Shark meat worse than its bite

By Tony Carnie

 

Durban – Never mind their fearsome jaws. People are now more likely to be killed by eating shark meat rather than the other way round.

This was the warning from researchers at the Sharks International Conference in Durban, where several new studies showed increasing levels of chemical poison and toxic metals in shark meat when a growing number of the animals are targeted for human consumption.

In her presentation “Sharks may kill you… if you eat them”, Jann Gilbert of Southern Cross University in Australia said recent meat samples from at least three species of shark had levels of arsenic, mercury and other toxic compounds way above the recommended food safety levels.

Gilbert said up to 273 million sharks were killed every year around the world. While a large percentage were destined for the shark fin soup market, shark meat was also used widely for direct human consumption or indirectly in fish meal or fertiliser.

Gilbert’s study was based on toxic metals in dusky, sandbar and great white sharks in south-eastern Australia.

For instance, mercury levels in two of these predator species were 10 times higher than safety levels recommended by the Foods Standards Authority of Australia and New Zealand.

Arsenic pollution was also high, with some sharks containing arsenic concentrations significantly higher than safety recommendations.

Very high levels of arsenic had also been found in hammerhead sharks in the Mediterranean sea in a separate study.

Gilbert said her results were comparable to many other studies from around the world, which indicated that shark meat was becoming increasingly toxic and unsafe for human consumption.

While it was difficult to provide an exact guideline on safe levels for those who consumed the meat regularly, she suggested that most sharks more than 150cm long were “not likely” to be safe for consumption.

Because high mercury levels could damage the brains of developing human babies in the womb, Gilbert would not advise pregnant women to eat shark meat more than once a fortnight.

Kady Lyons, of the University of Calgary, said that apex predators such as sharks were prone to bio-accumulating and bio-magnifying man-made chemical poisons because they were at the top of the food chain, especially if they fed along the coast next to large cities and farming areas.

Some of these toxic chemicals, including DDT and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), were also being passed on to young sharks from the fatty tissues of their mothers.

Mercury threat

Daniel Fernando, a marine biologist from Linnaeus University in Sweden, told the Durban conference that a study of manta rays and other shark-like species in Sri Lanka and China showed high concentrations of mercury and other toxic substances were above international recommendations for human consumption.

The chemicals they found came from a wide variety of human sources, such as wood preservatives, marine anti-fouling agents or insecticides.

 

In his keynote speech, Dr David Ebert of the Pacific Shark Research Centre in California, said sharks continued to conjure up images of large and fearsome predators with a large dorsal fin cutting through the surface of the sea.

“However, the reality is that sharks come in a variety of sizes and shapes – from the giant whale shark (the world’s largest fish) to the dwarf pygmy sharks.” – The Mercury

 

Source: iolscitech

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What’s Clogging Your Membrane?

by Ryan Lessing, Watts Water Quality

Want to know what’s clogging your commercial RO membranes? The next time your RO stops producing water, try using your senses to determine why.

  • Smell:Does the membrane have a fishy or moldy odor when removed from the housing? If it does it’s likely that bacteria/bio film is present. Cut the membrane lengthwise and unroll it like a roll of paper towels.
  • Feel: The membrane material should feel like clean wet plastic. If there’s slime or a slippery film present it means the membrane could be bio-fouled. If the membrane’s texture feels like sand paper it means a mineral fouling is present.

To test mineral fouling, unroll and dry a sample of membrane, scrape up a sample of the mineral, put it into a beaker, and soak it in RO water with a pH of 4 (adjusted with muratic acid) for one hour. Then readjust the pH back to 7 with baking soda and use a field kit to test for hardness and/or iron. Is hardness present? If yes, your softener isn’t working all the time. Then scrape up a second sample of scale and put a drop of vinegar on it. If it foams it is carbonate; if not it could be sulfate.

  • Sight: Is there discoloration on the membrane surface? A red/brown discoloration indicates possible iron fouling while grey/brown indicates possible silt fouling.

Source: Watts Email Newsletter.

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Gluten Found in Portland’s Water Supply

Authorities in Portland, Ore. have discovered detectable levels of gluten in the city’s water supply, causing a citywide panic.

