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.
Common diabetes medication among drugs found in Lake Michigan
by John Fauber
There is more than one way to measure prescription drug use in modern society.
The most direct method is just to count up prescriptions filled by America’s pharmacies. That would show, for instance, that more than 180 million prescriptions for diabetes drugs were dispensed in 2013.
Or you could test the treated water coming out of sewage facilities such as the South Shore plant in Oak Creek.
That approach reveals that in the Lake Michigan waters outside the plant, the diabetes drug metformin was the most common personal care product found by researchers with the School of Freshwater Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
More importantly, according to their latest research, the levels of metformin were so high that the drug could be disrupting the endocrine systems of fish.
Metformin is a first-line treatment for type 2 diabetes and is the most commonly prescribed medicine for the condition. In 2013, about 70 million prescriptions were dispensed, according to IMS Health, a drug market research firm.
It is so ubiquitous it can easily be found in water samples taken two miles off the shore of Lake Michigan.
“I was kind of a surprise,” said Rebecca Klaper, a professor of freshwater science at UWM. “It was not even on our radar screen. I said, ‘What is this drug?’ ”
The drugs get into the sewage and eventually the lake because they are not broken down completely after they are consumed and then excreted.
The metformin concentrations are low, compared with the amount taken by people.
For instance, coming right out of the treatment plant the levels are about 40 parts per billion. About two miles away, they drop to 120 parts per trillion.
Other commonly found substances include caffeine, sulfamethoxazole, an antibiotic, and triclosan, an antibacterial and antifungal found in soap and other consumer products.
Klaper co-authored a 2013 science journal paper on the finding as well as another one this year.
The more recent research suggests that metformin in lake water is not just a curious artifact of everyday life.
The study looked at the effect of metformin on fathead minnows in the lab that were exposed to the drug at levels found in the lake for four weeks.
It found gene expression suggesting disruption of the endocrine system of male fish, but not females. In essence, the males were producing biochemicals that are associated with female minnows. The biochemicals are precursors to the production of eggs.
Klaper said that because the minnows are a stand-in for other fish, the changes also could be affecting other species such as perch, walleye and northern pike.
The UWM research confirms what others have found regarding prescription drugs showing up in America’s lakes, rivers and streams, said Melissa Lenczewski, an associate professor of geology and environmental geosciences at Northern Illinois University.
For years, it was assumed that the volume of water in the Great Lakes was so enormous that any drugs that got through treatment facilities would be diluted to the point that they would not pose a problem, said Lenczewski, who was not a part of the UWM study.
That theory itself now is being diluted.
Even more concerning are the much higher levels of antibiotics that are being put into rivers and streams near pig farms where the drugs are used to produce larger animals, she said.
In addition, strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria also have been found in water near those farms, she said.
“It is very alarming how much we are putting drugs out there in the environment,” she said.
Manual Filter Controls: A case where simple is sometimes better
by Gene Franks
Backwashing water filters used for removal of sediment, chlorine, chemicals, iron, hydrogen sulfide odor and many other water contaminants are regulated by control devices that range from simple to very complex. The main function of the valve is to control the time and duration of backwash (where water is reversed in the filter tank to clean and resettle the media bed) and rinse (where water is pushed downward through the media at a fast rate to rinse and settle it after the backwash).
These functions can be controlled by fully electronic or electrically driven mechanical timing devices that regenerate the filter at preset times and for preset durations. The electronic versions are more versatile than the mechanical and offer many more options. For example, an electronic controller can be set up to regenerate the filter every other Sunday at 3:51 AM, backwashing for 6 minutes then rinsing for one minute. Depending on the product, mechanical timers offer fewer options. With the most popular mechanical control (the Fleck 5600), for example, you could choose to regenerate every day, every other day, every third day, fourth day, every sixth day, or every 12th day, but you could not choose to regenerate every Sunday or every eighth day. With the standard 5600 you also have no control over duration of the functions: it’s a 15 minute backwash and a 10 minute rinse whether your filter needs this much time or not. (Unless you’re running an iron filter or have very sandy well water, you probably don’t need this much time, but the filter is preset to accommodate the “worst case” user so even clean city water gets a 15-minute backwash.)
Totally Manual Control
A less frequently used control valve is the totally manual (non-electric) Fleck 2510 control pictured below.
This control valve requires no electricity and no programming. It has a three-choice selection lever that send water to the home (Service position), backwashes the filter, or rinses the filter.
This very simple valve not only costs less, but it works better in some situations than more expensive controllers. Here are some examples.
