Texans Answer Call to Save Water, Only to Face Higher Rates

By Neena Satija

Gazette’s Introductory Note:  This piece underlines one of the ironies of conservation: as consumption goes down, cost per unit goes up.  Water utilities are faced with the unpleasant task of asking their customers to use less of their cash product. It’s like asking a service station to conserve energy by selling less gasoline. This is one of the strongest arguments for publicly owned water supplies.  It is for the common good to conserve water, and the public as a whole can absorb the cost.  It is unreasonable to expect a for-profit owner of a privatized water utility to voluntarily give up its profits to conserve water.–Hardly Waite. 

The drought-stricken city of Wichita Falls could soon give its residents more bad news.

Even though the 100,000 residents of this northwest Texas city have substantially cut their water use, their dry lawns may no longer continue to save them money on their water bills. Instead, they will be asked to pay more; the city lost $4.5 million in water sales last year because of the conservation efforts.

“It’s tough to tell the consumer that ‘Yeah, well, you guys did a great job out there conserving water, but lo and behold, we got hurt financially, so we’ve got to raise your rates,’ ” the assistant city manager, Jim Dockery, said.

Wichita Falls, whose total rainfall over the last three years was 33 inches below normal, is not alone in its water conservation conundrum. Several Texas cities have collectively lost tens of millions of dollars by restricting outdoor water use, which has been a main source of revenue. At the same time, most of their expenses, like paying off debt and infrastructure maintenance, have increased, forcing utilities to raise rates for everyone, regardless of their water use.

The losses have prompted credit ratings agencies to look closer at the finances of public utilities in Texas. One agency, Fitch, downgraded some of Fort Worth’s water and sewer debt last year, and last week the firm downgraded the debt of the city’s wholesale water supplier. Fort Worth lost $11 million last year because of water conservation.

“This business is extremely weather-dependent,” said Mary Gugliuzza, the Fort Worth water utility’s spokeswoman. Rainy summers can also hurt a city’s bottom line because residents do not need to water their lawns as much.

Fort Worth’s goal, like that of many other cities in Texas, is to change its rate structure to avoid such ups and downs. Today, about 17 percent of the utility’s revenue comes from fixed monthly charges that all water customers pay regardless of how much they use; by 2018, Ms. Gugliuzza said, 25 percent of its revenue will come from such charges. Mr. Dockery said Wichita Falls is considering a similar transition.

Still, the changes will be hard to swallow politically. Consumers have underpaid for water for decades, said Sharlene Leurig, a program director at Ceres, a nonprofit sustainability advocacy group with which many Texas cities have consulted on water rate structures.

“People truly don’t understand that the cost of having reliable water is not the cost of the water itself,” Ms. Leurig said. “It’s the cost of all the infrastructure you have to put in place to provide that water reliably and safely.”

Wichita Falls is spending about a million dollars on a pipeline that will deliver treated wastewater to a large manufacturing company, and the city will lose an additional $100,000 a year by selling the reused water at a discount.

“We’re paying to save water, is what we’re doing,” Mr. Dockery said. He added that the city has had to defer important maintenance projects because of the lost revenue.

Cities across Texas hope that utility revenues will bounce back once the rain returns. But even if the drought lifts, officials know that water users’ habits have changed. They will never be the water-guzzlers they might have once been.

While that is good news for conservationists, the phenomenon that credit ratings agencies call a “drought shadow” will result in higher costs for all users, even the most water-conscious.

Source:  Texas Tribune (New York Times).

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How RO Tanks Work

This page features cutaways of three reverse osmosis tanks.  The first is an actual tank that was cut apart after it failed.  In the first tank, water goes in and out through the valve on top.  Air is added through the valve on the right side near the bottom.  The butyl diaphragm is pushed toward the top by air pressure when no water is in the tank but as the tank fills it compresses the air and the diaphram sags toward the bottom of the tank. When there is a demand for water, the compressed air pushes the diaphragm upward and forces the water out through the valve.

The three tanks pictured work identically although the one in middle of the page is mounted on its side.

Plastic in Our Body Wash, Our Toothpaste?

by Nancy Gross

When 19-year old Aerospace Engineering student Boyan Slat gave a TEDex talk about the ocean cleanup array he has designed, he referenced “The Stone Age, The Bronze Age,” and then referred to our time as “The Plastic Age,” saying, “Every year we produce about 300 million tons of plastic.” The more I take notice, the more I see the truth of this. We are in The Plastic Age. Take a look around and keep looking. Plastic is everywhere, and even where it isn’t center stage, it often forms the cartilage of the products we rely on.

