The Dangerously Clean Water Used to Make Your Iphone
The ultra-pure water used to clean semiconductors and make microchips would suck vital minerals right out of your body. Plus it tastes really nasty.
by Charles Fishman
FACT: Water can be too clean to drink—so clean that it’s actually not safe to drink.
That’s the kind of claim about water that people scoff at—it seems ridiculous on the face of it.
Water too clean to drink?
Give me a break. It’s water. Cleaner is better.
But this is one wild water story that’s true.
Every day, around the world, tens of millions of gallons of the cleanest water possible are created, water so clean that it is regarded as an industrial solvent, absolutely central to high-tech manufacturing but not safe for human consumption.
The clean water—it’s called ultra-pure water (UPW)—is a central part of making semiconductors, the wafers from which computer microchips are cut for everything from MRI scanners to greeting cards.
Chips and their pathways are built up in layers, and between manufacturing steps, they need to be washed clean of the solvents and debris from the layer just completed.
But the electronic pathways on microchips are now so fine now so fine they can’t be seen even with ordinary microscopes. The pathways are narrower than the wavelengths of visible light. They can only be seen with electron microscopes. And so even the absolute tiniest of debris can be like a boulder on a semiconductor—so the chips have to be washed, but with water that is itself absolutely clean.
The water must have nothing in it except water molecules—not only no specks of dirt or random ions, no salts or minerals, it can’t have any particles of any kind, not even minuscule parts of cells or viruses.
And so every microchip factory has a smaller factory inside that manufactures ultra-pure water. The ordinary person thinks of reverse-osmosis as taking “everything” out of water. RO is the process you use to turn ocean water into crystalline drinking water. And in human terms, RO does take most everything out of the water.
But for semiconductors, RO water isn’t even close. Ultra-pure water requires 12 filtration steps beyond RO. (For those of a technical bent, the final filter in making UPW has pores that are 20 nanometers wide. At the IBM semiconductor plant I visited, they send the 20 nm filters out to be inspected by a private company, using a scanning electron microscope. They want that company to find filters with nothing in them.)
Just the one IBM microchip plant in Burlington, Vermont, makes 2 million gallons of UPW a day for use in manufacturing semiconductors, and there are dozens of chip plants around the world. UPW is also used in pharmaceutical manufacturing, but it is a purely human form of water—water that is literally nothing like the stuff that exists naturally on Earth.
Water is a good cleaner because it is a good solvent—the so-called “universal solvent,” excellent at dissolving all kinds of things. UPW is particularly “hungry,” in solvent terms, because it starts so clean. That’s why it is so valuable for washing semiconductors.
It’s also why it’s not safe to drink. A single glass of UPW wouldn’t hurt you. But even that one glass of water would instantly start leeching valuable minerals back out of your body.
At the chip plants, the staff comes to regard UPW as just another part of a high-tech manufacturing process. One senior IBM official was stunned when I asked her what UPW tasted like. Despite presiding for years over the water purification process, she not only had never tasted it, it has never even occurred to her to taste it. One of her deputies had, though, and he piped right up. “I stuck my tongue in it,” he said. “It was horrid.”
In fact, super-clean water tastes flat, heavy, and bitter. The opposite of what we like. The appealing freshness in water comes not just from it’s temperature and its appearance, but from a sprinkling of salts and minerals that give it a crisp taste.
So there it is: Not only is it possible for water to be too clean to drink—it’s exactly that kind of water that makes your iPhone possible.
Plan targets farmers in 3 states to reduce Lake Erie algae
by John Seewer
TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) — Farmers in Ohio, Michigan and Indiana are being asked to be part of the solution in fixing the algae problem in Lake Erie. Federal officials on Friday outlined a program that will make $17.5 million available to farmers who take steps to reduce the pollutants that wash away from the fields and help the algae thrive.
Algae in water at Toledo’s water uptake point.
How will it work?
First, it’s a voluntary program so farmers won’t be forced to take part. And it only applies to those who have land in the western Lake Erie watershed, which is mostly made up of northwestern Ohio, southeastern Michigan and northeastern Indiana.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture will work with those farmers to reduce their field runoff by developing a plan that could include planting strips of grass or cover crops that help soil absorb and filer the phosphorus found in farm fertilizers and livestock manure.
Farmers would receive a payment from the government.
