Water, water everywhere Nor any drop to drink

These familiar lines come from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. They seem to be true for our solar system these days:

A spectacular front cover of the journal Science, 19th March 2010, shows an image from the Cassini probe of a closeup of Saturn's rings. These rings are composed of variable-sized chunks of water ice containing coloured compounds, apparently partly fed by icy plumes jetting from at least one of its moons.

Water has also been found on the moon at the poles and even scattered over the lunar surface.

Recent data shows that Mars was once a 'blue' watery planet like Earth before it turned to red dust.

In comparison, 70% of our planet's surface is covered with water, but only 1% is drinkable. This may feel like its easier to find new sources of water extraterrestially rather than in our backyard. So when an a recent United Nations conference was held in Eqypt, a member of NASA proposed that the MARSIS (Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding) probe that found the massive Martian water deposits could also be used to find water in our own deserts, we need to sit up and take notice. According to Dr. Essam Heggy, the MARSIS radar can detect water up to a kilometre beneath the surface, so that it could be used to determine the sites of new wells and artificial oases.

Don't we just want the water to be available for all now here on Earth?

If we won't stump up for space-age technology to be used here on Earth, how about giving dowsing another try? Dowsing is an ages-old method of divining the location of ground water, even oil, gemstones and archeology, using one or two divining sticks or rods. Its veracity has been regularly challenged by sceptics over the years, but then so has the size of the budget spent on space exploration.

World Water Day

Since 1992 when the United Nations designated 22nd March as the annual Word Water Day, has there been any improvement in the global water crisis?

Well, for a start we haven't actually found anymore drinking water on this planet (and No all that stuff on the Moon does not count!). As I wrote in an earlier post (Figuring the Facts about Water, 31st March 2009), around 97% of the Earth's water is salty or otherwise undrinkable, and another 2% is stored in the ice caps and glaciers, we're left with only 1% for us to use. So it's hardly surprising that not all of us has access to safe drinking water. The latest WHO/UNICEF's Joint Monitoring Program report, published this month, reveals the limitations of the progress we have made globally:

• 883 million people do not use an improved source of drinking-water
  
• 2.6 billion people (yes, that's 2,600,000,000!) still do not have access to adequate sanitation services
  
• and a staggering 1.1 billion also must still practice open defacation

So we really could not pat ourselves on the back on Word Water Day.

When will we achieve basic human rights to clean safe water and adequate sanitation wordwide? The Millenium Development Goal (MDG) target relating to drinking-water and sanitation (MDG 7, Target 7c), is to: "Halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking-water and basic sanitation". Well apparently, we're not going to manage this, so having an annual reminder day about this global issue is helpful in raising public awareness only if it gets blanket coverage across all media, not just the internet! It might also help if writers like me get there on time - rather than a day late!! Oh well, maybe next year... If all this leaves you feeling guilty about that bottle of E**** or whatever brand sitting on your table, then GOOD - it should! We have safe cheap tap water here in the UK and yet we are happily spending about 1000x more litre-for-litre on a bottle of water rather than open the tap. If you do one thing this year, give the bottle the boot to get real about our most precious commodity. One day, not too far in the future, we'll be going to war over the right to have enough drinking water coming out of our taps. Let's not hasten this with our dependence on bottled water.

Tainted water that we unknowingly drink.

Over the years, much has been said about the safety of drinking water. It has been estimated that 1 in 6 Americans has been exposed to contaminated drinking water – that’s 49 million people in the most powerful and richest nation on earth.