Remote areas where there is no electricity.
If you have electricity, but it isn’t dependable. It’s easier to manually regenerate a filter than to repeatedly reset an electric control system.
Seasonal homes or homes where the inhabitants travel frequently. It’s easier to backwash your filter manually than to constantly reset an automatic system to fit your schedule.
When backwash duration requirement might change. Some wells take on large amounts of sediment after a rain, or a city water filter might pick up a large amount of dirt when there is city water line maintenance,. At such times, it’s easier to simply give the filter its needed backwash manually than to reprogram your electronic controller.
If saving water is important. If you want to backwash your clean city water carbon backwashing filter once a month for five minutes only (not an unreasonable schedule). you can save almost 300 gallons per month, as compared with a standard electro-mechanical control valve!
You can find a manual controller as well as a variety of automatic controllers here.
An excessive amount of antibiotics is present in China’s major rivers, exposing millions of nearby residents and local ecosystems to grave risks.
China Central Television (CCTV) reported Thursday that various types of antibiotics have been found in water tested from the Yangtze, Huangpu and Pearl rivers, as well as in tap water in Nanjing, East China’s Jiangsu Province.
The report said the high concentration of antibiotics was created by illegal discharges by Shandong Lukang Pharmaceutical, one of China’s largest drug producers, and the abuse of antibiotics by poultry farmers. The situation was exacerbated by ineffective supervision by local environmental protection bureaus.
The drugs can cause bacterial resistance to antibiotics in humans and damage ecological systems.
Although authorities have not released the exact number of people that could be affected, the rivers tested have long been major water sources for central, eastern and southern China.
According to the report, Shandong Lukang Pharmaceutical has been discharging polluted water containing over 50,000 nanograms per liter of antibiotics, which is 10,000 times above the antibiotic concentration in untainted water.
The report also found that in Nanjing’s Lishui district, a major poultry farming area in Jiangsu Province, duck farmers have been giving ducks excessive amounts of antibiotics and dumping duck feces into the nearby river.
Most of the farms are not equipped with pollution processing systems. Rivers and ponds nearby have become severely polluted with the concentration of antibiotics reaching 60 nanograms per liter, CCTV reported.
In a water sample taken randomly from a Nanjing resident’s house, two types of antibiotics were detected. The concentration of amoxicillin, a drug that is used to treat ear or bladder infections, was 8 nanograms per liter.
A media officer from the Nanjing Water Group Thursday told news portal thepaper.com that the city’s tap water meets national standards. However the media officer admitted that there is no requirement to test for antibiotics in tap water, and there is no equipment to detect antibiotics at pumping stations.
Jia Weile, deputy director at the Beijing Academy of Ecocivilisation, told the Global Times that excessive amounts of antibiotics in water will cause drug resistance and reduce the effectiveness of drugs.
In the long-term, pollution in surface water will contaminate soil and groundwater and enter the food chain, he said.
Xiao Yonghong, an expert at the National Health and Family Planning Commission, told CCTV that drug-resistant bacteria will freely circulate between humans and the environment without preventative measures.
According to a report published this May in science journal Chinese Science Bulletin, China’s surface water contains 68 kinds of antibiotics.
In rivers like the Pearl, which empties into the South China Sea, and Shanghai’s Huangpu River, every liter of sampled water was found to contain several hundred nanograms of antibiotics, compared with less than 20 nanograms in water in developed countries.
Seventy percent of all drugs produced in China are antibiotics, compared with 30 percent in Western countries, the Xinhua News Agency reported. At least 15,000 tons of drugs expire and end up in trash bins every year, said Yu Feng, a professor with the China Pharmaceutical University in Nanjing.
According to Ministry of Agriculture regulations, farmers can only purchase antibiotic drugs with a prescription from a veterinarian. However, drug stores in Nanjing reached by the Global Times admitted that they sell prescription drugs freely to farmers.
One store owner said that the farmers buy various kinds of antibiotics to solve the drug resistance problem. “Duck farmers won’t eat ducks fed with those drugs,” he said.
CCTV also quoted an anonymous source as saying that Lukang, one of the four largest antibiotic producers in China, receives a secret notice every time before a “random” inspection from the local environmental protection bureau.
“Production will be suspended to cover up the pollution … Once the inspectors leave, the factory will resume operations as usual,” the source noted.