“We will not go to a farm and say ‘you will do this,'” said Terry Cosby, the USDA‘s state conservationist in Ohio. “They’re in charge of their farm.”
But that doesn’t mean all farmers who apply will be selected or get a payment.
The agriculture department will rank the applications based on what farms are most likely to have the biggest impact on reducing runoff. The department has been working with university scientists and soil experts to determine what areas they should target.
“We have hot spots,” Cosby said. “We’ve identified all that.”
Why target farm runoff?
Researchers have found that agriculture is the leading source of the phosphorus that feeds the algae in Lake Erie and other fresh water sources. Some researchers say as much as two-thirds comes from agriculture.
The algae blooms produce the type of toxins that contaminated the drinking water supply for Toledo and a sliver of southeastern Michigan for two days last August.
Pure Water Gazette Technical Wizard Pure Water Annie Answers All the Persistent Questions about Water Treatment.
This week’s topic: Reverse Osmosis Flow Restrictors.
What’s the purpose of the flow restrictor?
The flow restrictor, as the name suggests, restricts the flow of brine (reject water) in drain line leaving the membrane. It provides resistance, creating pressure against the membrane and forcing some of the water, the permeate, or product water, through the membrane. Without the resistance provided by the drain line flow restrictor, all the water entering the membrane housing would simply take the path of least resistance and exit through the drain line. In short, without the flow restrictor, the reverse osmosis process wouldn’t take place.
Where is the flow restrictor located on my home RO unit?
The most common situation is to insert a tiny restrictor into the 1/8″ threaded fitting where the reject water leaves the membrane housing. Better units now normally use larger capillary restrictors that are inserted into the drain line itself. These are easily visible and have the advantage of having the “size” of the restrictor printed on the surface. This is especially valuable, because if you can read the output of the restrictor you can guess the size (output capacity) of the membrane.
In RO units larger than undersink, flow restrictors are often electronically controlled or variable-output hand-controlled needle valves that allow adjustment to suit different treatment challenges.
Tiny fitting-insert-style flow restrictor that inserts into the elbow fitting where drain water leaves the membrane housing.
Capillary-style flow restrictor.
Are flow restrictors all the same output?
No, the fixed-output flow restrictors used in undersink and countertop RO units are sized in accordance with the membrane output. In other words, a membrane that produces 25 gallons per day product water does not need as much drain water to keep it rinsed as a membrane that produces 50. The higher the membrane’s permeate output, the looser the flow restrictor. In small units, sizing is usually done so that the restrictor size is about four times the membrane’s permeate rating: a 25 gpd membrane is matched with a 100 gpd flow restrictor.
Are restrictors rated by their GPD (gallons per day) output?
Some are, but most manufacturers use MLM (milliliters per minute). This leads to confusion. If the restrictor size is stated in mlm, it can be roughly converted to gpd by multiplying by 0.38. Thus, a 400 milliliter per minute flow restrictor would flow around 150 gallons of water per day to drain if it ran continuously for 24 hours.
Can I save water by reducing the flow size of the flow restrictor–for example, replacing my 250 mlm restrictor with a 180 mlm?
Yes, you can, but in most cases it’s a bad idea. Unless the water has very low TDS and little hardness, you’ll probably get poorer TDS performance, reduced production because of hardness scaling of the membrane, and reduced membrane life. The water that flows to drain is not “waste.” It’s an essential part of the RO unit’s operation. Its function is to rinse the membrane, keep it clean, and to wash the impurities rejected by the membrane down the drain.
Do flow restrictors have to be replaced?
Sometimes–if they fail. Some manufacturers say that you should replace the restrictor each time you replace the membrane, but most of us let them run until they have a problem. Usually this is never.
What are symptoms of flow restrictor failure?
Either too much water or not enough water (which can be no water at all) flowing to drain. If the restrictor stops up and no water goes to drain, the RO unit is in effect constipated and the water quality gets bad, then it stops making water completely. If the restrictor is too loose, you waste water, and if the problem is bad enough, the unit won’t make enough water and it won’t shut off properly.
How do you know if the flow is too much or too little?
The best way is to pull the drain tube out of its fitting and measure the amount of water that comes out with a measuring cup. 250 mlm means that literally 250 mlm should be coming from the drain. Catch the water from the drain tube in a measuring cup and see how much comes out in one minute. It won’t be exactly the rated figure, but it should be in the ballpark. Remember that the TDS of the water, the temperature, and the water pressure are variables that make it unlikely that you’ll come up with a perfect reading.
