROVIDES DECENTRALIZED SOLUTION FOR 1,500 HOME COMMUNITY Not quite a year ago we ran a report entitled Decentralized Wastewater Systems, and this update begins where the earlier report ended. Instead of a system to service 150 homes, this report describes a system to service 1,500 homes. Here then, the viability of decentralized solutions to wastewater treatment is being proven at a scale an order of magnitude greater than the earlier example. The vast areas between the simple septic tank that serves a single home, and the massive wastewater treatment plant that services an urban area with millions of homes, is being filled in with solutions at any...

Oil drips to the ground at the neighborhood filling station-from cars and trucks passing through and from the rows of storage tanks. The spill sits on the cement innocently enough, but takes on a life of its own when rain pummels to the ground. With the force of rain, the oil snakes its way towards the storm drain and slithers towards the coast. There it joins the other pollutants that arrive by leaching into rivers flowing into the ocean. Water pollution is a huge issue: In fact, the annual global petroleum pollution alone, is comparable to the Exxon Valdez spilling 5 times over! Water pollution comes in many forms including industrial or sewage pollution. But nonpoint source pollution (NPS)-pollution from a variety of sources-is much harder to track. In the U.S, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) explains that "NPS pollution is caused by rainfall or snowmelt moving over and through the ground. As the runoff moves, it...

Only an extreme libertarian would claim there is no role for government.  In the face of population growth, aging infrastructure, and myriad new, cleaner and more sustainable ways to deliver energy, water and transportation resources, there is much to be done by the public sector.  Green public works will create wealth and resource abundance.  Green public works must include massive new infrastructures and determining what these will be is a qualitatively focused and very subjective exercise - despite the advances of science.  In California, the self-proclaimed greenest state in the USA, what are these green infrastructure investments we should make? BUILD DESALINATION PLANTS - Upgrade California's existing coastal power facilities to also include desalination capability.  This would allow desalination plants to be more easily built since their construction would...

Getting fruits and vegetables onto the kitchen table is a stressful affair. Farmers constantly deal with pests, weather changes, pesticides, droughts, increased costs of running equipment and crop diseases. For example, the moth, Helicoverpa armigera, causes crop damage in excess of 5 billion dollars worldwide per year, while the 2008 floods in the U.S Midwest have already soaked through thousands of acres of farmland. Losing a crop is extremely frustrating; especially to farmers who excitedly bought land and then purchased the popular $110,000 180-PTO horsepower diesel tractor to maintain the now demolished harvest. Architects and agriculturalists believe that many of these issues can be solved with indoor agriculture. Not only that, but by incorporating farming into high rise buildings protected from outside variables, the volume of produce harvested increases dramatically. In fact...

A TECHNOLOGY WHOSE TIME HAS COME In this excerpt from an in-depth study authored by international water investment expert Laura Shenkar of the Artemis Project, the state of desalination technology today is examined. It is clear that desalination has come a long way - and just in time, in order to address the "triple threat" of population growth, crumbling water utility infrastructure, and climate change. Even if you believe climate change is overhyped, and we do, the challenge posed due to population growth, combined with increasing global prosperity which increases per capita water consumption, along with scandalously inadequate investment in water...

Nobody likes to admit it, but there is one thing everyone has in common: Urination. It is just one of the many "benefits" associated with being alive, in addition to sweating, sneezing, coughing and shedding dead skin cells. The body excretes an array of substances, whether we like it or not. Excusing one's self to relieve the bladder from part of the 800-1000ml of fluid that pass through the organ every day may be embarrassing, but the water wasted flushing away the urine is an even more controversial topic. Toilettes and urinals use an average of 25% of a building's water supply, while a leaky toilet adds to the problem; wasting up to 200 liters of water a day. Water free urinals are the next step in the world of resource management. Falcon Waterfree Technology, developed environmentally friendly urinal stations with the knowledge that a typical urinal wastes about 151,000 liters of water a year. The idea...

Irrigation canals, water wheels driven by oxen, and smooth stones meant to catch dew drops that form during colder nights have all been used to water crops. Irrigation processes are constantly evolving. In today's world, subsurface drip irrigation is one of the most efficient ways of water dispersal. This subsurface system wastes little water by allowing it to drip out directly onto the root zone while a miniscule amount of the liquid is lost to drain-off or evaporation. This is an attractive choice, especially when one considers that water is not always an abundant resource. Drip irrigation doesn't only benefit those concerned about saving on water, however. This system is also an environmentally friendly alternative to the more wasteful systems (like sprinkler or surface irrigation). Ideally,when it is an option, wastewater (or effluent) is used to grow crops and maintain...

"ONE MOUTH, TWO HANDS," INDIA'S POPULATION PARADOX Current demographic trends suggest India will soon become the world's most populous nation, given India currently has 1.1 billion people and an annual population increase of 1.4%, whereas the current population leader, China, currently has a population of 1.3 billion people but an annual population increase of only 0.6%. India's population is growing twice as fast as China's. When we predict that the virtues of democracy and technology will enable humanity to enter an era of abundant land, air and water within a generation, it is India and China where this prediction will be put to the test. The fate of democratic...

For years the conventional wisdom among environmentalists and policymakers has been the following:  Desalination is too expensive, too energy intensive, too environmentally dangerous, and not scaleable.  We disagree emphatically with all of these notions. A small desal system on the California coast. (Photo: NOAA) The environmental impact of desalination is negligible if the brine is released into a major ocean current.  Certainly on North America's west coast, where the California current moves some 20-30 sverdrups per year past any outfall point, the impact of brine is a non-issue (ref. Sverdrups & Brine).  As for the impact of pipelines on the seabed to move brine 10-20 kilometers...

God's Own Garden in Peril: Hydel Projects threaten Lepcha community in Sikkim Few issues of scaleable energy are harder to parse and assess than hydropower. It is renewable, it is 24 hour, it can be throttled back, the capacity is massive. At capacity China's Three Gorges complex outputs somewhat over 17.0 gigawatts. India's entire hydroelectric capacity is about 35 gigawatts. The "hydel" (hydro-electric) dams India plans to build in the Teesta river systems will pour another 5.0 gigawatts into India's electric power grid. Sikkim will be an energy exporter. And the dams will consume lands and habitats and ecosystems will be drowned. Who can make the...