Golf courses conserve water as fairways turn from green to brown
By Nancy Szokan December 23, 2014
Gazette Introductory Note: This article is really good news. If golfers can learn to play on courses that aren’t lush green, so too, perhaps, can footballers, baseballers, and soccer players. After that maybe people can learn to hold a backyard barbeque on a lawn that’s brownish or take their kids to play in a city park where the color of the grass reflects the season and recent weather conditions. When you think of it, having golf courses and cemeteries that are eternally green is like living in a bubble. Life is richer when you experience change, and you don’t really appreciate green grass unless it’s sometimes brown.–Hardly Waite.
You know that climate change is scaring people when no less an authority than Golf Digest says, “The new reality for American golf is that water is far too precious to be squandered on golf courses.”
That’s how Ron Whitten begins his piece praising two “iconic” American courses that have implemented “startling and instructive” water- conservation programs.
U.S. Open golf tournament in Pinehurst, N.C.
Pasatiempo Golf Club is located in Santa Cruz, Calif., which is going through an extended drought; mandatory water restrictions have shut off irrigation on at least the first 75 yards of each fairway, and roughs are yellowed and thin. “Pace of play has improved because there’s little time spent looking for balls in high rough,” Whitten writes.
More impressive is Pinehurst No. 2, in North Carolina, which has cut its water consumption from 55 million gallons in 2009 to 15 million this year. When it hosted the men’s and women’s U.S. Open championships in June, television viewers saw fairways that were yellowish or even brown instead of green, lined with “vast stretches of exposed sand.”
The fairways stayed brown until it rained, under Pinehurst’s new policy: “Let nature dictate the course conditions.”
A Green Dilemma for the Holidays:
Better to Shop Online or In-Store?
By Crystal Gammon
The conventional wisdom has been that shopping online is environmentally preferable to going to a brick-and-mortar store. But a new study suggests it’s not quite as simple as that.
Gazette Introductory Note: The green dilemma presented here is a lot like the environmental nitpicking that goes on with such issues as paper vs. plastic at the supermarket, real vs. artificial for Christmas trees, or burial vs. cremation when the whole thing winds down. The real answer is usually hardly mentioned or at best played down: the best tree is no tree, the best bag is no bag, and the worst choice of all at the very end is to put off dying. Holiday purchasing is, of course, so complex an issue that a mere consideration of how the package gets to your home is only one of dozens of factors that would have to be considered to come to a rational decision. My own answer is that whether you drive to the mall to pick up the baseball cap for your cousin or have it delivered in a UPS truck is largely unimportant; what is important is whether you should buy the cap in the first place. There are lots of alternatives to buying things. We need to be brave enough to explore them rather than simply caving in every time the merchants, brick-and-mortar or online, start ringing the bells of Christmas. Bah, Humbug!– Hardly Waite.
As holiday packages arrive at doorsteps and gifts pile up under Christmas trees, environmentally-minded consumers may wonder, what’s the most carbon-conscious way to shop — online or in-store?
Various studies in recent years have suggested that online shopping typically packs a lower carbon punch than shopping at brick-and-mortar stores. But new research published online in the Journal of Cleaner Production suggests the story is more complicated than that.
Cyber Monday sales topped $2 billion this year, making it the heaviest online shopping day ever.
“Consumer travel and behavior is critical,” said Patricia van Loon, a logistics researcher at the international business school INSEAD and lead author of the study. The key, she said, is to minimize the number of miles driven per item — whether by the shopper, a local delivery van, or a FedEx truck.
A typical online order, with goods delivered by truck, has a carbon footprint roughly three times as large as a brick-and-mortar shopping trip, according to van Loon’s analysis, which looked at U.K. shoppers buying household goods. That’s because brick-and-mortar shoppers typically buy many more items at once than online customers, she said. Moreover, online shoppers will often make extra trips to the store anyway — to pick up items they forgot to order, return unwanted ones, or to browse and test products — a factor previous studies largely ignored.
On an item-by-item basis, however, online shopping usually does win out, van Loon’s analysis shows. Purchasing a single item online and having it delivered by truck has roughly half the carbon footprint as driving to a local store to buy it, she found. Yet her calculation is based on driving — the results would be different in a bicycle-centric country like the Netherlands, the study points out, or in a place like Manhattan, where pedestrians and public transportation dominate.
Clearly, online shopping continues to boom. Amazon, the United States’ largest online retailer, did nearly $75 billion in web-based sales last year, including the 37 million items — 426 per second — it sold on Cyber Monday. This year, total online sales on that day in the U.S. grew by 17 percent, to over $2 billion, making it the heaviest online shopping day ever.
