People are swimming in a plastic sea

by John Cordina

No part of the Mediterranean Sea is immune to plastic pollution, and area to the east of Malta hosts a particularly high concentration of such debris, a research expedition has discovered.

The research expedition, Tara Méditerranée, is the tenth expedition being organised by French non-profit organisation Tara Expeditions, which was established in 2003 by fashion designer agnès b and her son Étienne Bourgois. The expeditions are carried out through the non-profit’s schooner – the Tara.

The seven-month expedition, which began in May and which is being carried out under the patronage of the EU’s Environment Commissioner Janez Potočnik, aims to carry out a scientific study concerning plastic pollution, as well as promote awareness of environmental challenges in the Mediterranean region.

The Tara arrived in Malta on Thursday and set sail once more yesterday, a visit which helped fulfil the expedition’s educational aims though an exhibition called “Our Ocean Planet” in St George’s Square, Valletta, the screening of the documentary Planet Ocean and press briefings.

In comments to The Malta Independent, the expedition’s scientific director Gabriel Gorsky – the head of the Oceanology Observatory of Villefranche-sur-Mer, which is part of the Paris-based Pierre-et-Marie Curie University – explained that as the Tara sails around the Mediterranean, the scientists on board are quantifying the plastic fragments they come across, measuring their size and weight and identifying the types of plastic found at sea.

Dr Gorsky added that the team is also analysing the organic pollutants which adhere to these plastic fragments, as well as the microorganisms which colonise them.

Plastic in your plate

The development and spread of plastics may have transformed society, but it has also had a significant effect on the world’s seas, accounting for the vast majority of marine debris.

The most obvious effect is the accumulation of waste along the coast, but the effect of plastic waste is far more wide-ranging than the creation of an unsightly nuisance.

Most plastics do not readily biodegrade: their slow degradation is typically the result of exposure to sunlight. But this process, which breaks down plastic waste into smaller and smaller fragments over the years, may only make the matter worse.

The breaking down of plastic material can lead to the leaching of toxic chemicals which have been used in its manufacture.

Threats to marine life include the potential of poisoning, but also the risk being harmed or killed through entanglement in plastic waste or through the accidental ingestion of debris, which can lead to starvation due to a blocked digestive tract.

That marine creatures such as turtles end up swallowing plastic is well known, but another reality is the consumption of small particles by filter-feeding creatures such as barnacles and various tiny organisms, a process which can lead to plastics making their way up the food chain.

Research on what happens to plastic debris and its effect on marine ecosystems – including their possible future impact on the oceans and on humans alike – is still lacking, and the Tara Méditerranée expedition is striving to help fill this gap.

The probable entry of plastic fragments – and all the pollutants and microorganisms they may be carrying – into the food chain is also a subject that has been virtually unexplored, and according to Dr Gorsky, the risk of such plastic waste contaminating seafood is all too real.

“We are looking at how the plastic may cause bioaccumulation in your plate,” he explained.

The risk of bioaccumulation of mercury in seafood is already well known: pregnant women, in particular, are often advised to limit their consumption of certain fish such as tuna. Whether plastic contamination may present a similar threat in the future remains to be seen.

Plastic everywhere

Asked to state what the findings of the expedition have been so far, Dr Gorsky explained that what is being collected at present will need to be analysed once the expedition is over in an appropriate laboratory. But one particular fact is already clear.

“There is not one parcel of the Mediterranean Sea that is devoid of plastic or plastic fragments… they are everywhere,” he maintained.

Dr Gorsky added that Malta is not only not an exception to the rule, but revealed that the ship has encountered very high concentrations of plastic waste to the east of the country, although their extent will only be properly quantified once tests are carried out.

“However, there is a general problem, not just related to Malta,” he emphasised.

The Mediterranean may only account for 0.8% of the ocean surface, but it hosts close to 8% of global marine biodiversity. Around 450 million people live along its coast, and almost 30% of the world’s maritime traffic is concentrated in the Mediterranean; factors which contribute to the increasing presence of plastics and other pollutants.