Dirty Water Is Leading to Obesity and Diabetes in California
by Colleen Curry
A lack of access to clean drinking water in rural California farm communities is leading residents to turn to sugary drinks and soda, contributing to obesity and Type 2 diabetes, researchers said in a new policy paper.
The report, from the University of California Davis Center for Poverty Research, finds that many agricultural immigrant communities in California’s Central Valley have difficulty obtaining clean, drinkable water. And even in those that do have clean water, a persistent belief in the contamination of water leads individuals to buy alternatives, including soda and other sugar-heavy drinks.
Researchers at the school interviewed mothers in poor, rural, unincorporated towns in the Central Valley for the report. They found that the women would not drink the water or give it to their children because of its “unpleasant taste, dirty or yellow appearance, excessive iron, and/or general contamination.” Instead, the women purchased bottled water or other drinks at nearby stores. They reported that their children drink soda or sugary drinks at least two to three times per week.
“The prevalence of obesity and Type 2 diabetes in California is higher among low-income minority populations than white affluent populations. A combination of environmental factors, including a lack of access to healthy foods and nutrition education — and safe drinking water — likely contribute to these disparities,” the team wrote. “Decreasing sugar-sweetened beverage consumption is key to preventing obesity and nutrition-related chronic disease.”
According to information provided by the Community Water Center, the San Joaquin Valley, which is part of the Central Valley, has the highest rates of drinking water contamination and the greatest number of public water systems with contaminant violations in the state. The water supply is tainted with nitrates, arsenic, coliform bacteria, pesticides, disinfectant byproducts, and uranium, according to the group, which attributes the contaminants to fertilizers, pesticides, large-scale animal feed operations, and mining.
Ryan Jensen, a community organizer with the Community Water Center, an advocacy group serving the region, explained that it’s not just environmental issues at play.
“It’s also an institutional and structural issue,” he told VICE News. “You’re dealing with a lot of very small unincorporated communities, a very poor population. So they don’t have the resources to deal with issues or the technical knowledge to be able to address it effectively.”
Jensen said some studies have found that as many as one-quarter of all of the communities in the Central Valley don’t have drinkable water.
“At one time the pinnacle of modernization was that you could walk into your home or apartment and turn on the water and it would be safe to drink,” said Harold Goldstein, the director of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy.
Goldstein told VICE News that the policy report from UC Davis highlights the dangers of sugary drinks and their disproportionate effect on poor immigrant communities. He said that nearly one-third of all patients over 35 admitted to hospitals in California have diabetes, while that figure jumps to 43 percent among Latinos.
“People have come from countries where the water wasn’t good to drink. There may be a sense that the water isn’t safe to drink from their own history and this enforces that,” he said.
“If that’s the case you’ve got to go to the store and buy something, and there’s a lot of marketing to induce people to consume the growing plethora of sugary drink. There are signs, ‘buy 12 packs of soda for the price of 2,’ you know? So making sure people have access to water is absolutely essential.”
He criticized the soda companies for their slogans, including Pepsi with “Live for Now,” and Coca-Cola with “Open Happiness.”
“Yeah, live for today, day of diabetes tomorrow,” he said. “Or Coke’s campaign is open happiness, it doesn’t say open a bottle of insulin.”
Goldstein advocates for a tax and warning label on sodas and sugary drinks, the profits from which could be used to make sure clean water is more readily available.
Ken McDonald, the city manager of Firebaugh, California, a small town about 45 miles outside of Fresno, said that his city has a water treatment system that provides clean drinking water to residents, but the problem is that many outlying residents — some up to 20 miles away — have a Firebaugh address but are not hooked up to the town water system.
“The whole thing is a little larger than just the city,” McDonald told VICE News, explaining that the Central Valley’s history as an ancient seabed made its groundwater vulnerable to mineral deposits trapped underground. “So our water in the municipal system has to go through a treatment process to make it potable. Unpotable water is an issue outside of city limits, out on Interstate 5, which is about 20 miles away.”
The state of California has become more responsive to pleas for help on behalf of the communities, Jensen stressed, though as they lack the resources, it can sometimes take three years to apply for grant money and use it to build water facilities.
