Bottled Water Companies Pump Aquifers Dry and Pay a Pittance

In many countries, including the United States, there is little limitation on the rate at which water can be pumped out of Nature’s underground water reserves called aquifers.  Water bottling companies have for years been pumping billions of gallons of water out of aquifers without regard for the watershed and surrounding environment and selling water for 3000 to 5000 times more than they pay for it.

Nestle, for example, runs a plant for its two of its bottled water brands in Stanwood, Michigan.  The company operates three well fields with a total of seven wells, all within the Muskegon River watershed.  According to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ), Nestle pumped more than 3.4 billion gallons of water from its three Michigan well fields between 2005 and 2015.  In 2015, Nestle was given approval by the MDEQ to pump 250 gallons per minute at White Pine Springs Well in Osceola County.  The company now wants to increase the amount of water it pumps from this well to 400 gallons per minute. Nestle would pay the state of Michigan $200 per year for this increase. Not $200 per hour.  $200 per year.

Nestle’s White Pine Springs Well pumps water from an underground aquifer that is connected to the above-ground water system through a permeable layer of earth called a leaky aquitard.  Pumping water from the aquifer can drain significant amounts of water from above. With the high level of depletion of the aquifer,  the wetlands and wildlife above the ground are at high risk of being harmed by Nestle’s pumping.  Residents of the area have noticed that water levels in Osceola County’s Chippewa Creek, which flows into the Muskegon River watershed, have significantly dropped in recent years, affecting trout populations.

Nevertheless, regulators are expected to grant Nestle’s request to boost its pumping rate to 400 gpm. This is corporate welfare at its worst.

Testing Turbidity

Climate change is overwhelming our crappy water infrastructure

Most of Nebraska is a disaster area with 95 percent of the state’s population affected by flooding. According to FEMA, total economic losses are approaching $1 billion, including more than $400 million to agriculture and more than $400 million to public infrastructure. Cascading levee failures along the Missouri River have meant that, for the time being, there’s essentially nothing holding back the floodwaters.

Six Nebraska public drinking water systems went offline, and dozens of wastewater treatment facilities failed — including one for Omaha which officials say could take weeks or months to restore. In several cases, raw sewage is being discharged into streams and rivers.

For rural residents who get their water from private wells, that added pollution could prove dangerous. Emergency room visits for gastrointestinal issues increase after heavy rains.

 As climate change makes rainstorms more intense, this problem will only worsen. Across the Great Plains, the frequency of heavy downpours has increased by 29 percent over the past 60 years. Flooding isn’t just a quickly damaging natural disaster that destroys roads, bridges, homes, and factories — it’s a lingering public health issue.

This problem isn’t unique to Nebraska. In recent years, floods in Texas, the Carolinas, and coastal Virginia have swept hazardous material from the petrochemical industry, hog farms, and agricultural land into waterways, threatening public safety.As of 2015, there were 772 cities — mostly in the Midwest and Northeast — with outdated sewer systems that funnel waste directly into streams as a matter of course even without record-breaking floods.

These systems were cheap to build in the 1800s, but now people are starting to reconsider “combined sewer overflow” systems.

Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has campaigned on his record of using eco-friendly methods, like rain gardens and expanding parks near floodplains, and technology to deal with its combined sewer system.

City officials say they’ve saved $500 million by adding smart sensors to its sewer system.Cities are trying to hold polluters accountable for cleanup costs, too: A new wave of “failure to adapt” lawsuits might help put pressure on industry to put more foresight into how climate change might turn their infrastructure into toxic waste sites.

Lawsuits and tech aside, the most effective way of adapting to climate change may ultimately be a planned retreat from coastlines and waterways — giving more space for nature as a buffer.

Reprinted from Grist.

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Plastics in the Deep Ocean

A dangerous chemical has tainted N.J. water for decades and the feds are still dragging their feet

by Sol Warren

It is a problem that has tainted New Jersey’s drinking water for years.

Areas of the state are contaminated with a cocktail of dangerous, cancer-causing chemicals known as PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) after decades of hazardous disposal by manufacturing plants across New Jersey. Since the 1940s, when use of the chemicals began, PFAS chemicals were discharged in the plants’ wastewater, which then mixed with drinking water supplies. The industrial use of PFAS has been phased out of American facilities in recent years, but the damage has been done.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, the health effects of PFAS exposure range from increased risk of cancer to stunting the growth of children. Exposure to these chemicals, which have been used to manufacture everything from nonstick cook-wear and stain-resistant carpets to cosmetics, is even linked to lower chances of pregnancy in affected women.