If you aren’t familiar with the trash gyres in the ocean, please look them up online. Having just traveled for business and spent time in several airports, a convention center, and a hotel, I was that much more aware of the number of plastic one-time use containers that make cleanup oh so easy, except for the cleanup of the larger biosphere, since these items are not going to biodegrade for countless generations, if at all. During his TEDex talk, Slat shows the audience images of the insides of the bellies of dead Albatrosses that have been feeding on plastic bottle caps and other plastic debris. The color red says “food” to the sea bird even if it is far from being food. Plastics are in the oceans, are in all the pathways of urban runoff, and are likely affecting processes in our bodies.

Ocean Trash

A surprising and nearly invisible utilization of plastic that is of particular concern in terms of water treatment just came to my attention. It was introduced about a decade ago, and began showing up in the news as a pollutant about a year ago: tiny plastic microbeads are employed for exfoliation or to provide a “feel good factor” in many top brands’ personal care products, from body washes to toothpastes. The beads are often as small as salt particles and are not accidentally entering our waterways; rather they are designed to go down the drain. They are being found in the wastewater going out into the ocean. They have been found in large quantity in The Great Lakes, something that prompted a coalition of mayors to ask EPA to study the potential harm to humans and the ecosystem. They absorb chemicals, are ingested by fish and other organisms, and must then inevitably end up in food we eat.

On January 25, Los Angeles Times reported on the microbeads in the L.A. River, where the discharge from the Donald C. Tillman Reclamation Plant flows. A spokesman from the L.A. Department of Public Works says the plant is able to filter out all microbeads down to the size of 10 microns, or 0.01 millimeters. Markus Eriksen, a scientist with the 5 Gyres Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to researching plastics in the world’s waterways, said he doesn’t yet know the origin of the beads, but he did say they are larger than 0.01 millimeters. “Using a net only 2 feet wide for 10 minutes in a stream a few hundred feet across, I caught dozens of bits of plastic,” he said. “So, it’s easy to extrapolate that millions of plastic particles flow through this channel every day.”

According to Plastic Free Seas, these are some of the brands on the market that have products containing plastic microbeads:

Nivea (Beiersdorf)

Neutrogena (Johnson & Johnson)

Olay (Proctor & Gamble)

Biore (Kao)

Kiehl’s (L’Oreal)

Lancome (L’Oreal)

L’Oreal

Shiseido

Clinique

Boots

Estee Lauder

Superdrug

Garnier (L’Oreal)

Gatsby (Mandom Corp)

The Body Shop (L’Oreal)

Darlie (Toothpaste)

Unilever

These are excerpts from a statement by Unilever to its stakeholders.

“Small pieces of plastic material (typically under 5 mm in size) identified in the marine environment are often referred to as micro-plastics. They originate from a variety of different sources including the breakdown of larger plastic materials in the water, the shedding of synthetic fibres from textiles during domestic clothes washing, and from the use of small plastic beads, for their abrasive or other properties, in a range of consumer and industrial products.

Unilever currently uses small plastic scrub beads in a limited number of dedicated personal care products, such as exfoliating face and body washes. The plastic scrub beads are used as an ingredient because of their ability to gently remove dead skin cells from the surface of the skin. Many consumers enjoy the clean feeling that using products with the beads provides.

The amount of plastic in the marine environment thought to originate from the use of plastic scrub beads in personal care products is considered to be limited compared to other sources. However, a number of stakeholders have expressed concerns about the growing presence and potential impact of micro-plastics in the marine environment and are looking at ways in which the amount of micro-plastics can be reduced, including from the use of plastic scrub beads in personal care products.

Our position: Unilever has decided to phase out plastic scrub beads from personal care products. This is because we believe we can provide consumers with products that deliver a similar exfoliating performance without the need to use plastics. We expect to complete this phase out globally by 2015 and are currently exploring which suitable alternatives can best match the sensory experience that the plastic scrub beads provide.”

For more information visit the 5 Gyres Institute’s website.

Visit Plastic Free Seas’ article on microbeads.

Source:  Water Efficiency.