“It’s changing and it’s changing very rapidly. The state is making a lot of strides toward improving that situation,” he said. “But there are a lot of communities that don’t have or aren’t very well equipped to deal with the structure.”
Music festival causes spike in ecstasy and caffeine in nearby river
by Rachel Feltman
Gazette Introductory Note: How do music and sports affect water? This article will tell you that they may have more than we thought to do with the growing problem of “emerging contaminants.” A local university professor published research a couple of years back showing how the calendars of our two local universities are reflected in the birth control drug content of our lakes. Are we approaching a time when special hazardous waste assessments are required for football stadiums and concert halls as they are now for auto repair shops and dry cleaners?–Hardly Waite.
It turns out that massive music festivals might not just be a noise disruption for locals — they might be causing issues for nearby aquatic life, too. According to a study published Wednesday in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, these events could be introducing dangerous drugs like ecstasy and ketamine into the water supply, leaving traces of them in rivers and soil.
The study is part of an effort to research so-called “emerging contaminants,” (ECs) or things like drugs (both prescribed and recreational) and hygiene products that end up in waste water. According to recent studies, only about half of these contaminants are actually removed during the water treatment process. So eventually, they can end up back in our drinking water — and in our fish.
Researchers were particularly interested in how certain events — like football games, holiday weekends, and tourist attractions — could cause spikes or even changes in these sneaky contaminants. After all, it stands to reason that an influx of people (especially a large group all doing the same activity) would have an effect. The researchers measured contaminant levels in Hengchun, a popular vacation destination in Taiwan.
ECs were higher in Hengchun rivers than in other areas, despite the low population of the town. That wasn’t unexpected — since the area is popular with tourists, it often has extra people hanging around flushing their waste. These areas also showed a lower concentration of illicit drugs.
So the researchers also weren’t surprised that contaminants spiked during popular travel times, like weekends and seasons with good weather.
But during the “Spring Scream,” an event that draws over 600,000 young music fans to the beach town, things got a little crazy.
Daily sampling during the week of Spring Scream found big spikes in drugs like ecstasy, ketamine, and caffeine — exactly the cocktail of “fun” drugs one would expect hoards of young music festival goers to partake in. Meanwhile, more benign drugs — like ibuprofen — were fairly consistent before, during, and after the concerts.
This isn’t the first indication that sewage can be affected by one-off events.Studies of water near universities have found spikes in amphetamine (taken illicitly by many students to enhance their studying) during exam periods, for example. Another study found that levels of party drugs like cocaine and ecstasy spike in the London area on weekends.
It’s not as if going for a swim in this water could get you high. But the concern is that people and animals are being exposed to varying mixtures of different drugs at different concentrations — so it’s hard to guess just what the long-term effects might be. And research has indicated that some of the drugs that change behavior in humans might also change the behavior of aquatic animals exposed to them, so this party drug pollution is something that warrants a closer look.
The Risk of Benzene in Drinking Water, and How to Get Rid of It
Benzene was featured in the January 2015 Water Technology’s “Contaminant of the Month” feature.
Here are some highlights:
Benzene is a natural product in some foods, is a hydrocarbon manufactured from petroleum, and is the base product amid the family of BTEX (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylene) hydrocarbons.
Health risks assessment:
As with most volatile solvents, benzene can cause drowsiness and headaches at high inhalation levels.
Benzene is a known human carcinogen — EPA Group A, based upon occupational epidemiology.
Leukemias are the principal cancer concern.
EPA’s lifetime risk calculation for inhalation is about one in 100,000 to one in one million for exposure at 1 µg/m3.
EPA’s calculated risk of one in one million for ingestion through drinking water is between 10 and 100 ppb.
The other BTEX hydrocarbons have much less chronic risk than benzene.
Benzene is not present in most groundwaters and is most of ten found when wells are contaminated with gasoline from hazardous waste sites or leaking underground storage tanks.
Treatment options: Activated carbon and aeration are effective for water treatment plants. For point-of-entry or point-of-use: Activated carbon is effective, but cartridges or carbon beds must be replaced before exhaustion. Although reverse osmosis membranes are not effective because benzene can dissolve and migrate through to the treated water, the carbon filters that go with reverse osmosis units make reverse osmosis a good option.
Regulation figures:
EPA’s MCLG (Maximum Contamintant Level Goal) — 0.