The city’s water bureau discovered the contamination yesterday and is desperately trying to find out how gluten got into the water. A preliminary report found that the contamination may have occurred “at least eight or nine months ago” when a child dropped a loaf of bread into a local river.

Officials have declared a state of emergency and plan to drain all of the city’s reservoirs. The mayor has also deployed city’s spiritual and wellness counselors to provide relief to beleaguered residents who drank the gluten-contaminated water.

“I haven’t seen anything like this since the Tofu Crisis of ‘08, when we discovered that the Pacific Northwest’s entire supply of tofu had been prepared alongside bacon,” said city engineer Bryce Shivers. “I imagine we’re going to be seeing the disastrous effects of this on the city for decades, like higher rates of obesity, cancer, brain damage and illiteracy.

“Or whatever it is that gluten does. Frankly, I have no idea. My Hot Yoga guru just gave me a brochure.”

Make it grain (free)

Gluten, a type of protein in wheats and certain grains, is found in numerous products including flour, pasta, pastries, beer, cereal, salad dressings and lip balm.

Although gluten-free food is recommended for people with celiac disease, it has become a fad diet for many, including millions in trendier-than-thou Portland. Gluten-free foods are becoming mainstream throughout the U.S. — even though very few consumers can explain what gluten is or why they think it’s bad.

“This is the worst news I’ve ever heard,” Portland resident Steve Arlo said as he sat drinking a microbrew made with barley and rye. “It’s like being told they dumped fluoride into the water supply. Wait! Have they dumped fluoride into the water supply?”

Dex Parios said she started her gluten-free diet “before anyone ever heard of it.” Now depressed by the news about the gluten, she is concerned that Portland is losing its reputation for livability and alternative lifestyles.

“When I moved here after getting my master’s degree in order to work part time at a record store, I thought Portland was a haven for intelligent, well-educated and cultured people,” she said. “But it’s so dangerous. Our leaders can’t even protect us from chemtrails, cell phone towers, bark dust fires, Republicans, people trying to talk to you, and now gluten outbreaks. It’s becoming like Baghdad or Afghanistan day by day.

“If I want to live in a city filled with provincial, arrogant, short-sighted morons, I’ll move to Gresham.”

Despite the paranoia gripping Portland’s streets, not all scientists are convinced by the city’s analysis and believe the water bureau has made  a grave error.

“Gluten is not soluble in water, so it’s extremely unlikely to be found in tap water,” says Dr. Chaz Friday of Portland State University. “Nevertheless, just to be on the safe side perhaps hipsters with gluten-sensitivity should move to Seattle instead.”

Source: The Daily Currant

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A Guide to Small Inline Water Filters

Small disposable inline water filters provide an easy way to add a water filter almost anywhere.  They can be used as stand-alone filters or can be added to existing filters.

Typical uses:

Refrigerator filter, to remove chlorine or chloramine from city water.

Add-on filter, to raise the pH or add mineral content to water from an undersink reverse osmosis unit.

Add-on filter to protect an existing undersink filter or RO unit from sediment.

The final or “polishing” stage of an undersink reverse osmosis unit.

An inexpensive  independent undersink filter to improve taste and odor of city tap water.

The most common format for small inlines today is with quick connect (a.k.a. John Guest) fittings, but they can still be installed with plastic compression fittings (Jaco style) or conventional copper compression fittings. They come in 6″ length, 10″, and larger.  By far the most popular size is the 10″.  They can be installed with inexpensive clips, or they be laid on the floor, or even, because of their light weight,  installed on a vertical  tube like an undersink faucet line without additional support.

Here are the fitting styles available.

 

The filter above has what  is currently the most popular connection method. The 1/4″ quick connect above is used widely for refrigerator filters and reverse osmosis postfilters.  Simply push in the tube until it “hits bottom” and the connection is made. This filter comes from the factory with quick connect fittings built in. These are virtually leak proof when used with plastic tubing because when the filter is replaced, the fitting is also replaced.   To release, press in on the collet (the red ring) with your thumbnail or  other release tool and pull the tube out. These fittings can be used with copper tubing, but they work much better with plastic.  The fitting in the picture is a straight-in fitting, but you can make a 90 degree fitting easily by using a socalled a plug-in elbow:

 

The same filters can be purchased with female threads.  Below is a standard 1/4″ threaded filter:

The threaded filter can be used either with quick connect filters added. with “Jaco” plastic compression fittings, or with standard hardware-store grade metal compression fittings.  Just telflon tape the threaded portion of the fitting and screw it into the filter.

