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

Study Shows That Irresponsible Drug Disposal Is Still Common

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

by Hardly Waite

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

Water … Right Here All Along

by Elizabeth Cutright,  Editor, Water Efficiency

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source:  Water Efficiency

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

 

The Hanford Question

by Janice Kaspersen, Editor, Stormwater.

 

Private frack water treatment expanding in Marcellus region

 

About 4 million gallons of water goes into a typical Marcellus Shale well during the fracking process. As much as 20% of what went in comes back out right away. That’s what’s known as flowback water.

Over the life of a producing well, more than a million gallons comes out, and after the initial flowback the rest is known as produced water.

In Pennsylvania, treating that water for metals and total dissolved solids and radioactive materials at public treatment plants has caused problems. Hydrofracking for natural gas is on hold in New York while the Department of Health reviews its potential health impacts. If New York permits the controversial drilling technique, one of the obstacles is how to handle the huge amounts of wastewater produced by each fracked well.

In Pennsylvania, drillers are increasingly using private treatment plants as a way to deal with all that waste.

Tom Johnson, a hydrogeologist in Clifton Park, NY, says the challenges drillers faced  brought the private companies in.

“Where there’s some profits to be made, obviously, somebody will come in and develop a business to meet the need that industry has,” says Johnson.

In the last few years, Williamsport, Pennsylvania has become a center for the drilling industry, including for private treatment plants.

The cheaper option is underground injection, the wastewater goes into the well untreated. But those are mostly found in Ohio, a long way from Northeast Pennsylvania.

According to Johnson, the lack of injection wells in Northeast Pennsylvania and New York can be overcome.

“If you hear characterizations that say this water can’t be treated, it’s kind of nonsensical because there’s a very, very large water treatment industry out there that treats wastewater on a daily basis,” says Johnson.

In Susquehanna, officials from Cabot Oil and Gas say the company recycles 100% of its wastewater and uses it to frack new wells. They’re spared the hardest step in purification because salty water can be reused for fracking.

At a temporary facility in Springville, Pennsylvania, Cabot’s wastewater moves through a series of tanks protected from the weather by plastic tarps and a floor of steel plates.

Mark Banyas supervises the plant for a treatment company called Chemtech Industries. He says the facility can handle multiple wells at once and it takes about 3 hours to go through the whole process.

When the water comes in, it’s muddy and obviously contaminated. Chemicals are added to separate the solids from the water and, in the end, and clear, salty water is left. The solid waste is then compressed into a clay-like bricks and sent to landfills.

Some companies also use mobile treatment technologies at well sites. Multiple wells are drilled at each well pad, so the water that comes back up from one can be treated and sent down another, or trucked to a site nearby.

A company in Long Island called Advanced Waste and Water Technologies uses an electric charge to fully treat wastewater.

Another called Filtersure uses a system with multiple filters to recycle it.

Brian Rahm of Cornell’s Water Research Institute says these sorts of systems are likely to be used in New York if hydrofracking moves here. And the water that can’t be recycled will probably be shipped to disposal plants in Pennsylvania.

“To truck the waste from Broome County down to Williamsport is probably not that big of a deal. I think they’ll probably use that capacity,” says Rahm.

He says that the most important thing isn’t whether or not wastewater can be treated. It’s whether the Department of Environmental Conservation can enforce the rules they’ve spent the last five years creating.

“That to me seems the biggest problem right now is not being quite sure how New York DEC is going to undertake all the things they say they’re going to undertake,” says Rahm.

According to Rahm, there needs to be a lot of drilling before water treatment plant operators, which need permits from the state and the federal government, start building new plants in New York.