Tara Expeditions argues that it is urgent to find concrete solutions to the problem, noting that many of the solutions – including water treatment, waste management, biodegradable plastics, promoting sustainable tourism and creating Marine Protected Areas – have been proposed decades ago by the Barcelona Convention for Protection against Pollution in the Mediterranean Sea, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and the EU itself.

“People must be aware that they are swimming in a ‘plastic sea’, and that this plastic hosts harmful pollutants and organisms,” Dr Gorsky maintained.

“Everyone must contribute to decrease the amount of plastic waste.”

 The Malta Independent

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

University of Texas at Arlington researchers have unveiled a study that found potentially unhealthy levels of arsenic in water wells scattered throughout North Texas.

The study, conducted last year, involved 100 water wells across the Barnett Shale, 10 of them in Denton County. An 11-member team of UTA scientists found that 30 percent of wells within 1.8 miles of active natural gas drilling showed an increase in heavy metals, including arsenic.

“To find that high of arsenic concentrations was alarming,” said Dr. Zacariah Hildenbrand, a UTA biochemist. “This is indirect evidence that drilling does affect the water.”

Researchers compared their results with previous water tests conducted in the same area before the Barnett Shale gas boom exploded across the region 10 years ago. They believe the vibration from drilling or hydraulic fracturing operations shakes the pipes in nearby wells, causing arsenic-contaminated rust to fall into fresh water. The scientists referred to those vibrations as “pressure waves from drilling activity.”

Alex Mills, the head of an oil and gas industry trade association, said he doubts the study’s findings.

“If they’re talking about drills shaking it free, that’s a little farfetched,” said Mills, president of Texas Alliance of Energy Producers in Wichita Falls.

Mills, who has 30 years in the oil and gas industry, said natural gas wells are drilled so deep that vibrations could never make it to much shallower water wells. Even if homes are located within 500 or 600 feet of the drilling site, they wouldn’t feel the vibration of the hydraulic fracturing because of the gas well’s depth, he said.

“I’ve never heard or even came close to hearing that hydraulic fracturing is so vicious, so earth-shattering to shake lose rust from water wells,” he said.

Researchers acknowledged that other factors might have caused the water well contamination, including “hydrogeo chemical changes from lowering of the water table or industrial accidents such as faulty gas well casings.”

According to the UTA study, which was published in Environmental Science & Technology journal, “The maximum concentration of arsenic detected in a sample from an active [gas well] extraction area was almost 18 times higher than both the maximum concentration among the nonactive/reference area samples and historical levels from this region.”

Currently, the Environmental Protection Agency’s maximum contaminant limit for arsenic is 10 parts per billion. Anything over that is considered unsafe. The UTA team found that 29 out of 90 water wells exceeded the EPA standard. Methanol and ethanol, two chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing, were also detected in 29 percent of water samples, according to the study.

Epidemiologists say arsenic, a heavy metal, can threaten people’s health and lead to death.

“Gastrointestinal effects, reno-cardio effects, neurological effects — we could talk for hours about the harmful effects of arsenic,” said Juan Rodriquez, chief epidemiologist at Denton County Health Department.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that ingesting low levels of arsenic can cause nausea and vomiting, decrease in red and white blood cells, abnormal heart rhythm, damage to blood vessels and a sensation of “pins and needles” in the feet.

Arsenic is also a known human carcinogen, according to the Department of Health and Human Services and the EPA.

In 2011, the Texas Railroad Commission reported that 93,000 gas wells have been drilled in Texas since the hydraulic fracturing booms began. More than 15,300 of them are located in the Barnett Shale, which covers Denton, Johnson, Montague, Tarrant and Wise counties. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2013 that more than 15 million Americans live within a mile of an oil or gas well.

The UT-Arlington researchers plan more studies to understand the effects of natural gas drilling on water quality.

“It was our very first crack at groundwater in the area,” said Hildenbrand, a research associate at UTA.

Now they’re gathering a larger sample of 500 private water wells, 130 of them in Denton County.

“It’s a polarizing issue,” Hidenbrand said. “Nobody really understands what’s going on.”