 Metal Compression Fitting

 

Quick Connect Elbow

Jaco Plastic Compression Fitting

Inline filters can serve as stand-alone taste/odor/chemical filters. They can raise the pH of acidic water. They can protect appliances like coffee makers and ice machines. They can remove lead and heavy metals. They can remove sediment.  Carbon inlines come with standard GAC, coconut shell GAC, and in several carbon block styles.

More information.

Inline filters available from Pure Water Products.

 

World Oceans Day


Posted June 8th, 2014

World Oceans Day 2014: World’s Most Polluted Seas Revealed

By Ludovica Iaccino

Sunday 8 June is World Oceans Day, an event to raise global awareness about threats to the oceans and promote marine conservation. The special day has been recognised by the United Nations since 2008.

According to World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), more than 80% of marine pollution is caused by land-based activities that cause oil spills, fertilisers and toxic chemical runoff and the discharge of untreated sewage.

Some water pollution starts also as air pollution, which settles into waterways and oceans, according to the United States’ National Ocean Service.

More than 80% of marine pollution is caused by land-based activities.

 

IBTimes UK looks at the most polluted oceans areas and seas in the world.

Atlantic Ocean – Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone
The Gulf of Mexico is a basin in the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the gulf coast of the United States, Mexico and Cuba.

The dead zone here is one of the largest in the world.

Its waters are full of nitrogen and phosphorous that come from major farming states in the Mississippi River Valley, including Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

The presence of these chemicals frequently turns Gulf of Mexico waters hypoxic, or low in oxygen.

Hypoxia kills fish in huge numbers.

“Hypoxia in bottom waters covered an average of 8,000–9,000 km2 in 1985–92 but increased to 16,000–20,000 km2 in 1993–99,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Atlantic Ocean – North Atlantic Garbage Patch
This patch was first documented in 1972 and is entirely composed of man-made marine debris floating in the North Atlantic Gyre.

Scientists estimate that the North Atlantic Garbage Patch is hundreds of kilometres in size and has a density of 200,000 pieces of trash per square kilometre in some places.

Pacific Ocean – Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Located in the northern Pacific Ocean, near the North Pacific Gyre, this collection of marine debris is largely composed of plastic and chemical sludge.

This patch is believed to have formed gradually as marine pollution was brought together by ocean currents.

The exact size of the patch is unknown, but estimates range from 700,000 sq km (270,000 sq miles) to more than 15 million sq km  (5.8 million sq miles). Because the floating debris is largely composed of microscopic pieces of plastic, it is invisible from space.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch collects marine debris from North America and Asia, as well as ships travelling through the area.

Rubbish from the coast of North America takes about six years to reach the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, while detritus from Japan and other Asian countries takes about a year.

Indian Ocean
A garbage patch in the Indian Ocean was discovered in 2010. This patch, mainly formed by plastic debris and chemical sludge, is the third major collection of plastic garbage in the world’s oceans.

According to the Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX), the Indian Ocean is gravely polluted by plastic debris and chemical runoff, resulting in hypoxia.

INDOEX has documented widespread pollution covering about 10 million sq km (3.86 million sq miles).

According to scientists, tropical cyclones that cause large numbers of deaths around the Arabian Sea (region in the northern Indian Ocean) are becoming increasingly common as a result of pollution.

Mediterranean Sea
The Mediterranean is probably the most polluted ocean in the world.

The United Nations Environment Programme has estimated that 650,000,000 tons of sewage, 129,000 tons of mineral oil, 60,000 tons of mercury, 3,800 tons of lead and 36,000 tons of phosphates are dumped into the Mediterranean each year.

Because it is so enclosed by land, the warm waters of the Mediterranean take more than 100 years to clean and renew themselves, according to Greenpeace.

Due to the high rates of pollution, many marine species are at risk of extinction, among them the Mediterranean Monk Seal, one of the world’s most endangered marine mammals.

Baltic Sea
Overfishing, oil spills and land-based pollution are high threats to the Baltic Sea, situated between Central and Eastern Europe.