To maximize efficiency, van Loon said, consumers generally should buy online and should plan orders so that each contains as many items as possible. “In that case, online shopping … can be even better than walking to the store,” she said, because warehouses tend to be more energy-efficient than local stores.
But numbers-crunching aside, what should a carbon-conscious shopper do?
“Give yourself more time to plan,” recommends Darby Hoover, a senior resource specialist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. She said planning ahead can allow consumers to choose more flexible shipping options — “Do you really need it to get there tomorrow?” — and to buy from companies with environmentally friendly policies, such as minimizing packaging.
And if waiting longer for a product is not an option, Hoover said, “focus on efficiency and using less stuff, and bring that approach to whatever decision you’re trying to make.”
There’s a lot more to determining the carbon footprint of Rex’s new cap than whether you bought it from Amazon or at the pet store in the shopping center.–Hardly Waite.
Leave it to beavers: California joins other states in embracing the rodent
by Samantha Clark
Californians are crossing their fingers for more rain after three punishing years of drought have left streams, rivers and wetland parched.
One animal has the potential to restore these dry landscapes.
With their industrial buck teeth and flat tails, beavers and their dams offer a defense against drought, a solution to reversing the effects of climate change. The rodents are known as ecosystem engineers. And they once populated most of California (and the Bay Area) until fur traders nearly wiped them out in the 19th century.
“This state has lost more of its wetlands than all other states, and beavers can rebuild those wetlands,” said Rick Lanman of the Institute for Historical Ecology in Los Altos. “Knowing that it is native should help guide restoration efforts.”
Beaver dams bestow benefits to the environment that we humans can’t easily copy. They turn land into a sponge for water. Their gnawing and nesting promotes richer soil and slows down water, improving imperiled fish habitat. Their dams raise water tables, nourishing shrubbery alongside streams that stabilize eroding banks and add habitat for birds and deer. They also help the endangered California Red-legged frog.
After beavers move to a new area, at night, they drag a tree across a shallow stream to start a dam. They carry rocks and mud with their paws and branches with their big incisors. Water in these beaver ponds would otherwise flow away. So it’s no surprise that thirsty western states are turning to the furry critters with open arms.
“There’s a growing interest in using beaver as a habitat restoration tool,” said Michael M. Pollock, an ecosystems analyst with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle. “They create good wetland habitat much more cheaply than other restoration methods.”
Government agencies are hosting a workshop series in a few western states and writing a guide on how to use beavers for restoration. California Fish and Wildlife is starting to embrace the beaver, a shift beaver advocates applaud.
“Our effort now is to show its many sides, sides that have always existed,” said Kevin Shaffer, a fisheries manager for state Fish and Wildlife. “We are investigating how beaver promote habitat and water conservation through their habitat manipulation. We are also creating public and scientific information about the beaver, its ecological role and current regulations and laws affecting its management and conservation.”
Other arid states in the West have comprehensive policies for managing beavers. California allows beaver to be hunted or relocated and killed if they cause trouble. Utah has a beaver management plan, and New Mexico recently mandated that its Fish and Wildlife come up with a plan too. Oregon, Washington and Idaho have relocation programs.
“It would be great if we could recognize the benefit of the beaver and to resolve conflict nonlethally and manage them to continue receiving those benefits,” said Kate Lundquist, director of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center’s Water Institute, a group that is drafting beaver policy recommendations for state Fish and Wildlife.
So how would California look if beavers bounced back? A lot wetter, perhaps. Beavers once were an integral part of a vast network of wetlands throughout the state.
Locally, they range from Salinas to Sonoma County.
Given away by girdled willow branches, beavers live around the Lexington Reservoir and in Pescadero in the Santa Cruz Mountains. A mile-long stretch in the upper Los Gatos Creek has at least 10 dams. Parts of the creek have separated into beaver ponds, which provide needed refuge when flows are reduced from the reservoir up the mountain. The ponds are great rearing habitat for struggling young coho salmon and steelhead trout.
“Beaver ponds are beneficial because they also create a lot of wetland that provide a lot of food for fish,” Pollock said.
Beavers can also help reverse the rising temperatures of water, which can harm fish. The deep pools created by their dams have cooler water at the bottom.
“With a range of temperature conditions, fish are able to find the temperature that is ideal for them at a given time,” Pollock said.
Since beavers moved to the Alhambra Creek in downtown Martinez, the area has seen new species flourish. By moving mud, the beavers create a haven for bugs.