Waiting and worrying

Jeffrey and Tracey Schmitt’s water well has been tested as part of the next UTA study. They have been waiting weeks for the test results and worrying about the fate of their well water.

When they built their home in Amyx Ranch, a residential community a few miles outside of Ponder, they never imagined the possibility that their water could be contaminated.

“I don’t know what we’ll do if it comes back positive,” said Tracey Schmitt, who purchased the five acres with her husband.

They built the home as an investment and plan to sell it after their children finish high school. But now all of that could change. If high levels of arsenic are found in their well water, the property might become impossible to sell.

“I’d hate to have to cook with bottled water,” she said.

The Schmitts said they’ve had problems with their water well since drilling it nearly 10 years ago. They reached water at 450 feet, but it tasted bad and discharged a layer of fine sand. They couldn’t afford to drill deeper to reach the next water table, so they bought bottled water to drink and used well water for cooking and showering.

“My husband thought it was because of fracking,” Tracey Schmitt said.

Across the highway from Amyx Ranch, roads lead to Devon Energy Corporation gas well sites. Company signs line the roadway between Denton and Ponder. Devon operates more than 40 wells located in Ponder. The company is one of the biggest operators for extracting gas in the region.

Company spokesman Chip Minty declined to comment on the UTA study because he had not read it.

At Amyx Ranch, the Schmitts are awaiting results of their well test, which researchers say could be a few more weeks.

“I’m so praying the test doesn’t come back positive because we don’t want to retire here,” Tracey Schmitt said.

Comment on the article above by read Lis Amel:

We lived 5 years near a military base reserve that bombs continuously throughout the year. When the temperature was just right during the bombing, our community of neighbors had their windows and driveway’s crack. We were fortunate that our windows never cracked but our costly driveway did. All 32 neighbors had wells and we all had issues with our wells, where one day the well was fine and after heavy overnight bombing practice the well had particles. County water was brought out to 2 cul-de-sacs in an attempt to help those who needed water, because neighbors said their wells suddenly stopped working. Our well was only 30 feet from one neighbor and 40 from a second one. Water taps were installed for each home so we could connect when the well stopped working. Our well had heavy metals detected twice in the first year, but then would settle down and none was detected. We had 3 filter systems installed on our lines just to make sure we were not taking heavy metal showers. The underground bombing for military practice was a suspect as to why the wells suddenly had issues. Every neighbor we had wanted out of there. Now we are in Oklahoma where when the first earthquake hit last fall, we had to ask if they were doing underground bombing in the area, which they do not. We are so tired of living where the ground shakes, that we are now declining to move back to our home state of Texas for retirement. Regardless of how many benefits there are to Veterans there, the water issues, earth shaking and possible sinkholes, have us looking elsewhere.

Source: Denton Record-Chronicle.

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

Iron Stains from Irrigation Wells: A Water Treatment Challenge

One of the big problems of water treatment is how to deal with iron in water used for irrigation.

When well water with iron is used for watering landscaping, it leaves stains on buildings, sidewalks, and driveways. Although homeowners often try to cure the problem with conventional iron filters, this approach is seldom satisfactory. The problem is that iron filters have a limited capacity between regeneration sessions. If used for water inside the home, an iron filter only has to process a few hundred gallons of water per day at a moderate flow rate. The filter has time to backwash and renew itself at night. With irrigation applications, however, the filter might be required to process thousands of gallons per day at a high flow rate. Iron filters used for significant irrigation jobs work only when they are sized very large, and usually multiple filters are required so that one can be regenerated while others are in service.

Alternative Treatment

To keep iron from staining buildings and walks, an alternative to filtering is sequestration of the iron. In this process, iron is not removed from the water but simply chemically bound so that it does not cause staining.

Treatment is done by injecting the concentrated chemical into the water line, either with an electric chemical pump or with a passive siphoning system powered by the flow of water itself. Both systems work well.

This  Stenner Peristaltic Pump can be used to feed a sequestering solution (poly-phosphate) into the stream of irrigation water. 

Once the system is in place, upkeep involves only occasionally adding the sequestering agent to the solution tank.