Half of the fish species in the Baltic are at levels below the critical biological level.

As it only has a narrow outlet to the ocean – between Sweden and Denmark – its water takes 25-30 years to refresh itself.

The health authorities of Finland have warned against eating some species, such as Baltic herring, from the Baltic Sea.

Caribbean Sea
Located in the northern part of the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea is one of the areas most seriously damaged by human activity.

According to a study by the National Centre for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), oil spills, over-fishing, pollution and climate change are killing marine life. Oyster and sea grass beds, mangroves, fisheries and coral are slowly disappearing.

To find out more about World Oceans Day, head to the official World Oceans Day website.

Source:  International Business Times.

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Sierra rises, quakes erupt as Central Valley aquifer drained

by David Perlman

 Are We Creating Earthquakes by Overuse of Water?

The Sierra Nevada is rising.

Drought-stricken farmers in the Central Valley are pumping more and more water from the valley’s huge aquifer beneath them, and the drainage is triggering unexpected earthquakes along the San Andreas Fault, scientists have discovered.

For the past 150 years, they report, periodic pumping from the aquifer has caused the towering Sierra to rebound upward as much as 150 millimeters, or about 6 inches. At the same time, they note, California’s Coast Range, which spans 400 miles from Humboldt to Santa Barbara counties, has grown, although by much less.

The pace of uplift in the Sierra is measured only in millimeters, but when California experienced bone-dry seasons between 2003 and 2010 and pumping increased up and down the Central Valley, the High Sierra rose by about 10 millimeters, the geophysicists say. That’s nearly half an inch during those seven years alone.

During that same period of increased pumping, instruments at Parkfield in Monterey County detected unusual clusters of earthquakes along the quake-prone San Andreas Fault there.

The unexpected links between the periodic drainage of the Central Valley’s aquifer and the rise of the mountains that increase stresses on the San Andreas fault zone are reported in the May issue of the journal Nature.

Its authors are a team of Earth scientists led by Colin Amos of Western Washington University and includes Roland Bürgmann of UC Berkeley and William Hammond of theUniversity of Nevada in Reno.

GPS sensitivity

The remarkable ability to measure tiny changes in the height of mountains is made possible by the extraordinary sensitivity of advanced global positioning systems, similar in principle to the GPS devices that tell car drivers where they’re going in unfamiliar cities, block by block.

Hammond and his colleagues at the Nevada Seismological Laboratory regularly analyze signs of the Earth’s movements from more than 12,000 GPS stations around the world. For this study, the team focused on 566 stations in California and Nevada.

“The whole Earth is elastic,” Hammond said, “and when it moves even slightly we can measure it.”

Amos, the study’s lead author, explained the connections.

“As winter snows melt and rains fill the aquifer each year, the enormous weight of the water pushes the Earth’s crust downward beneath both the valley and the mountains,” he said. “Then as pumping drains the aquifer, particularly in dry years, the crust springs upward – mountains, valleys and all – and the rocks rebound like elastic.”

Amos calculated that the amount of water pumped from the great aquifer since 1860 would be enormous, weighing roughly 175 billion tons, more than enough to fill Lake Tahoe.

‘Real eye-opener’

“The periodic stress on earthquake faults would be very small, but in some circumstances even such small stress changes can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” Bürgmann said. “The stresses from the rebounding mountains would give just that extra force needed to unclamp the (San Andreas) fault and encourage, not only small earthquakes, but also larger ruptures to occur.”

“This is a real eye-opener,” said James Famiglietti, a water resource expert and director of the UC Center for Hydrologic Modeling at UC Irvine who has long studied the great aquifer’s long-term drainage issues and its seasonal water losses. He called the study’s conclusions surprising and valid.

“The whole role of fluids and seismicity is still poorly understood. They have identified a real link between human activity and earthquakes,” said Famiglietti, who was not part of the study.

“It forces us to consider not only the role that large groundwater mass changes can play in earthquake frequency, but by extension, the roles of water management decisions in times of drought and climate change.”

Source: SFGate.

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Nation’s largest ocean desalination plant goes up near San Diego; Future of the California coast?

by Paul Rogers

Racks containing reverse osmosis components at the $1 billion Carlsbad desalination plant in Carlsbad, California.  When completed in 2016, it will be the largest desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere and will produce 50 million gallons per day.