EPA’s MCL (Maximum Contaminant Level) — 5 ppb.
Florida and California MCL — 1 ppb.
World Health Organization MCL – 10 ppb.
You can find Water Technology’s Contaminant of the Month assessment of benzene here.
Scientists: Great Lakes Teeming With Tiny Plastic Fibers
Associated Press
TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. — Scientists who have reported that the Great Lakes are awash in tiny bits of plastic are raising new alarms about a little-noticed form of the debris turning up in sampling nets: synthetic fibers from garments, cleaning cloths and other consumer products.
They are known as “microfibers” — exceedingly fine filaments made of petroleum-based materials such as polyester and nylon that are woven together into fabrics.
“When we launder our clothes, some of the little microfibers will break off and go down the drain to the wastewater treatment facility and end up in our bodies of water,” Sherri “Sam” Mason, a chemist with the State University of New York at Fredonia, said Friday.
The fibers are so minuscule that people typically don’t realize their favorite pullover fleece can shed thousands of them with every washing, as the journal Environmental Science & Technology reported in 2011.
Over the past couple of years, Mason and colleagues have documented the existence of microplastic litter — some too small to see with the naked eye — in the Great Lakes. Among the particles are abrasive beads used in personal care products such as facial and body washes and toothpastes. Other researchers have made similar finds in the oceans.
A number of companies are replacing microbeads with natural substances such as ground-up fruit pits. Illinois imposed a statewide ban on microbeads last year. Similar measures were proposed in California and New York.
But microfibers have gotten comparatively little attention. They’ve accounted for about 4 percent of the plastic litter that Mason and her students have collected from the Great Lakes. The group drags finely meshed netting along the lake surfaces, harvesting tens of thousands of particles per square mile, and study them with microscopes.
About three-quarters of the bits they’ve found are fragments of larger items such as bottles. Smaller portions consist of microbeads, Styrofoam and other materials.
But when Mason’s team and a group from the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant program took samples from southern Lake Michigan in 2013, about 12 percent of the debris consisted of microfibers. It’s unclear why the fibers were three times as prevalent in that area as elsewhere in the lakes, although currents and wave actions may be one explanation, said Laura Kammin, pollution prevention specialist with Sea Grant.
Ominously, the fibers seem to be getting stuck inside fish in ways that other microplastics aren’t. Microbeads and fragments that fish eat typically pass through their bodies and are excreted. But fibers are becoming enmeshed in gastrointestinal tracts of some fish Mason and her students have examined. They also found fibers inside a double-crested cormorant, a fish-eating bird.
“The longer the plastic remains inside an organism, the greater the likelihood that it will impact the organism in some way,” Mason said, noting that many plastics are made with toxic chemicals or absorb them from polluted water. She is preparing a paper on how microplastics are affecting Great Lakes food chains, including fish that people eat.
There’s also a chance that fibers are in drinking water piped from the lakes, she said. Scientists reported last fall that two dozen varieties of German beer contained microplastics.
Because microfibers are used so widely, there’s no obvious solution, Mason said. Persuading people to stop wearing synthetic clothes likely would be a tougher sell than the idea of switching facial scrubs.
But pollution prevention remains the best way to protect the lakes, Kammin said.
“It’s very hard to remove these microplastics once they’re out there,” she said.
Jellyfish in a group are called a smack. The ignorant, however, just call them a bunch of jellyfish.
Some things you may not know about one of earth’s most ancient creatures.
They have been around longer than the oldest of dinosaurs, approximately three times as long. They go back at least 500,000,000 years.
Although they are called fish, they actually aren’t. They are zooplankton.
They are heartless and brainless and made almost entirely (up to 98%) of water. When exposed to air, they can actually evaporate.
Some, but not all, have eyes. One variety has 24 eyes, in fact, and has a full 360-degree view of the world.
One species, Turritopsis nutricula, has the ability to renew its cells and is, therefore, theoretically immortal.
They conveniently eat and defecate through the same orifice which serves as both mouth and anus.
Jellyfish are aquarium favorites.
Just to be different, they have a unique group name. A group of fish is called a school, but multiple jellyfish are referred to as a bloom, a swarm, or a smack.
They are deadly and they don’t mind to sting. One species can kill a human in a matter of minutes with a single sting. And jellyfish stings are very painful.
They come in all sizes. They range in size from a few millimeters in diameter to 440 lbs. The longest jellyfish has tentacles that can extend 120 feet.