Sequestration can be accomplished using either standard electric feed pumps of the type used to feed chlorine or specially designed feeders that use the force of the irrigation water itself flowing through the pipe to power the injection process. The non-electric systems are more accurate if flow rates vary and they are easier to set up because they adjust automatically to changing flow rates.

The “Unrust” brand chemical injection system shown above is made specifically for wells used for landscape irrigation.  Needing no electricity, the Unrust system feeds a stain-prevention solution into the irrigation water as it flows through the pipe toward sprinklers. 

Israel Has Officially Banned Fluoridation of Its Drinking Water

by Douglas Main

Check water periodically for bacteria, nitrate

by JoAnn Alumbaugh

Bacteria and nitrate are widespread in the environment, so every water-well owner should regularly test the water to make sure no health risks exist, recommends the National Ground Water Association.

While most bacteria found in water do not cause disease, disease-causing pathogens can exist in well water given the right circumstances. Nitrate is not uncommon in rural areas due to its use in fertilizers and because it is sometimes linked to animal or human waste.

“We recommend that well owners test their water annually for bacteria and nitrate because of their widespread presence,” says Cliff Treyens, NGWA public awareness director. “Knowing whether or not you have a problem with bacteria or nitrate through valid laboratory testing is key to keeping your water safe.”

Bacteria: Coliforms are bacteria that occur naturally in the environment and may indicate the possibility of pathogens. Fecal coliform and E. coli are bacteria whose presence indicates that water may be contaminated by human or animal waste harmful to human health. Pathogens can cause diarrhea, cramps, nausea and headaches. In extreme circumstances, they can be lethal.

Potential sources of bacteria include:

• Runoff from woodlands, pastures, and feedlots
• Septic tanks and sewage plants
• Animals, both domestic and wild

Potential pathways of bacteria into well water include:

• Reduced pressure or suction in water lines that draw soil water at the pipe joints
• Faulty sanitary seals in a well system, i.e., a faulty well cap, grout, pitless adapter

If test results indicate the presence of bacteria in your well water, a qualified water-well system professional should determine whether there is a cause or source for the bacteria entering the well. Any necessary maintenance should be performed and the well system disinfected by the professional.

Nitrate: The most common sources of nitrate are fertilizers used on crops. Animal and human waste contain nitrogen in the form of ammonia. Nitrate also is generated by:

• Decomposing plant and animal materials
• Sewage
• Septic systems
• Industrial effluent
• Landfills

The greatest health concern from nitrate is “blue baby syndrome” or methemoglobinemia. The syndrome is seen most often in infants exposed to nitrate from drinking water used in baby formula. Infants 0 to 3 months of age are at highest risk. The syndrome affects the ability of the baby’s blood to carry oxygen to body tissues.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has a maximum contaminant level for nitrate of 10 parts per million (milligrams per liter) as nitrogen.

The EPA has approved certain methods for removing nitrate including reverse osmosis and ion exchange. Reverse osmosis works best on point-of-use systems, which generally are used in places such as the kitchen sink where water is used mostly for drinking and cooking. Ion exchange, along with a water softening system, can provide a whole-house solution for nitrate contamination.

To learn more about water well and groundwater stewardship visit www.WellOwner.org.

Source: PorkNetwork.

More about nitrates.

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

Large Dams Just Aren’t Worth the Cost 

by Jacques Leslie

Introductory Note:  The dam is a perfect example of the many things in our lives that are “mixed blessings.”  That’s why dams are always controversial.

In one of my favorite novels, Paradox, Rey by Pio Baroja, progressive Europeans bent on saving the world go to Africa to build a dam. Among people and animals there are mixed reactions. The dam helps some and hurts others:  the frogs love it, but the snakes hate it; poor people who are promised cheap electricity love it, but poor people who lose their homes hate it.  The dam provides water for irrigation, but it covers up much valuable farmland.  It provides water for some cities, but it forces abandonment of other cities.  It helps one species of fish but hastens extinction of another.

If we are allowed to generalize, we can say that dams are mainly an advantage to the rich and a burden for the poor.  But there are exceptions even to that, as the editorial reprinted below shows. 