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Manganese in Winnipeg’s Water Not Considered Harmful

 A Report by the Winnipeg Free Press 

Although it looks bad, Winnipeg’s manganese-tainted water is considered safe.

Outbreaks of brown water in Winnipeg households are expected to decline over the next two years as city hall launches an aggressive plan to control the problem.

City officials identified the cause of the discoloured water as the presence of manganese in the city’s water supply.

The solution is to aggressively “clean” the city’s reservoirs and water mains to reduce the amount of manganese.

“We’ve identified an issue and a path to the solution,” Coun. Justin Swandel, chairman of the city’s public works committee, said during a Friday news conference.

Members of council were briefed during a special seminar on the findings of a consultant’s report and the steps the civic administration is taking. News media were briefed afterwards.

Diane Sacher, director of water and waste, said discoloured-water incidents have occurred in the city for several years but only became problematic when the city’s new water-treatment plant became operational in 2009.

Sacher said a material — ferric chloride — added to the water supply at the treatment plant as a coagulant, binds small solids such as algae together in larger clumps, making them easier to remove.

However, the ferric chloride was also releasing manganese, a natural substance found in water and many liquids, such as apple juice and tea.

The treatment plant filters out ferric chloride but not manganese.

The manganese attached itself to the lining of the water lines and was released with a sudden change in direction — water-main breaks or repairs, and resulted in clumps of discoloured water of varying sizes travelling through the water system.

Sacher said the city is switching to an alternative ferric chloride with a lower concentration of manganese, speeding up its annual cleanup of the reservoir and enhancing the water-line cleanup from a six-year to a two-year cycle.

Reservoir cleaning is underway now and water-main cleaning will begin in May.

“While we expect it will take approximately two years to implement all the recommendations in the report, our customers should see a gradual reduction in discoloured water as each recommendation is implemented,” Sacher said.

Sacher said discoloured water is a common occurrence at all water utilities across North America, but the number of incidents in Winnipeg began increasing in 2010 and reached seemingly epidemic levels in the summer of 2013.

There were more than 1,600 incidents in August. The city’s goal is to reduce the outbreaks of discoloured water to traditional levels of fewer than 100 incidents per month.

Sacher said the city will hire an independent consultant, at a cost of $500,000, to verify the findings and monitor the city’s cleanup efforts.

Other costs included an additional $250,000 annually for the operational changes and a one-time capital construction cost of $580,000 for a testing facility at the treatment plant, which will be used to find alternatives to ferric chloride as a coagulant.

One of the issues that perplexed many homeowners last summer was the presence of brown water at one home but not the neighbour’s.

Sacher said the consultant explained that phenomenon occurs as a result of an affected household using a large amount of water while the other household did not, which resulted in large amounts of manganese entering a home’s water line and not their neighbours.

“The manganese is causing a coating on the wall of water mains,” Sacher said. “That is disrupted when the flow velocity increases or the direction changes.

“This goes as a slug through the main. If you have your dishwasher going, a shower running, you would be bringing it in, whereas your neighbour, if he wasn’t using water at the time, wouldn’t necessarily bring it in to his system.”

While manganese levels are high, Mayor Sam Katz said health officials assured him they do not pose a health hazard.

“Our water is safe. Period,” Katz said.

Sacher said manganese is found in many liquids, adding levels in tea and apple juice are much higher than those found in samples taken across the city.

Coun. Jeff Browaty (North Kildonan) said the outbreaks of brown water will not immediately stop, adding he expects the problem to be under control as the city reduces the amount of manganese in its water supply.

“People’s expectations have to be reasonable,” Browaty said. “We’ll still see unacceptable levels of brown water this summer, but we’re on the right path and we should get levels that we are used to within a couple of years.”

A consultant was first hired by the city in 2010 when reports of brown water escalated that summer. Samples found high levels of iron, which prompted the consultant to recommend a treatment solution that did result in fewer incidents in 2011.

But the numbers jumped again in the summer of 2012, which prompted the city to hire another consultant who later discovered the high levels of manganese, which were not present in the water supply in 2010.

Sacher defended the work of the first consultant, adding the findings and solutions were backed by research.

Coun. Dan Vandal, who persuaded council in the fall to accept claims for laundry damaged by discoloured water, said this latest report is the best information the city has to deal with the problem.

Time will tell if this is the best advice, Vandal (St. Boniface) said.