Some are edible. They are a popular delicacy in places like Japan and Korea, but haven’t caught on in most parts of the world. In Japan they make jellyfish candy.
Jellyfish have been used in space experiments because of their similarity to humans as regards adaptation to zero-gravity environments.
Jellyfish live in every ocean and can be found from the surface to the deep sea.
The Evolution of High Quality Drinking Water in the United States
Probably the most spectacular water event in 2014, a year of drought and controversy over fracking, was the chemical leaking into West Virginia’s Elk River of ten thousand gallons of 4-Methylcyclohexane Methanol (MCHM), a chemical used to clean coal.
This Charleston incident served as the starting point of an excellent article on “The Politics of Drinking Water” by Anya Groner. Groner’s article takes a look at the history of America’s drinking water laws and customs. We usually think of advances in drinking water purity to start with chlorination. We forget about steps like the evolutionary jump from shared public drinking cups to the “bubbler” and very successful strategies like moving the water uptake point away from the human pollution near the lakeshore to a point far out in the lake to prevent water-borne diseases.
Here are some excerpts from Anna Groner’s article:
Most Americans take cheap, safe drinking water for granted. Globally, one out of 10 people can’t access clean water. Some 1,400 children die each day from water-related diseases. Unless there’s a spill or equipment failure, these numbers exclude U.S. residents. Across the 50 states, 155,000 public water systems treat, filter, and deliver 100 gallons per person per day, all for the low cost of less than 1 cent per gallon.
1911 Drinking Fountain
Contaminant-free drinking water hasn’t always been part of the American experience. Until the early 1900s, shared public cups accompanied most drinking fountains. Cholera, typhoid fever, dysentery, and food poisoning from coliform bacteria—all potentially fatal—spread from mouth to cup and back again. Diarrhea was rampant. Not until 1899, when Kohler Water Works invented the Bubbler, which pumped a continuous flow of water an inch into the air, did a spout replace the cup. To partake, drinkers stooped over the copper basin and slurped. What wasn’t sucked up dripped down the nozzle. Clean water mingled with saliva. Though an improvement over the public cup, bacteria still flourished.
Humans weren’t the only creatures to suffer waterborne illness. In the late 19th century, 100,000 horses populated New York City’s streets, producing 26,000 gallons of urine daily. Concerned with dehydration, early chapters of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals advocated for the erection of “fountains for man and beast,” with large, street-side basins for horses, sidewalk basins for “the sons of men,” and low spouts for dogs. Glanders, an equine disease now eradicated in North America, proliferated. Lesions formed in the infected horses’ respiratory tracts, causing fevers; coughing; and, ultimately, septicemia (an inflammation of the blood). Within days of exposure, horses died. On occasion, the bacterium crossed species’ lines, taking the lives of cats, dogs, goats, and men.
Despite health hazards, drinking fountains became a fashionable social project. Prominent citizens appealed to city governments to build fountains “for the convenience of street passengers,” and the growing temperance movement boosted the cause. In 1859, a doctor named A. K. Gardner warned the Common Council of New York City that, “Men, and women, too… resort to drinking saloons and bar-rooms where they must ‘take a little something’ for the sake of a glass of water.” A New York Times editorial from the same year argued, “intemperance should be arrested… by putting fresh, good water freely within the reach of the wayfarer.” Water and sewerage boards, church temperance clubs, men’s associations, and tree planting societies took up the cause by writing letters, holding meetings, and raising money.
The ensuing fountains ranged from purely functional to “handsome bronze and marble affair[s]” designed more to flaunt wealth and memorialize family names than to quench public thirst. Rich patrons bequeathed fountains in their wills, and young people collected change to support upkeep. Newspapers supported this fetishization, printing the locales of new fountains alongside lists of prestigious attendees at inaugural festivities.
In 1892, when the Chicago World’s Fair coincided with a devastating typhoid outbreak, clean water became a matter of national safety. In the two years prior, Chicago suffered more typhoid-related deaths than any other city in the world. To protect the fair’s 27 million guests from infection, engineers designed plumbing that extended four miles into Lake Michigan where they hoped the water was contagion-free. Additional supplies were piped in from Waukesha, Wisconsin, and sold for a penny per glass. The innovations worked. When the fair opened to the public in 1893, infection rates dropped and the outbreak receded.