Dams are not permanent.  They eventually die, choked by the sediment they have collected,  and have to be removed.  Sometimes they are an advantage to the generations that benefit from their use but they are always a burden to the generations that pay for building them and tearing them down.–Gene Franks.

Dams have pros can cons, but in most ways they are losers for the builder and the displaced population.

THAYER SCUDDER, the world’s leading authority on the impact of dams on poor people, has changed his mind about dams.

A frequent consultant on large dam projects, Mr. Scudder held out hope through most of his 58-year career that the poverty relief delivered by a properly constructed and managed dam would outweigh the social and environmental damage it caused. Now, at age 84, he has concluded that large dams not only aren’t worth their cost, but that many currently under construction “will have disastrous environmental and socio-economic consequences,” as he wrote in a recent email.

Mr. Scudder, an emeritus anthropology professor at the California Institute of Technology, describes his disillusionment with dams as gradual. He was a dam proponent when he began his first research project in 1956, documenting the impact of forced resettlement on 57,000 Tonga people in the Gwembe Valley of present-day Zambia and Zimbabwe. Construction of the Kariba Dam, which relied on what was then the largest loan in the World Bank’s history, required the Tonga to move from their ancestral homes along the Zambezi River to infertile land downstream. Mr. Scudder has been tracking their disintegration ever since.

Once cohesive and self-sufficient, the Tonga are troubled by intermittent hunger, rampant alcoholism and astronomical unemployment. Desperate for income, some have resorted to illegal drug cultivation and smuggling, elephant poaching, pimping and prostitution. Villagers still lack electricity.

Mr. Scudder’s most recent stint as a consultant, on the Nam Theun 2 Dam in Laos, delivered his final disappointment. He and two fellow advisers supported the project because it required the dam’s funders to carry out programs that would leave people displaced by the dam in better shape than before the project started. But the dam was finished in 2010, and the programs’ goals remain unmet. Meanwhile, the dam’s three owners are considering turning over all responsibilities to the Laotian government — “too soon,” Mr. Scudder said in an interview. “The government wants to build 60 dams over the next 20 or 30 years, and at the moment it doesn’t have the capacity to deal with environmental and social impacts for any single one of them.

“Nam Theun 2 confirmed my longstanding suspicion that the task of building a large dam is just too complex and too damaging to priceless natural resources,” he said. He now thinks his most significant accomplishment was not improving a dam, but stopping one: He led a 1992 study that helped prevent construction of a dam that would have harmed Botswana’s Okavango Delta, one of the world’s last great wetlands.

Part of what moved Mr. Scudder to go public with his revised assessment was the corroboration he found in a stunning Oxford University studypublished in March in Energy Policy. The study, by Atif Ansar, Bent Flyvbjerg, Alexander Budzier and Daniel Lunn, draws upon cost statistics for 245 large dams built between 1934 and 2007. Without even taking into account social and environmental impacts, which are almost invariably negative and frequently vast, the study finds that “the actual construction costs of large dams are too high to yield a positive return.”

The study’s authors — three management scholars and a statistician — say planners are systematically biased toward excessive optimism, which dam promoters exploit with deception or blatant corruption. The study finds that actual dam expenses on average were nearly double pre-building estimates, and several times greater than overruns of other kinds of infrastructure construction, including roads, railroads, bridges and tunnels. On average, dam construction took 8.6 years, 44 percent longer than predicted — so much time, the authors say, that large dams are “ineffective in resolving urgent energy crises.”

DAMS typically consume large chunks of developing countries’ financial resources, as dam planners underestimate the impact of inflation and currency depreciation. Many of the funds that support large dams arrive as loans to the host countries, and must eventually be paid off in hard currency. But most dam revenue comes from electricity sales in local currencies. When local currencies fall against the dollar, as often happens, the burden of those loans grows.

One reason this dynamic has been overlooked is that earlier studies evaluated dams’ economic performance by considering whether international lenders like the World Bank recovered their loans — and in most cases, they did. But the economic impact on host countries was often debilitating. Dam projects are so huge that beginning in the 1980s, dam overruns became major components of debt crises in Turkey, Brazil, Mexico and the former Yugoslavia. “For many countries, the national economy is so fragile that the debt from just one mega-dam can completely negatively affect the national economy,” Mr. Flyvbjerg, the study’s lead investigator, told me.

