Water Conservation Flash Mob

The Athens-Clarke County Water Conservation Office held a flash mob in University of Georgia's Student Learning Center to help raise awareness for water conservation. Check it out!

I Invented Bottled Water

I have a confession to make.  I invented bottled water.  Not the fancy, sparkly Perrier kind.  The tap water in a bottle kind.  

It happened long ago, when I was on my way back from Mexico.  My friends and I had gone to Rocky Point, a particularly hot and humid location along Mexico’s coast. On our way back to Tempe, AZ, we found ourselves truly dying of thirst.  We stopped at a lonely gas station with a drink vending machine.  I looked at my soft drink choices and said, “All I want is water.  I wish they had water for sale in here.  I’d buy it.”  This led my friends and me to a discussion. Who would buy water in a bottle when you can get it for free (essentially) at your tap every day?  We figured no one would be that stupid and my idea evaporated into the moment.

Apparently I could have been very, very rich today.  The Beverage Marketing Corp keeps up with sales figures for bottled water.  In 2011, 9.1 billion gallons of water were sold.  Charles Fishman did some math for me (thank you, Mr. Fishman) and found “that comes to 222 bottles of water for each person in the country.”  Revenue for bottled water in 2011 reached $21.7 BILLION.  Yep.  I could have been rich and driving in my very own Dodge Challenger today!

But my fortune would have been accompanied by a heaping dose of good old-fashioned Catholic guilt (thanks, mom!).  First is the guilt of producing something packaged in plastic bottles.  (For the record, I do recycle my recyclables, but only 31% of all water bottles make it to recycling.  The rest are piling up in our landfills.)  Second, I would have the knowledge I am charging people an obscene amount of money for the water – it cost 1,900 times more for bottled water than tap water!  Then there is the fact I am draining the aquifers on which communities depend.  I take the water from their aquifers and ship the water to other parts of the country, their water never to be returned to their water cycle.  Finally, every one liter of bottled water I produced would require three liters of water to make.  Not necessarily very water conservation minded.    

However, the true guilt comes from having learned about the water crisis facing our planet.  We are so fortunate in the USA.  We turn on our tap and expect water to come out.  When it doesn’t, we aren’t happy and immediately call the public utilities office or the plumber.  If we are concerned our tap water is too icky, we drive to a store and purchase flats of water to transport back to our homes – where we already have a faucet waiting to bestow clean water.  We typically drive over four miles to pick up our conveniently packaged water.  We might complain about how heavy it is, how much it costs, etc.*

Compare our situation to other places in the world.  Women and children walk four miles every day to a dirty well, waste filled river, or shrinking puddle to get their water.  They carry an average of 44 pounds of water on their backs or heads to deliver to their families.  They use an average of five-gallons of water per day for drinking, bathing, and cleaning.  We buy a five-gallon barrel of water to set in our kitchen by a refrigerator that dispenses cold water and ice. 

I am not willing to say bottled water is an evil as others might.  I realize there is a place and time for it.  And it sure would have been a much appreciated alternative in the vending machine on the way back from Mexico.  But, as the inventor of bottled water, I do ask everyone to appreciate your accessibility to water.  Do not take it for granted.  Be aware of it, appreciate it, and take action to care for it. 

Laurie Loftin-Education Programs Specialist

 

*Watch this video to hear some other complaints people in the U.S. have.  This may make water appear – from your eyes. 

More People, More Floods

That title is pretty fatalistic, isn't it?

Well, to water movement, it kind of is.

Everyone has heard of urbanization, everyone knows what it is: it's everywhere!  However, something that isn't frequently talked about is how urbanization changes the water cycle.  Believe it or not, urbanization has lots of repercussions for the water (or hydrologic) cycle.

First, check out this drawing:

This is a normal hydrologic cycle.  It rains, some water gets intercepted by leaves (for life functions like photosynthesis, etc), some goes directly into streams, and some infiltrates into the ground (it moves through the soil and into the water table, also known as the groundwater).  Eventually the infiltrated water runs off into streams, where it evaporates and is sent back to the beginning.