By 1900, germ theory—the belief that microscopic pathogens travel through air and water—took hold. New sanitation methods promised to eliminate these invisible threats. Redesigned Bubblers included arc projection, separating clean water from run-off, and the first disinfectant, a continuous dilute solution of chloride of lime, was added to the Boonton Reservoir in 1908, providing sterile, disease-free water to Jersey City. Nationwide, municipal treatment centers followed suit. Though gastroenteritis and norovirus infections occasionally broke out, germ-free water became the norm.
As tap water became safer, drinking fountains provided a staging ground for white Americans to act out fears of racial contamination. The rhetoric of sanitation—maintaining purity against an insidious threat—was used to justify Jim Crow laws. From 1876-1965, alongside hospitals, trains, lunch counters, voting booths, and highway passing lanes, drinking fountains became sites of Black exclusion. “White Only,” “Colored Only,” or simply “Colored” signs directed traffic. A 1963 pro-segregation speech titled “The Message from Mississippi” argued that separate fountains protected white citizens from “exposure” to bad morals, poor education, and improper hygiene: “There are many Negroes, of course, who have reached plateaus of citizenship. They are personally clean, have high morals and are educated. However, they are still in the minority.” In 1964, the Civil Rights Act mandated “equal enjoyment … of public accommodation,” ending segregated fountains and setting precedent for the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, which legislated spout height and knee clearance to enable wheelchair access.
Although public water fountains have become more inclusive, they’ve also grown less desirable. Bottled water, the fastest-growing drink product in the U.S., is now the preferred way to hydrate. The anthropologist Martha Kaplan suggests that this “bottlemania” reflects post-9/11 skepticism of federally-protected water supplies. Participants in her study of American water consumption cited unclean pipes, pollution, unsavory smells, bad tastes, and fluoridation as reasons for preferring the corporate-produced, single-serve water bottle. In the Great Recession, Kaplan notes, “Bottled water [was] the only luxury people [could] still afford.”
Besides portability, bottled water offers few advantages over the fountain. Many popular brands—including Aquafina and Dasani—simply fill bottles with tap water. The difference in taste, when there is a difference, is most often caused by the disinfection process. Public treatment plants use chlorine while bottled water companies tend to adopt more costly methods: ultra violet light or ozonation. Not only is single-serve bottled water more expensive than gasoline—averaging $7.50 a gallon—the petroleum used to create the plastic of the bottle and the carbon released during its shipment incur environmental costs. Student organizations such as “Tap That” at Vassar College and “Take Back The Tap” at the University of Nevada attempt to reduce plastic bottle consumption. So far, over ninety colleges have restricted bottled water sales. Last March, San Francisco became the first city to create policy on the topic by banning distribution of single-serve, single-use bottled water on public properties.
Bottled water backlash has renewed enthusiasm for old-fashioned drinking fountains. Since 2013, the EPA has partnered with mayors to “reinvigorat[e] our nation’s supply” of these “iconic symbols of public health and welfare in our communities.” Companies have taken note. Both Elkay EZ and Halsey Taylor sell affordable retrofits: no-touch, sensor-activated spigots that turn neglected fountains into “HydroBoost” stations where passersby can top off reusable bottles. While consumers pause for their refill, electronic counters track how many plastic bottles they’ve diverted from landfills. Watching the display uptick feels good, akin to the sensation produced by a Facebook like or a favorited tweet.
Unlike oil, water is a renewable resource, replenished by rain and snowmelt. Even so, environmentalists warn that we’re tapping out our supply. Agriculture, industry, and household use deplete ecosystems faster than they can replenish. Many of the world’s biggest rivers—including the Indus, the Ganges, and the Colorado—often dry to sand before reaching the ocean. The Baltic Sea, central Lake Erie, the lower Mississippi River, and portions of the Gulf of Mexico are so polluted by fertilizers and sewage that they’ve become oxygen-deprived and are unable to support life.
As we near peak water, hydroclimatologist Peter Gleick warns that skirmishes over resources will intensify. “Water can be—and often is—a source of cooperation rather than conflict,” Gleick notes, “but conflicts over water are real.” Already Gleick’s organization, the Pacific Institute, has created a 5000-year timeline of water-related conflict. Highlights include Assyrians poisoning enemy wells with rye ergot in the 6th century B.C., the World War II targeting and destruction of Soviet hydroelectric dams, the U.S. bombing of North Vietnamese irrigation canals in the 1960s, and riots in Cape Town, South Africa in 2012 sparked by insufficient water supplies. By 2025, scientists predict that one in five humans will live in regions suffering from water scarcity, areas with insufficient resources to meet water usage demands.