To underline its point, the study singles out the massive Diamer-Bhasha Dam, now under construction in Pakistan across the Indus River. It is projected to cost $12.7 billion (in 2008 dollars) and finish construction by 2021. But the study suggests that it won’t be completed until 2027, by which time it could cost $35 billion (again, in 2008 dollars) — a quarter of Pakistan’s gross domestic product that year.

Using the study’s criteria, most of the world’s planned mega-dams would be deemed cost-ineffective. That’s unquestionably true of the gargantuan Inga complex of eight dams intended to span the Congo River — its first two projects have produced huge cost overruns — and Brazil’s purported $14 billion Belo Monte Dam, which will replace a swath of Amazonian rain forest with the world’s third-largest hydroelectric dam.

Instead of building enormous, one-of-a-kind edifices like large dams, the study’s authors recommend “agile energy alternatives” like wind, solar and mini-hydropower facilities. “We’re stuck in a 1950s mode where everything was done in a very bespoke, manual way,” Mr. Ansar said over the phone. “We need things that are more easily standardized, things that fit inside a container and can be easily transported.”

All this runs directly contrary to the current international dam-building boom. Chinese, Brazilian and Indian construction companies are building hundreds of dams around the world, and the World Bank announced a year ago that it was reviving a moribund strategy to fund mega-dams. The biggest ones look so seductive, so dazzling, that it has taken us generations to notice: They’re brute-force, Industrial Age artifacts that rarely deliver what they promise.

Source: New York Times Sunday Review

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

Drought leaves California homes without water

 Nearly 1,000 people in East Porterville, CA  whose wells have gone dry due to drought received an emergency allotment of bottled water August 22, 2014.

PORTERVILLE, Calif. (AP) — Hundreds of rural San Joaquin Valley residents no longer can get drinking water from their home faucets because California’s extreme drought has dried up their individual wells, government officials and community groups said.

The situation has become so dire that the Tulare County Office of Emergency Serviceshad 12-gallon-per person rations of bottled water delivered on Friday in East Porterville, where at least 182 of the 1,400 households have reported having no or not enough water, according to the Porterville Recorder.

Many people in the unincorporated community about 52 miles north of Bakersfield also have been relying on a county-supplied 5,000-gallon water tank filled with non-potable water for bathing and flushing toilets, The Recorder said.

Emergency services manager Andrew Lockman, said the supplies of bottled water distributed by firefighters, the Red Cross and volunteer groups on Friday cost the county $30,000 and were designed to last about three weeks but are only a temporary fix. To get future deliveries, officials are asking low-income residents to apply for aid and for companies to make bottled water donations like the one a local casino made a few weeks ago.

“Right now we’re trying to provide immediate relief,” Lockman said. “This is conceived as an emergency plan right now.”

Officials said the problem is partly due to the shallowness of some residential wells in East Porterville that are replenished by groundwater from the Tule River, the Fresno Bee said (http://bit.ly/1zkf4aD ). But river flows are way down due to the ongoing drought, leaving some wells dry.

East Porterville resident Angelica Gallegos fought back tears as she described being without water for four months in the home she shares with her husband,, three children and two other adults.

“It’s hard,” she told The Bee. “I can’t shower the children like I used to.”

Farmworker Oliva Sanchez said she still gets a trickle from her tap, but dirt started coming out with the water about a week ago.

“I try to use the least possible. I’ll move if I have to,” she said.

Along with experiencing inconvenience and thirst, some residents have been reluctant to speak up about being waterless because they are afraid their landlords will evict them or social workers will take their children away, The Recorder reported.

“We want to make it abundantly clear we are not going to make this harder for anyone,” Lockman stressed. “These lists aren’t going anywhere. (Child Welfare Services) isn’t getting a list. They (CWS) made it abundantly clear they are not going to remove children because of no water. We just want to help the people.”

Source: SF Gate. 