But efforts to rectify the issue — particularly on the federal level — have moved slowly.

On Thursday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency unveiled its first nationwide “action plan” to deal with the PFAS family of chemicals. The plan includes expanded monitoring of the chemical around the country, continued enforcement actions to cleanup contamination hotspots and further research of the health effects stemming from PFAS consumption.

Yet there are still no federal drinking water standards for the chemicals.

“The PFAS action plan is the most comprehensive cross-agency plan to address an emerging chemical of concern ever undertaken by EPA,” said Andrew Wheeler, the EPA’s Acting Administrator.

The new action plan was announced Thursday morning in Philadelphia, just up the Delaware River from Paulsboro and West Deptford, where New Jerseyans have been grappling with PFAS contamination for years due to the area’s heavily industrial past. It was there that, from 1985 to 2010, Solvay Solexis Specialty Polymers used a member of the PFAS chemical family known as PFNA.

The Solvay plant discharged the chemical within its wastewater and now Gloucester County is home to some of the highest levels of PFNA contamination on Earth. The EPA plan comes months after New Jersey established statewide drinking water standards for PFNA.

PFAS pollution has been found elsewhere in the Garden State, with particularly high concentrations near New Jersey’s military installations like Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst and Naval Weapon State Earle, where the use of fire-fighting foam containing the chemicals has dirtied nearby waters.

Wheeler said that the EPA will continue to take enforcement actions against PFAS polluters based on a 2016 health advisory issued by the agency, but drinking water standards under the Safe Drinking Water Act won’t be proposed until the end of the year.

Even after that proposal is unveiled, the rules-making process can take years and is not guaranteed to establish new drinking water standards.

Environmental groups slammed the EPA for not proposing drinking water standards for the chemicals in the new plan.

“While the agency fumbles with this ‘mis-management plan,’ millions of people will be exposed to highly toxic PFAS from drinking contaminated water,” said Erik Olson, the senior director for health and food at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “As a guardian of public health, Administrator Andrew Wheeler should revisit this embarrassing decision.”

Source: NJ.com

Whole House Water Treatment: Keeping It Simple and Easy

Simple whole house treatment for city water consists of a sediment filter, a carbon filter, and a TAC scale prevention unit. 

One of the best-kept secrets about water treatment equipment is that to be effective it does not have to be complicated, expensive, and large. The truth is that much of the innovative energy of water treatment professionals in recent years has been directed toward greatly improved performance of traditional items like filter cartridges and toward the development of technologies that provide simpler solutions to problems like scale prevention.

Filter cartridges for city water applications, because of improved efficiency, often outperform large tank-style systems. Similarly, recently developed alternatives to conventional water softeners, like TAC units, can greatly improve water quality and prevent scale buildup without complicated control programming, drain connections, salt purchases, or service agreements.

It is easy to be impressed by the size of a large tank-style whole house carbon filter and to assume that because it is big it works better than a filter that is relatively small. Looks can be deceiving. Compact filter cartridges, made from very tightly packed powdered filter carbon, actually follow a different set of rules than large filters.  Concepts like “empty bed contact time” used to design and to size tank style filters filled with granular carbon do not apply to modern filter cartridges.  In many ways a well- engineered 4.5″ X 20″ carbon block filter cartridge can outperform a carbon tank with several cubic feet of granular carbon.

Here are some advantages of cartridge-style whole house filters as compared with large tank-style backwashing units:

Easy to install. No drain or electrical connection needed. Thus, fewer plumbing connections, no wiring, and greater flexibility in choosing a place to install.

Low purchase price. Typically, a cartridge filter array costs less than 1/2 as much as a tank-style equivalent.

Easy to service. With cartridge units there is little that can go wrong, so an easy cartridge change and an occasional o ring replacement are all that’s needed. Changing a cartridge is a much easier “do it yourself” job than rebedding a tank-style filter.

Versatile. There are many cartridges to choose from.  When you put in a new cartridge, you have a new water filter. If your city changes its disinfectant from chlorine to chloramine, you just change your filter cartridge. If you have a standard-sized filter housing, which is what we recommend, you have literally dozens of cartridges to choose from.

