Dead Pigs in Shanghai Water Supply Don’t Ring Alarm Bells for Chinese Officials

by Peter Ford, Christian Science Monitor

 

Here’s a riddle for you: When is the discovery of 2,813 dead and rotting pigs in a major city’s water source not a public health problem?

Answer: When the discovery is made in China.

The Shanghai water bureau, which oversees the water consumed in China’s largest city, was insisting on Monday that tap water derived from the Huangpu River met national standards despite the presence of the decomposing pigs.

All I can say is that I am glad I live in Beijing, not Shanghai.

Truly disgusting photographs of bloated porcine carcasses on a riverbank have appeared in many Chinese papers and websites, drawing attention to what seems – believe it or not – to be a relatively common occurrence.

When pigs die of disease, farmers who cannot be bothered to bury the animals just toss them into the nearest river.

Local residents of one pig-rearing village upstream from Shanghai told the national broadcaster China Central Television on Sunday that disposing of dead pigs in the river was a common practice. “After the pigs died of illness, [they] just dumped them in the river … constantly. Every day,” one villager said.

“They are everywhere and they smell very bad,” the villager added.

Thousands of pigs in the Shanghai area have succumbed to epidemic disease in recent months, according to the Jiaxing Daily, a government-run paper in a hog-raising region southwest of Shanghai.

Last week the paper reported that more than 18,000 pigs had died since the beginning of the year in Zhulin, a village in the Jiaxing district. It was not immediately clear how many of them had been legally disposed of and how many had been thrown into the river.

But in a report last week, the paper quoted one pig farmer as saying that “when things are busy,” he and his fellow farmers do not bother to call the local veterinary services to take the corpses away and just “throw them away where we can.” In the summer, he added, the smell of rotting meat is sometimes so strong that villagers cannot open their windows.

“What if they were cooked in a restaurant?” the newspaper article wondered.

River Water in China That You Would Not Dare Swim In

 

Hydraulic Fracturing Uses 4 to 6 Million Gallons of Water Per Well

Study Shows That Irresponsible Drug Disposal Is Still Common

 

Citizens Campaign for the Environment, a New York environmental group,  reviewed the pharmaceutical disposal plans of 59 facilities and found that 51 percent of the medical and health facilities in Suffolk County are still flushing unused medications down the toilet. The group is pushing for guidelines and legislation to stop this disposal method.

The medical community certainly should know better, and better ways of getting rid of drugs are available.

Newsday says that a quarter of the facilities in the study use a reverse distributor service to collect the unused drugs. It says 12 percent participate in a take-back program sponsored by the federal Drug Enforcement Agency. Nevertheless, over half of the medical facilities are still simply flushing drugs down the toilet, and  trace amounts of these drugs are now being detected in drinking water supplies.

 

The Farmingdale environment group is pushing for new state legislation and guidelines that would ban flushing of medications.  One would hope that medical facilities would take it upon themselves to dispose of drugs responsibly.

We’re Learning to Use Water More Wisely (But We Still Have a Long Way to Go)

by Hardly Waite

 

While there is an assumption that humans will continue to use more and more water, there are signs that we’re learning to use water more wisely in some areas.

For example, improvements in irrigation techniques have resulted in considerably less water being lost to evaporation.  And even the compulsion to maintain lush lawns in areas where grass was not meant to grow seems to be losing its stranglehold on the American psyche.

Another big positive for sensible water consumption is that Americans are eating less beef. The eating of cattle is one of our most outrageously wasteful practices when it comes to water consumption. A move toward a plant-based diet not only leads to much less consumption, but it is one of the most powerful anti-pollution steps we can take.

We have also made great advances in improving water-using appliances.  Common home appliances like washing machines and toilets now do a better job while using less water than their predecessors. Industry has also learned to save expense by saving water and many commercial machines use remarkably less water than previous models.

Another important advance that we are making in conservation is in the reuse of treated wastewater.  The reuse of wastewater is still in its infancy, but more and more cities and industries converting to direct or indirect reuse of their treated waste stream.  This takes time for people to accept.  Although all the water we use is recycled, the idea of drinking today what was yesterday’s sewage doesn’t sit well with us.  As the practice becomes more common, though, its use will accelerate and wastewater reuse  and will probably become our most powerful water conservation tool.

 

Water … Right Here All Along

by Elizabeth Cutright,  Editor, Water Efficiency

 

Drought, pollution, climate change . . . all these challenges, and more, threaten our water supplies, forcing many communities to seek out new water sources, including reuse, desalination, and rainwater catchment.

But what if we already had enough water to meet our needs? What if it’s our needs that need to be studied and recalibrated?

That’s the theory posited by a group of panelists who recently presented their finding at a discussion hosted by the New York Academy of Sciences. The panelists, including Brian Richter (director of global freshwater strategies for The Nature Conservancy), Peter Gleick (co-founder of the nonprofit, Pacific Institute), Adam Freed (director of the Nature Conservancy’s Global Security Water Program), and Brooke Barton (Water Program Leader for Ceres) all agreed that when it comes to meeting future water needs, conservation is key (http://news.yahoo.com/wheres-water-future-190622108.html).

We must find a way to endure with the resources that are already available to us.

“I related it to my personal banking account,” Richter is quoted as saying in an article about the panel discussion on Yahoo News. Quoting a friend, he explained, “If I am overdrafting my personal bank account, it is going to do me no good to open up another account. You can’t build your way out of the problem. We are not making any new water.”

“The assumption that our demand for water has to go up with population and economy is a false assumption,” explained Gleick in the same article.

In order for conservation to work, the panelists agreed that a consortium of advocates must be tapped, including the agricultural community and the corporate world. And while irrigation has continued to increase in efficiency, a study conducted by Ceres last year revealed that “many large companies were far behind the curve with regard to water conservation,” according to Barton.

The price of water must also be recalculated to reflect its true cost, said Richter who also warned, “We do have to be careful not to raise the price out of the [range of] affordability of the poor.”

Maybe most importantly, Gleick believes we must wean ourselves from a tendency to use that past as a barometer for the future.

“Our water systems were designed for yesterday’s climate, and managed for yesterday’s climate,” he continued. “We have to deal with variability,” said Gleick. “But climate change may also impose unexpected problems that our past experience isn’t sufficient to deal with.”

Source:  Water Efficiency

German Parliament Objects Strongly to ” making water a free merchandise”

 

The Hanford Question

by Janice Kaspersen, Editor, Stormwater.