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

Water rights of Ireland and Jordan

 Here is a cautionary tale of two very different countries which once shared a similar water use philosophy and usage patterns. The right photo is in Jordan’s Wadi-Rum desert. The forest on the left is in Ireland.

Parts of this country receive up to 4 meters of rain each year. But Ireland was running out of water so its government recently brought in water charges. Here is why.

Jordan is one of the world’s driest countries, with desert comprising 75 percent of its land area. The entire country averages only about 160mm of annual rainfall and 41 percent of its land receives fewer than 50mm of rain each year.

Ireland receives an average of 1000mm of annual rainfall and parts of its Atlantic coastline receive nearly 4000mm (4 meters) of rain each year. Ireland’s driest recorded year was 1887 when only 356.6 mm of rain fell, more than twice Jordan’s average rainfall. With such a plentiful source of freshwater, Ireland never had to pay for huge reservoirs, desalinization plants, waste-water reclamation systems or Red to Dead sea projects.

In fact, in 1997, the government of Ireland decided that water should be a basic human right. So domestic water charges were abolished. Ireland did this thirteen years before the United Nations General Assembly passed resolution 64/292 in July 2010 which also “Recognizes the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of life and all human rights.”

Water, they argued, shouldn’t be a commodity. Water should be a human right.

Irish residents took full advantage of this basic right. They washed their cars, dishes, clothes, bathed, showered and drank the free water. They could even water their golf courses and gardens during rainstorms and let their faucets drip 24 hours per day, 365 days per year– all for free because there was no such thing as a water meter!

Hundreds of thousands of new homes were built without any consideration for water efficiency. Flush a toilet in a brand new million dollar Dublin home and seven liters of freshwater will begin a journey to the sea. Water was free so one noticed or cared when leaks in pipes developed. It is estimated that 41% of Ireland public utility water leaked away from underground pipes before arriving into Irish homes.

The average Irish citizen consumed 140 cubic meters of water per year. This is between two and three times the average for the rest of Europe and slightly less than a Jordanian’s average water consumption of 170 cubic meters per year.

It wasn’t long before the rainy country of Ireland began to experience water shortages. Ireland’s just-in-time rainwater delivery system couldn’t cope as the demand from growth and leaks and wastage grew towards infinity.

An Irish government report published in 2012 concluded that “Our current model of water provision, where unlimited quantities of an expensive product are provided at no charge, is simply not sustainable,” as economist Milton Friedman once said, “If you put the Federal Government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there will be a shortage of sand.”

It took slightly longer than 5 years but in 2014, only 17 years after the Irish government abolished water charges, the water charges came back. This time the government wasn’t shy about putting a price tag on this valuable and limited resource. As yet another Atlantic storm drops torrents of Gulf Stream humidity onto this Emerald Isle, the Irish water charges are estimated to start at €1.70 per cubic meter.

Meanwhile in Jordan, water costs €1.92 per cubic meter but subsidies reduce this so that only about €0.51 of this is passed on to the water user. So unless you’re willing to soap up outside in the rain, a shower in Cork Ireland (1207mm rain/year) will cost more than three times as much as a shower in Amman Jordan. (271mm rain/year). Put another way, a faucet that leaks one drop per second would cost about 15€ each year in Ireland and only 4€ in Jordan.

But what would happen if Jordan ran out of water or if the government could no longer guarantee the purity of Jordan’s water supply? People might buy bottled water. At about €0.50 per liter, bottled water costs €500 per cubic meter. This is 260 times the cost of Jordan’s municipal water. Sometimes governments must charge for a limited resource in order to reflect the true social cost of that resource. This is certainly true of water. After all, water is a basic human right.

Source: Green Prophet

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

Is Fluoride in Private Wells Causing an IQ Decline?

Excess fluoride, which may damage both brain and bone, is leaching out of granite and into Maine’s drinking water—and potentially other New England states

by Dina Fine Maron

ocals call it the “Switzerland of Maine” for its breathtaking mountains and picturesque waters, yet Dedham is just one of a cadre of communities in The Pine Tree State where tap water may not be as safe as it appears.