Perhaps the greatest mark of versatility is the ability to easily increase filter capacity by installing two or more carbon filters in parallel, so that each cartridge gets a fraction of the service water.  If your cartridge supports a service flow of six gallons per minute, installing a second in parallel gives you twelve per minute.  The extra carbon unit(s) can be added at the time of the initial installation, or later, to accommodate an increase in family size or other expanded need for filtered water.

Two carbon cartridges in parallel double the capacity and greatly reduce pressure drop. The multi-cartridge system provides higher flow rates for larger homes.

For scale prevention, passive TAC systems are becoming a popular substitute for conventional water softeners.  TAC units require no drain connection and no electricity. The only upkeep is an easy media change, recommended for every three years.

The products featured on this page do not require electricity, drain connections, chemicals, or even water for regeneration. There are no electronic controls to program, no manuals to study, no salt to buy, no brine tanks to clean. Annual filter service is so easy most homeowners can do it themselves. Even the media change in the TAC tank (recommended every 3 years) does not require special equipment or great technical know-how.

More information about cartridge-style whole house units and salt-free scale treatment:

Brine from Desalination Can Be Put to Use

Currently, the world produces more than 100 billion liters (about 27 billion gallons) a day of water from desalination, which leaves a similar volume of concentrated brine. Much of the brine is pumped back out to sea, and current regulations require costly outfall systems to ensure adequate dilution of the salts to prevent damage to marine ecosystems.

A new MIT study shows that through a fairly simple process the waste material can be converted into useful chemicals — including ones that can make the desalination process itself more efficient.

The approach can be used to produce sodium hydroxide, among other products. Otherwise known as caustic soda, sodium hydroxide can be used to pretreat seawater going into the desalination plant. This changes the acidity of the water, which helps to prevent fouling of the membranes used to filter out the salty water — a major cause of interruptions and failures in typical reverse osmosis desalination plants.

Another important chemical used by desalination plants and many other industrial processes is hydrochloric acid, which can also easily be made on site from the waste brine using established chemical processing methods. The chemical can be used for cleaning parts of the desalination plant, but is also widely used in chemical production and as a source of hydrogen.

Converting the brine can thus be both economically and ecologically beneficial, especially as desalination continues to grow rapidly around the world. Environmentally safe discharge of brine is manageable with current technology, but it’s much better to recover resources from the brine and reduce the amount of brine released.

Adapted from MIT News.

Widespread PFAS Contamination Around Georgia Military Bases

The Military Times reports widespread PFAS contamination of water in the area of Gerogia military bases as the result of years of use of firefighting foam. Nationwide, the Air Force has acknowledged contaminating drinking water in communities close to its bases in more than a dozen other states.

In Georgia, Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Cobb County, Robins Air Force Base in Houston County and Moody Air Force Base in Lowndes County used the firefighting foam in training exercises and to put out fires when planes crashed. The foam also sometimes leaked out of its storage tanks, the Journal-Constitution reported. Thousands of gallons of foam soaked into the ground or washed into creeks and wetlands, killing fish and imperiling those who use the affected waterways for fishing, swimming and boating, the newspaper reported.

The contamination, which is linked to a class of chemicals known collectively as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, was laid out in a series of site inspection reports completed by the Air Force last year.

Of particular interest in this context is the EPA’s recent decision to not establish regulatory limits on PFAS. This ruling allows the military to disclaim responsibilty for contamination of drinking water in the areas surrounding bases. In a statement, the Air Force said its response is constrained by a lack of regulation for PFAS chemicals. The two that are the focus of most testing are known as PFOS and PFOA.

“Because PFOS/PFOA are unregulated and Georgia or federal entities have not established standards for non-drinking water sources, we cannot expend government resources on those water sources,” the Air Force said.

Reference: Military Times

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Filter Arrangement Using Compact Whole House Cartridge Filters

Compact whole house filters using 4.5″x 20″ cartridges in standard “Big Blue” housings or the equivalent can be arranged to effectively support very high service flow rates with parallel installation.

Figure 1.

For a single sediment filter, carbon filter, or specialty filter

Figure 2. 

For a sediment filter followed by a carbon or specialty filter. 

Figure 3.

For two carbon or specialty filters, each gets half the service flow.

Figure 4.

For a single sediment filter followed by parallel carbon or specialty filters.

Figure 5.

For a sediment filter followed by 3 carbon or media filters installed in parallel.

Figure 6.

Bypass. Either a single filter or an entire array can be isolated with a 3-valve bypass.