“Because we have an insect bloom, we have a bloom of all the different fish and animals up the food chain,” said Heidi Perryman, founder of the beaver advocacy group Worth a Dam and who led the effort to save a Martinez beaver family from extermination. “We’ve identified three new species of fish and seven species of bird. And we see more otter and mink than we ever saw before.”
In San Jose, a beaver has taken refuge in the dry Guadalupe River. The critter’s dam outside a dripping storm drain created a tiny oasis.
“They can get by with very little,” Pollock said. “In a number of cases, they’ve built on streams that have run dry and because they have built the dams, water flows again.”
Because beavers are so good at recharging ground water, they can make streams flow when they would otherwise run dry such as during the summer months.
California called on beavers to prevent erosion from the 1920s and 1940s in nearly half the state’s counties, including those in the Bay Area and Santa Cruz, according to a recent paper proving that beavers are native in nearly all of the state. The beaver population grew from less than a thousand to 20,000 by 1950. No one knows today’s population.
A beaver family can improve damaged land at a cheaper cost, but restoration isn’t as simple as moving in a beaver family. They can inflict serious destruction on culverts and agriculture lands as well as flood homes and other urban areas.
State Fish and Wildlife is experimenting with artificial beaver dams to avoid moving the animal and the damage they can cause.
Still, some other Western states are reintroducing beavers to help mitigate problems related to climate change. California is on its way.
The countertop reverse osmosis unit pictured above produces top quality reverse osmosis water at the rate of a couple of gallons per hour. The water quality is equivalent to that produced by an undersink RO unit costing double the price. It is an extremely versatile machine that can be used for many purposes.
The countertop RO unit is most commonly used as a bottled water maker, installed to the sink faucet and allowed to produce water into a bottle. When the bottle is filled, you turn the unit off. You can then leave it in place or remove it. The drain water (all reverse osmosis puts out a trickle of reject water) exits via a separate hose that is simply dropped into the sink.
The usual way to get water to the unit is with the standard diverter valve, like the one below, hooked to the kitchen faucet. You pull out the knob to divert water into the RO unit. The knob stays out until you turn off the water.
Standard Diverter Valve
However, there are many other uses and methods of installation. For example, the RO unit can be attached directly to a water line in a laundry room or patio–anywhere there’s a water source and a place to send the drain water. With a simple adapter it can take its water from a garden hose or outdoor faucet for use on a patio or greenhouse.
With modern day sink faucets, especially those with pull-out sprayers, it is often impossible the use the diverter valve. In this case the RO unit can be fed from an undersink water source identical to the inlet line used for undersink filters and RO units. In these installations, the feed line is pulled from under the sink and attached to the RO unit with a push-in fitting. After water has been produced, the RO unit is removed and the feed line is conveniently stored under the sink. See the picture below.
A simple adapter like the one in the picture can be used to provide water from a kitchen or laundry room undersink to a countertop reverse osmosis unit. The blue-handled valve can be located at a more convenient place nearer the delivery end of the tube if desired. When not in use, the tube can be removed from the RO unit and stored under the sink.
Here are some more ideas for countertop RO units.
Aquarium filler. Water is collected in a large container for subsequent addition to the aquarium. The RO unit can be turned off and on manually, or a simple automatic shutoff system can be added to the RO unit that turns it off when the container is full. The shutoff system is inexpensive and easy to add to an existing countertop RO unit.
Outdoor pond filler. The unit can be allowed to fill the pond when it is turned on manually or it can be installed to top off the pond and shut off automatically with a float valve when the pond is full. A garden hose adapter (see below) will allow the user to produce RO water from a garden hose.
Final rinse water for a spot-free car wash. The water for car washing is usually captured in a small tank, then pumped to provide pressure for the car wash. A deionizing cartridge can be added to provide zero-TDS water if desired. The standard countertop RO unit can make up to 50 gallons of RO water per day (and it can be easily modified to produce more). The pump setup is easy to make from standard water treatment parts.
High quality water for plants, either in small outdoor gardens or greenhouses. This application also requires capturing then pumping the water to the point of use, although small drip systems can be designed that take water directly from the RO unit. For small operations, the water can be produced into a small tank and then dipped out with a bucket or pitcher to water plants.
High quality water for dehumidifiers or other appliances that require water that does not leave mineral deposits. Again, it is easy to modify the RO unit so that it feeds water to the appliance upon demand.
This handy fitting screws onto the end of a garden hose or outdoor faucet to make an easy connection to a countertop RO unit. It is provided free for the asking when a Black and White countertop RO unit is purchased.