 

CARLSBAD — On sunny afternoons, this stretch of beach 35 miles north of San Diego offers a classic So uthern California backdrop: joggers, palm trees and surfers, flanked by waves rolling in and pelicans soaring overhead.

But just across the road, another scene, unlike any other in the state’s history, is playing out: More than 300 construction workers are digging trenches and assembling a vast network of pipes, tanks and high-tech equipment as three massive yellow cranes labor nearby.

The crews are building what boosters say represents California’s best hope for a drought-proof water supply: the largest ocean desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere. The $1 billion project will provide 50 million gallons of drinking water a day for San Diego County when it opens in 2016.

Since the 1970s, California has dipped its toe into ocean desalination –talking, planning, debating. But for a variety of reasons — mainly cost and environmental concerns– the state has never taken the plunge.

Until now.

Fifteen desalination projects are proposed along the coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco Bay. Desalination technology is becoming more efficient. And the state is mired in its third year of drought. Critics and backers alike are wondering whether this project in a town better known as the home of Legoland and skateboard icon Tony Hawk is ushering in a new era.

Will California — like Israel, Saudi Arabia and other arid coastal regions of the world — finally turn to the ocean to quench its thirst? Or will the project finally prove that drinking Pacific seawater is too pricey, too environmentally harmful and too impractical for the Golden State?

“Everybody is watching Carlsbad to see what’s going to happen,” said Peter MacLaggan, vice president of Poseidon Water, the Boston firm building the plant.

“I think it will be a growing trend along the coast,” he said. “The ocean is the one source of water that’s truly drought-proof. And it will always be there.”

To supporters, the Carlsbad Desalination Plant is a historic engineering marvel. And it is a survivor, having endured six years of government permitting, from the Carlsbad City Council to the California Coastal Commission. Supporters won 14 lawsuits and appeals by environmentalists before finally breaking ground in December 2012.

“They went through seven or eight years of hell to get here,” said Tim Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies. “But they stuck it out. They got it done. If it succeeds, it will encourage others to try. And if it fails, it will have a chilling effect.”

To critics, the plant is a costly mistake that will use huge amounts of energy and harm fish and other marine life when it sucks in seawater using the intakes from the aging Encina Power Plant next door.

“This is going to be the pig that will try for years to find the right shade of lipstick,” said Marco Gonzalez, an Encinitas attorney who sued on behalf of the Surfrider Foundation and other environmental groups to try to stop construction. “This project will show that the water is just too expensive.”

For the plant to be a success and copied in other parts of the state, Poseidon will have to deliver high-quality drinking water at the price promised — and not cause unexpected impacts to the environment such as fish die-offs.

“It’s a test case,” said Ron Davis, executive director of Cal Desal, an industry advocacy group. “We like to tease them: Only the entire future of desal is riding on this project. No pressure.”

High cost

Almost every discussion about desalination begins and ends with cost.

Desalinated water typically costs about $2,000 an acre foot — roughly the amount of water a family of five uses in a year. The cost is about double that of water obtained from building a new reservoir or recycling wastewater, according to a 2013 study from the state Department of Water Resources.

And its price tag is at least four times the cost of obtaining “new water” from conservation methods — such as paying farmers to install drip irrigation, or providing rebates for homeowners to rip out lawns or buy water-efficient toilets.

“We look out and see a vast ocean. It seems obvious,” said Heather Cooley, water director for the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit research organization in Oakland. “But it’s cost prohibitive for most places in California.”

In Carlsbad, two gallons of seawater will be needed to produce each gallon of drinking water. And to remove the salt, the plant will use an enormous amount of energy — about 38 megawatts, enough to power 28,500 homes — to force 100 million gallons of seawater a day through a series of filters. The process, known as reverse osmosis, removes salt and other impurities by blasting the water at six times the pressure of a fire hose through membranes with microscopic holes.

San Diego County is better suited than any large California community for desalination. It receives only 10 inches of rain a year, one-third less than Los Angeles, Fresno or San Jose. It has very little groundwater. And it has a large customer base to spread out the cost of the Carlsbad plant, which will provide about 7 percent of the total water needs of the county.