Like the majority of the state, many of Dedham’s denizens rely on private wells for the water they drink, bathe in and perhaps use to make infant milk formula. But the water trickling from the tap—unlike water from its public water sources—goes untested and is not subject to any state or federal guidelines. And although homeowners are encouraged to get their water regularly tested to ensure that worrisome levels of bacteria or naturally occurring minerals have not crept in, many residents do not follow that advice.

Yet newly available data, released in recent months, indicates that in some 10 communities in the state wells harbor dangerously high levels of fluoride. In some cases, the wells contain more than double the level that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has deemed the acceptable maximum exposure level.

In small quantities fluoride is known for helping to tamp down the blight of tooth decay; most municipalities in the U.S. add it to their water supplies as a public health measure. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recognizes water fluoridation as one of the top 10 greatest public health achievements of the 20th century.

But at higher levels, fluoride can lead to pitted teeth and discoloration. It also makes bones brittle and more prone to fractures. And recent studies have also linked high levels of fluoride exposure with IQ deficits. A 2012 review article examined some two dozen relevant studies performed outside the U.S.—mostly in China but also a couple in Iran—and found that high fluoride exposures reduce children’s IQs by an average of about seven points. (The studies did not all account for exposures to other potentially harmful substances such as lead, but the sheer volume of them does raise concerns about this association.)

Mainers may be sipping similar amounts of fluoride. “The sort of levels we’re talking about that are high in China are the sort of levels we see in some private wells,” says Andrew Smith, Maine state toxicologist.

In Dedham, for example, data from 37 wells indicates that 37.8 percent of that water is above the state’s maximum exposure guideline for fluoride. Dedham is not alone: in Surry, Prospect, Franklin, Sedgwick, Penobscot, York, Harrison and Stockton Springs, more than 10 percent of the wells appear to have fluoride levels higher than the state cutoff. The level of potential fluoride exposure encountered by residents may be even higher when factoring in fluoride exposures from dental rinses and toothpaste.

The new data on fluoride levels in Maine water is not from a random sampling of homes in Maine nor is it complete. The data comes from homeowners who voluntarily sent water samples into state labs for testing, which potentially skews the sample. But it does provide the first snapshot of what may prove to be a larger problem.

The state’s suggested limit of two milligrams per liter is half of the EPA limit but many public health advocates argue that limit is far too high. The agency is currently considering lowering its cutoff for fluoride exposure, although it does not expect to have completed its review of the issue until 2016. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has proposed adding fluoride to water in concentrations no greater than 0.7 milligram per liter to avoid any unwanted health effects.

Why are the Maine levels so high? Geology. Granite—especially certain kinds such as alkali and peraluminous granites—contains high levels of fluoride, boosting the chances of wells drawing it from that water. Certain other New England states such as New Hampshire (known as “The Granite State”) and Rhode Island may also have private wells at risk because they, too, sport large amounts of the potentially problematic rock.

People living in areas with high fluoride concentrations can take steps to mitigate the problem—but it is an open question whether they will. Countertop filters like Brita pitchers are not effective but advanced technology such as reverse osmosis systems (which may start around $150 per unit) will capture much of the fluoride.

Unfortunately even people whose water is contaminated with far more harmful chemicals frequently take no action. Researchers recently surveyed residents of central Maine whose well water contains high levels of arsenic—an odorless, tasteless element that can cause maladies including cancer, blindness and numbness in hands and feet. They reported that 27 percent of those Mainers did nothing about it. When asked why not, people reported a lack of concern about arsenic and reluctance to pay for any mitigating action.

The potential health concerns around arsenic are so much better publicized than fluoride, suggesting that fewer people will protect themselves from excessive fluoride concentrations. Yet Mainers should. “The studies of high fluoride should be taken seriously,” says Harvard University environmental health professor David Bellinger. “We have a long history of first identifying adverse effects at high levels and then, with further and better studies, discovering that there are adverse effects [milder] at levels that we thought were okay.”

Source: Scientific American.

Editor’s Note:  Both arsenic and fluoride are easily managed by reverse osmosis.

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement

Man-made wetlands could help reduce nitrate levels in drinking water

Pure Water Gazette Fair Use Statement