This is a pretty picture.  The grass, trees, and underground reservoirs (seen on the right, where the rocks are) get plenty of water, and the streams are full.

Now imagine the trees are cut down and the grass razed over to make room for a road, a subdivision, and sewer systems.  This is pretty standard, pretty necessary: we need places to live, right?  We're a little past living in tents and treehouses (as cool as it would be to have a Swiss Family Robinson house).  What happens though, when we remove the trees and ground cover is that the soil (where infiltration happens) is no longer held in place.  This leads to erosion, which we've all heard about before.  Eroded soils end up soiling (pun intended) our stream water, which lowers water quality.  More importantly, the loss of topsoil, trees, and ground cover (and replacing them with  impermeable surfaces) decreases the volume of water getting into the ground.  Instead, that water goes directly into runoff: into our streams.

The next step in urbanization is building septic systems, wells, and diverting streams into areas to meet the water needs of the people.  These activities will further the issue of runoff, plus septic systems will dirty our stream water.  Moreover, drilling wells for personal use will alter the underground water level (water table) which can cause the reservoirs I mentioned earlier to lose water.

Bottom line with urbanization: more runoff.

What does that have to do with flooding?
Remember how in a natural system, the rain does several things: 1) infiltrates into the ground, 2) gets intercepted by plant leaves, 3) fills the underground reservoirs, and then 4) runs into streams?
Well, in a concrete forest the rain 1) can't get into the ground through the concrete, 2) doesn't have plants to take it, 3) can't get into the underground reservoirs, so it just 4) runs into the streams.

But, the streams aren't used to so much water filling them at once.  The streams might see that volume of water over time, but it slowly moves into the streams, instead of all rushing into them at once.  The highest amount of water entering a stream after a storm (peak discharge) is significantly higher in an urban setting than in a natural setting.  The streams just can't handle it, so they overflow.  You get a week of heavy rain in an urban area, and you have a flood!

So, the question is now: "what, are we supposed to go back to tents and tree houses and walking and no roads?"  I think that answer is a resounding "No."  It is an impractical solution...it won't happen.
We have to do the best we can with what we have (in all of life, really).
The United States Geological Survey (where I found this information) has a page with some suggestions on how we can, as an urban society, help keep our waters clean.

As a whole, urban societies can:
1) improve urban drainage to slow runoff
2) drill wells specifically to recharge underground reservoirs
3) create ponds to slow runoff and increase infiltration
4) possibly look into reusing waste water

As an individual, you can:
1) keep litter out of gutters and storm drains (remember, these go directly to our streams!)
2) not wash hazardous oils and liquids (like antifreeze, brake fluid, car oil, paints, etc) off the street, but clean it up and dispose of it in a hazardous waste collection area.
3) follow directions for your fertilizers: don't use too much, and try to avoid those with Phosphorous
4) try to avoid adding impervious surfaces (concrete and asphalt), and be sure to keep your yard covered in grass or another ground cover
5) keep your septic system clean!  Having it checked and emptied every 3-5 years will reduce the leakage into our water system.

I know the title might have seemed a little fatalistic at the beginning, but it all makes sense now.  Floods are a part of the natural water cycle, but the flooding frequency has changed with the increase in concrete forests.
Just something to think about the next time you pass a storm drain.

Annaliese Ashley-Intern

Rivers Alive 2012: A success!

Wow, what a day! Rivers Alive 2012 is now completed and can I just say I was very impressed. Over 300 volunteers braved the chill morning air to protect and prevent our rivers from contamination. Families, students, county employees, and many others joined us for this wonderful day of service and environmental stewardship.