The high price is worth it to help San Diego and other regions rely less on water from the Colorado River and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, both of which are overdrawn and increasingly unreliable, said Bob Yamada, water resources manager for the San Diego County Water Authority.

“You can’t conserve or recycle what you don’t have,” Yamada said.

“Desal offers us local control.”

The authority will pay from $2,014 to $2,257 an acre foot for the water, depending on how much it buys. The agency, which provides water to 3.1 million people in San Diego County, signed a 30-year contract agreeing to buy at least 48,000 acre feet a year.

With that guarantee, Poseidon and its investors were able to sell bonds to finance the project. The company will be guaranteed a rate of return between 9 and 13 percent, depending on operating costs.

Critics say the agency is getting a raw deal.

“It’s not a public-private partnership,” Gonzalez said. “It’s corporate welfare.”

Nobody disputes that the cost of water will go up. According to Yamada, the average customer’s bill, now $71 a month, will rise $5 to $7 to pay for desalination.

Santa Barbara redux?

Sometimes the high costs can turn off the spigot.

After enduring severe water shortages during a drought in the late 1980s, Santa Barbara voters agreed to spend $34 million to build a desalination plant. It opened in 1991 and provided water for four months. When the drought ended, the city shut it down. Water from reservoirs and other sources was significantly cheaper.

Similarly, Australia spent more than $10 billion building six huge seawater desalination plants during a severe drought from 1997 to 2009. Today, Cooley noted, four are shut down because when rains finally came, the cost of the water became noncompetitive.

“We run the risk of building facilities that we don’t use,” Cooley said. “And that’s a waste of money.”

Earlier this month, the Santa Barbara City Council voted to spend $935,000 to hire an engineering firm, law firm and lobbyist to try to restart the city’s shuttered plant by 2016.

“None of us wants to do it, but I was there 25 years ago, and it’s really ugly when you run out of water,” said Santa Barbara City Councilman Harwood “Bendy” White. “This is one option for stretching out our supplies.”

Monterey County

Similarly, the California American Water Company in Monterey County is studying three locations to build a desal plant to make up for water lost when state regulators ruled the company didn’t have valid permits for the Carmel River. In Los Angeles, leaders of the West Basin Municipal Water District, which serves about 100,000 people, built a pilot plant in Redondo Beach and are studying plans for a $300 million desalination plant by 2020.

Desal technology continues to improve. It now takes only a quarter of the electricity to generate drinking water as it did in the 1980s because of more efficient pumps, membranes and energy-recovery devices, said Tom Pankratz, editor of the Water Desalination Report, a newsletter based in Houston.

But some places are balking.

Santa Cruz city officials in August shelved plans for a desal plant after environmental activists raised fears that the new water might trigger more growth. Marin County studied a desal project, then dropped it when water use declined. Long-running plans to build a desal plant in San Francisco Bay near Concord were shelved this year when the region’s largest water districts decided they could obtain water more cheaply through recycling and other means.

Another key issue looming large is how to get the seawater without hurting the marine environment.

The Coastal Commission approved the Carlsbad plant and its open-ocean intake system. But new scientific studies and changing laws mean that most future plants probably will be required to bury intake pipes and pump water at a lower rate to reduce impacts on fish and the millions of larvae, eggs and other sea life that can be killed.

“These organisms become things — like fish — and we always have to be careful of the perspective that ‘Oh, this is just one little piece,'” said Charles Lester, executive director of the Coastal Commission. “It all adds up.”

Plans by Poseidon to build a desalination plant in Huntington Beach slowed last year when the Coastal Commission said it wanted the company to investigate whether its pipes could be buried, a prospect that will increase costs. For the Carlsbad plant Poseidon was required to build 66 acres of wetlands in San Diego Bay to offset the plant’s environmental harm. It also must blend its brine at a 5:1 ratio with other seawater before flushing it back into the ocean so it won’t harm marine life. Other projects will have to do all those things to get state permits.

But some experts say the plants are coming anyway.

“In the next 10 years you are probably going to have three big plants built in Southern California and another plant or two in Northern California,” Pankratz said. “The trend is toward more desal. They are the most reasonable insurance policy against a long, protracted drought.”