You can read Anya Groner’s full article in The Atlantic.
Water was declared the ‘least on-track target’ by the United Nations even as companies and international organisations are paying more attention to water issues and investing in it.
The United Nations recognised water recycling as key to future water and energy needs. Organic matter extracted from treated wastewater offers potential for producing cleaner energy resources while providing additional supply of water to the growing global demand for this precious resource.
Water is the source of life, as the saying goes, but despite its importance, it remains the “least on-track target” of the millennium development goals (MDGs), according to a new report published by the United Nations in November.
As many as 1.8 billion people still use a source of drinking water that is contaminated and 1 billion defecate in the open, nine in 10 of whom live in rural areas. The UN water global analysis and assessment of sanitation and drinking water report attributes this to a lack of investment in water, hygiene and sanitation as well as government failure.
Companies and international organisations, however, are paying more attention to water issues as they realise how it forms a key aspect of their supply chains. In Asia, for example, investment in technologies such as water recycling, water treatment and desalination are on the rise.
Here’s our pick of the top five water stories for the year:
1. Human impact on a warming ocean
The year saw many climate science studies pointing to a warming ocean and the impact of acidification on marine resources and the marine economy, which many communities rely on for food and livelihood. Human activities also contributed significantly to the ocean’s degradation, with plastic trash being a key problem. A December study reported that 269,000 tonnes of litter have been dumped in the ocean.
On World Water Day in March, the United Nations published a report that highlighted the critical importance of water in energy production and urged governments and corporations to examine energy production in view of the industry’s water demand, which comprise 15 per cent globally. One of the key findings is that producing energy from fossil fuels puts a significant stress to freshwater availability.
Hydropower, long considered as a renewable source, also has a dark side and can pose threats to water security. Scientists released a new studywhich showed that the building of dams, mainly for hydropower projects, has been growing worldwide and will have a damaging effect on the world’s rivers.
The year saw various local communities and environmental groups in many parts of China, India, and the Southeast Asian countries in the Mekong delta such as Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, oppose these projects for being unsustainable and a threat to food security.
3. The economic value of protecting water
The Water Footprint Network said in a report in August that global efforts to protect water resources need to be stepped up and urged consumers to start calculating how much water a pair of jeans or a bite to a burger would cost the water sector. By being mindful of their water footprint, consumers can help to advocate the need for transparency in the global supply chain, the non-profit noted. Separately, in June, a new study by United States researchers found that water impact is highly overlooked in palm oil production.
At the same time, Asian investments in watersheds, the most natural basin and source of freshwater, is on the rise.Latest data from Forest Trends revealed that China led the region in terms of the number of investments in watershed protection. A study by the World Agroforestry Centre also highlighted the potential of agroforestry in saving watersheds from degradation.
4. Water recyling makes a big splash
The United Nations has identified the recycling of wastewater to be significant way to raise the sustainability of water for all. Some companies have already shown that water recycling could fill the gap in the increasing demand for water. For example, coal mining firm Anglo American in South Africa reported that through new water technologies, mine waste can be transformed to tap water and provide supply for about 80,000 consumers.
Singapore, recognised worldwide for its investment and success in water recycling, announced in September it will build its fifth water treatment plantfor reclaimed water. Scientists from the country’s Nanyang Technological University also announced a breakthrough in water filtration membrane that is cost-effective and more highly efficient than existing filtration systems.
Elsewhere in Asia, corporates such as multinational firm L’oreal is investing on water sustainability initiatives in its manufacturing plants in Asia, the latest of which is a new custom-built wastewater treatment plant in Indonesia that lowers the firm’s operational carbon, water and waste footprints.
5. The blue economy
In Asia, Indonesia has participated in various global forum this year to promote the adoption of a blue economy, which it refers to asthe sustainable development of marine resources.
In the United Kingdom, the Tidal Lagoon Swansea Bay offers an example of how to tap the marine economy by building a sustainable community that relies on tidal power for low carbon electricity, food security from aquaculture, and eco-tourism for their livelihood.