In 2000, Hollywood released ‘Erin Brockovich’. The movie highlights one woman’s fight for compensation for a community that was devastated by disease after ground water was contaminated with chromium(VI) by the Pacific Gas and Electric Company of California. The case was settled against PG&E in 1996 for $333 million (£222 million) among 634 plaintiffs. And Julia Roberts? She won an Oscar for her efforts.
Here in the UK, we have had our fair share of contaminated water supply stories:

• The Camelford incident in 1988: when 20 tonnes of aluminium sulphate were accidentally dumped in the drinking water supply for 20,000 people. Many of those who came into contact with the contaminated water suffered a variety of short-term health problems including gastric and urinary complaints, skin peeling and memory loss. Local river fish also died in their thousands. The South West Water Authority was fined and eventually paid out around £400,000 to 148 victims. Some long term effects on brain function were subsequently recorded.
• In 2008, routine tests by Anglian Water showed cryptosporidium in the water supply to 250,000 people across 85 communities in Northamtonshire. The contamination came from a straying rabbit. ‘Boil water’ recommendations were issued until the bacteria could be cleaned and flushed out from over a period of ten days from a thousand miles of pipe. £30 compensation was paid to each household in the affected area. 13 people were reported with cryptosporidiosis due to the incident; symptoms included diarrhoea and stomach upsets.

Back in the USA:

• The Crestwood suburb in south Chicago has higher than normal cancer rates that have now been possibly attributed to water drawn from a tainted well. Locals are angry that they have had to foot the bill for the defence of pubic officials implicated in the case.
• Chemical pollution of many American rivers is affecting the hormones of fish so that male fish are displaying female characteristics: they produce sperm but also small undeveloped eggs. Pesticides, pharmaceuticals, including birth-control pills and even household detergents are able to cause this unnatural feminisation. So what is the effect on the millions of people who drink water drawn from these same rivers? Food for thought or that should be drink for thought…
• Radioactive waste from the 921 nuclear warheads detonated in tests over 41 years has worked its way into the aquifers below the Nevada Desert. A population boom and a water supply crisis mean that the contamination is likely to affect locals now. A fresh environmental assessment of the estimated $48 billion worth of water lost to the nuclear fallout is needed. Early tests were carried out above ground that were visible from Las Vegas, later on the underground detonations vapourised huge chambers of rock and earth (some 5000 ft below the surface) to leave cavities filled with radioactive rubble and a strange landscape with hundreds of craters.

What’s the solution – maybe just drink beer. But 92% of beer is water, so the alternatives may not be much safer! Filtration is the answer as is taking better care of our most precious resource.

Updates on previous topics

My thanks to Max at ENSO Bottles who posted a comment about their biodegradable plastic bottles I mentioned last post (23rd February). They are now marketing a bottles that uses 25% recycled PET as well as continuing to develop new products. Good to hear that R & D is alive and working in these difficult financial times.

In the same vein, I heard today of another US-based company, Green Planet Bottling, who are developing recyclable/compostable plastic water bottles. The bottles are returned to 100% virgin polymer when ground to flakes and immersed in water at 170 degrees. The controversy seems to be that these are made from plants rather than petroleum and that if they are dumped in the standard recycling plastic system, they do not behave as ordinary PET plastic does and the yield of reusable PET is reduced. To give them their due, Green Planet Bottling aim to buy back their own bottles to put them into their own recycling system that is designed to deal with this plant-based plastic. The answer to all this, if plant-based plastics are going to have increased distribution, recycling systems will have to sort them from the standard petroleum PET plastics. Simple enough if the plant plastics are clearly labelled - recyclers need to sort for different plastics already, so why not add one more? It's down to consumers to change their preferences to help drive the expansion of recycling procedures.

On a different note and going back to an earlier post (17th November 2009) regarding the availability of water on the moon, it seems there is more up there. It has been announced by NASA that around 500,000kg of water ice has been found at the lunar north pole. That's a bit better than the 100kg or so down at the south pole. I won't be packing my bag yet though...


4th March: I've just heard about the Plastiki - a catamaran made of 12,500 plastic bottles filled with carbon dioxide that 4 lunatics (sorry - brave adventurers) will sail the Pacific Ocean in, from San Francisco to Sydney. The idea is to highlight the plastic waste issue I've been touching on. The journey of Plastiki will include the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This is situtated between California and Hawaii and is said to contain so much detritus that it could weigh 100 million tons and be five times the size of the UK (that's twice the size of Texas, for our American cousins who may be reading). Wow! I like adventures, but I think I'll stay on dry land away from plastic bottles.