I had the distinct pleasure of managing over the "Trash to Treasure" table at the event where participants brought interesting items that were found along their journey in the hopes of being one of the six awarded treasures. I believe that the stigma attached to "trash" in no way describes what was brought to my table. In every aspect of the word, these finds were treasure. To list just a few items that were discovered (I could talk for at least 15 minutes about how cool they were), we were presented with a road work sign, a complete bicycle, a shopping cart that was in fair condition, a calendar from 1987, a cell phone complete with charger, a dirt bike, and much much more.

If you are in a state of shock that these items were ACTUALLY found in or along the North and Middle Oconee please be comforted by the fact that they have now been properly disposed of. Next time you see one of the stylish forest green t-shirts that participants received, say thank you! These participants have done an amazing thing for the watershed and our community in Athens Clarke county.

I want to chime in quickly about the word community. Sometimes it is easy to forget the true meaning of this word when you are someone like me who goes to school in Athens and only resides here for 9 months out of the year. Saturday was my chance to see the word community come into action. Environmental thinking or awareness sometimes gets linked to political beliefs and opinions. On Saturday, the idea behind cleaning up our watershed was purely one of bettering our community. People of all kinds took part in the service project regardless of belief, opinion, or ideals. On either end of the spectrum, protecting our environment is protecting our community, and who can argue with that?

Nicole Duffy- Intern

Water, Water everywhere...

Yes, I did quote that poem by that guy...(The Albatross, Samuel Taylor Coleridge)...scientists are literate, too!

I had someone at a Film Athens event ask me why we don't use salt water since we're running out of fresh water.  I told him...I didn't know!  (I was there telling people about The Ripple Effect Film Project.)

So I did some research, and no, I haven't come up with an answer: I doubt I will, it would be a little presumptuous for me to answer on behalf of all water experts.

But I will explain some about saline water and its uses.

Saline water is defined as anything that has a significant amount of dissolved sodium chloride (regular salt) in it.  Usually it's measured with something called parts per million (ppm), which is a unit used for solutions with very small percentages.
Okay, so it's hard to explain, but basically, 1 ppm salinity would mean that 1 part for every million parts (of water molecules) was a dissolved salt molecule.

Now, 1ppm isn't often found.  Saline water is defined by the United States Geological Survey as anything from 1,000ppm to 35,000ppm (ocean water).  Fresh water, on the other hand, is usually considered anything that has less than 0.5 ppt (parts per thousand)!  So much less salt than even the slightly salty saline water!

Fresh water is what's in our rivers, saline water is pretty much everywhere else (except the ice caps, those are also fresh).  Fresh water is what we drink...fresh water is also what we don't have a lot of.  Saline water is used by the thermoelectric power industry to cool the equipment, and sometimes it is used in mining and other industrial functions. 

However, we do not drink it.  We can't just pick up a bottle of salt water and drink it, it's not clean, salt water doesn't work in our bodies the same way fresh water does...it's weird.  Anyway.  The question is: what about desalination?  What about making our salty water into fresh water?

The answer is, yes, it can be done.  Desalination is a pretty straightforward distilling process, in fact it was used on ships long ago to convert sea water into drinking water.  There are plants around the world that convert saline, but it uses a lot of energy.  It's hard to find the line between when too much fuel (renewable...or not...) is being used on a process that could be less important if we all conserved our freshwater a little more!  The simplicity of the process does not remove the fact that it takes a lot of heat--which comes from somewhere--to complete, which could be more of a waste of energy than it's worth. Not to mention the cost of transporting water from the ocean to the plants, and from the plants to the cities in need.

Bottom line?  Again, think at the sink.  Maybe we could build more desalination plants.  Maybe we could use the ocean water as drinking water after our rivers dry up.  Maybe we could...maybe we shouldn't.  Maybe it's a smarter choice to conserve water now, to be practical with our use now, so as to extend the ability to use our ready-made fresh water.
Maybe it's better to keep thinking at the sink...for innovations for the future...and for conservation of our water now.

Annaliese Ashley-Intern