“The evidence will be less discoloured water in city taps… which I expect by next summer.”

Source:  Winnipeg Free Press.

A Nation Chewing Itself to Death

 By Cam McGrath

The Yemeni capital of Sanaa is reputed to be over 2,500 years old, making it one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world. But it is living on borrowed time.

Economists warn that if poverty trends continue, by 2030 more than half of the Sanaa’s projected four million inhabitants will be unable to afford their basic food needs. But before that happens, the city will run out of water.

“Sanaa is using water much faster than nature can replace it,” says Noori Gamal, a hydrologist at the Ministry of Water and Environment. “The water table is dropping by up to six metres a year. By 2025, Sanaa could be the first capital in the world to run out of water.”

Yemen is an arid country, and Sanaa receives only 20 cm of precipitation per year. But climate is not the reason for the rapid depletion of groundwater stocks. The culprit is entirely man-made.

An obsession with qat, a mild narcotic plant whose bitter-tasting leaves release a stimulant when chewed, is ravaging Yemen’s fragile economy and sucking up precious water.

Thirty years ago, chewing qat leaves was an occasional pastime. Now it is an integral part of daily life in this poor Arab nation of 26 million, where 72 percent of men and a third of all women are reported to be habitual users. By one estimate, 20 million dollars is spent each day on qat, and 80 million work hours lost to its consumption.

Yemen’s preoccupation with the leafy stimulant qat is having dire consequences on water supplies.

“In Yemen, the day revolves around qat,” says Ali Ayoub, a leather merchant who chews qat for about four hours a day, or longer if there is a wedding or holiday celebration. “By 2 pm, you won’t find anyone at work. Everyone leaves early to buy qat.”

Like many poor Yemenis, Ayoub spends more money on the narcotic leaves than food for his malnourished family. He says qat stimulates the mind and offers an escape from the hardships of Yemeni existence: grinding poverty, high unemployment, and ongoing political strife.

“People say qat is the root of Yemen’s problems, but it is really just a symptom,” he says.

As the practice of qat chewing has grown, farmers drawn by the higher profits of the plant’s cultivation have abandoned traditional food and export crops. In 1997, some 80,000 hectares were planted with qat. By 2012, the number reached 250,000 hectares, according to official figures, and is growing at a rate of 10 percent per year.

The cultivation of qat has displaced staple crops like wheat and maize, which has sent local food prices soaring. The increase of food prices has had a deep impact on many households, especially among the poor, who account for 40 percent of the population.

“Until the 1980s, over 90 percent of produce was grown locally, but now because of qat Yemen must import 90 percent of its food needs,” Gamal tells IPS.

He estimates that qat fields consume about 50 percent more water per hectare than the cereal fields they have displaced. Farmers typically irrigate qat trees with water pumped from underground aquifers filled over thousands of years by the occasional rainfall that seeps through the soil and rock.

Government sources estimate that qat fields sucked up over a billion cubic metres of the country’s scarce water last year, accounting for about a third of all groundwater consumption.

Yemen already has one of the lowest annual per capita water shares in the world, estimated at 125 cubic metres, compared to the world average of 7,500 cubic metres. The annual water share is projected to drop to 55 cubic metres per capita by 2030 unless drastic measures are taken.

A population with an annual water share of less than 1,000 cubic metres per capita faces water scarcity, while humans need 100 cubic metres per year to survive.

As Yemen’s qat consumption has increased, health officials have noticed an alarming rise in related health issues. A study by Aden University found more than 100 types of pesticides used in qat cultivation, many known to transfer to babies through their mother’s milk.

According to Yemen’s health ministry, carcinogenic pesticides used by farmers to increase qat production are responsible for about 70 percent of new cancer cases in the country. Mouth and throat cancer are widespread in Yemen, far exceeding world averages.

Nasser Al-Shamaa of Eradah Foundation for a Qat-Free Nation, an NGO working to stamp out qat use in Yemen, compares qat chewing to cigarette smoking. He says as long as the practice remains socially accepted, it will be extremely difficult for eradication initiatives to make headway.

The efforts are further slowed by government officials with vested interests in the production and distribution of qat, who collect money through taxes and kickbacks.

“It will take time to change perceptions about qat,” says Al-Shama. “But we don’t have time, it is destroying our future.”

Source: Inter Press Service.

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