Source: San Jose Mercury News.

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Watering gardens with lead, BPA and phthalates

Garden hoses suited to water flowers — not us

by Blair Sanderson

Garden hoses are a hot commodity these days as gardeners get their vegetables and flowers in the ground, but should we drink from them?

Kevin Hurst is assistant manager of a Lee Valley Tools in Halifax, Nova Scotia, he said most people don’t read the fine print when they pick out a hose.

“On the back here, [there’s] a warning, ‘this product contains one or more chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects'”.

“I certainly wouldn’t let my kid, or any kid that I knew drink from a hose, it’s a completely unnecessary risk,” said Gideon Foreman, the Toronto, Ontario based executive director of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment.

“One of the concerns certainly around the garden hose is they are not meant to go into a child’s mouth,” he explained. “They’re not meant to be drunk from … they’re not regulated, and there is some danger that the chemicals in the hose, just like other plastics, can leach.

Many Garden Hose Manufacturers Now Market the Safety of Their Product

A non-profit research group in the U.S. called The Ecology Center decided to study which chemicals might be leaching into water being ingested by kids and sprayed on fruit and vegetable gardens.

Last year it tested 21 brands and models of hoses. Lead researcher Jeff Gearhart said they found a range of chemicals, including lead, leaching from those hoses.

“The level of phthalate plasticizers that leached into the water [were] four times higher than drinking water standards, and bisphenol A, which is another chemical we’re worried about, was 20 times higher than drinking water standards that are commonly used to measure water safety.”

The research found that hoses made with PVC and vinyl tended to leach more phthalates and BPA, while those with copper fittings were the worst for lead content.

Health Canada has also weighed in on this. The agency recommends people not drink from hoses, because in addition to the risk of leaching chemicals, dirt, bacteria and small insects can also present a health risk. In an email, a Health Canada spokesperson also suggested that people flush the hose thoroughly with cold water to remove material that may have accumulated in the standing water.

Nicole Mensour lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia with her two children, aged nine and seven. She said she’s not going to stop her kids from taking a drink out of the garden hose.

“I grew up and we all drank from the garden hose, none of us died from it,” she said. “It’s not like they’re drinking from it every day and filling up their water bottles … so it must be minimal.”

Still, the federal government is cracking down on chemicals like phthalates and BPA, banning or limiting them from a range of consumer products.

The California-based Ecology Center recommends you:

  • Store your hose in the shade to prevent leaching.
  • Choose a hose made of natural rubber or polyurethane.
  • Look for lead-free hoses.

Source: CBC News.

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Cattle and Water


Posted June 1st, 2014

 New Technology Extracts Water for Cattle from Manure

 

EAST LANSING, Mich. — A technology for extracting drinkable water from manure is on its way to commercial application this year, Michigan State University said Thursday.

The technology is particularly useful for animal operations in dry regions where water is at a premium, the school said.

The McLanahan Nutrient Separation System is an add-on to an anaerobic digester, which extracts energy and chemicals from manure. The system adds ultrafiltration, air stripping and a reverse osmosis system to produce water that’s clean enough for cattle to drink.

This unspectacular pile of cow manure can is 90% water.  One thing that America has is plenty of cow manure.  It may become a significant source of water for animals (and people?).

The system has value both in conserving resources and protecting the environment, said Steve Safferman, an associate professor of biosystems and agricultural engineering who is working on the project.

“If you have 1,000 cows on your operation, they produce about 10 million gallons of manure a year,” Safferman said in a statement. “Here in Michigan we have a tendency to take water for granted,” said Safferman. “But out west, for example, where drought remains an issue, the accessibility of clean water could make the difference between a farm remaining viable or going out of business.”

Manure also “contains large amounts of nutrients, carbon and pathogens that can have an environmental impact if not properly managed,” said Safferman.

A particular issue is ammonia “that would otherwise be lost in the atmosphere,” said Jim Wallace, a former Michigan State student now employed by McLanahan Corp., which is working to develop the technology. “Ammonia is a negative from an air-quality standpoint.”

About 90 percent of manure is water. The system now extracts about 50 gallons of water from each 100 gallons of manure, and Wallace said developers are aiming at raising that to 65 gallons.

Source:  South Bend Tribune.

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