Good luck to David De Rothschild and his crew

An Inconvenient Truth: when trying to get it right, sometimes we get it wrong

We all know that plastic is bad, but it's just so convenient. We are surrounded by the stuff and our world would struggle to function without it. Our homes, our cars and our workplaces are visibily (and invisibly) littered with plastic objects, mostly functional, some merely decorative, but it's a pretty dead certainty that all are a cheaper option than a non-plastic alternative. Plastic has contributed to our throw-away lifestyle. It is derived from our rapidly-disappearing natural resources of natural gas and crude oil, it is a nightmare to degrade/dispose of it and very little is actually recycled. So what's my point here - this is a blog about water isn't it?

Litre for litre bottled water is 1000x more expensive than tap water. It usually comes in plastic bottles (the tie-in!) that are used the once and then thrown away. Here in the UK, we only send a paltry 15% of these bottles for recycling, the rest end up in landfill. So even if you buy a bottle of water and refill it a few times from the tap, there is an 85% certainty the bottle will end up in the waste bin. So what is the way forward? Well there are a number of options:

• public water fountains
• ban on all plastic bottled water (bottles from shops and those monster 18L containers for water coolers)
• ban bottle-fed coolers, only allow Point-of-Use (POU) coolers
• mandatory recycling of plastic bottles
• glass bottles

Let's take a look a water fountains. Great idea - water for all when we're out and about, but with fears of swine flu and other communicable diseases, would you want to drink from one? Water fountains can be fitted with swan-neck spigots to draw off water into cups and personal containers, but still require sanitisation maintenance. You don't see many in public places anymore - cost-cutting, vandalism and health issues are to blame. However, paying for water from public dispensers is now on the menu for London: HydraChill units have been sited at Hamersmith Bus Station and Tower Bridge Museum. The 400,000 visitors who pass through these sites each year can fill bottles or get a cup of chilled water for 20p. Will other public places follow suit?

Ban all plastic bottles. Well they have done in Bundanoon, Australia AND installed public dispensers, getting local shops to sell personal containers for them. Undoubtedly, personal bottles are a great way of individuals saving money on buying water and issues of appropriate disposal, not to mention the positive affect on the environment from the downsizing of plastics production, bottling plants and their delivery trucks, but it's remembering to have the thing with you at all times. Also, have you ever tasted water that has been sitting in a plastic container for a few days - not nice. Leeching of chemicals into the water from the plastic, especially when it has been sitting in sunight, has led to concerns for long-term health. Dioxins from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic and bisphenol A used to make the water-cooler polycarbonate (PC) bottles have been mentioned, but the evidence is poor/inconclusive at this time.

Point-of-Use (POU) water coolers. These are plumbed-in water coolers that do save businesses £thousands each year. Earlier entries in this blog deal with the cost of bottle-fed coolers, the consequences of those delivery trucks as well as the safe storage and use of those massively heavy bottles. POU coolers require less sanitisation than bottle-fed units, so reducing maintenance costs. The main problem with POU coolers is knowing what you are buying/renting: unless stated clearly and/or you can see the filter at the back of the machine, it does not automatically FILTER the tap water to remove the chlorine, just chills or heats the water according to your chosen model. Filtered tap water tastes so much like bottled water that 'taste tests' usually fail to differentiate between them. What I will include here is the warning that if a bottle of water is not clearly labelled mineral or spring water - and most cooler water is not - then it is probably just filtered tap water that has been bottled!

Mandatory recycling/reuse is a strong possibility: Denmark is a real success story here. Until recently, beverages could not be sold in Denmark in plastic bottles - aluminium and glass were acceptable, as they are easily recycled materials. When pressed to permit plastic bottles, the Danish government legislated that the beverage industry itself took responsibility for the recycling with their own collection points that put the bottles back into their own system. The result is that over 95% of plastic bottles are recycled in Denmark. In a simlar vein, last year in New York State, a mandatory 5-cent (that's around 3p) recycling deposit was placed on all bottled water sold in the state, including containers less than 1 gallon (3.8 litres). It's estimated that this deposit will raise $115 million (£75 million) in revenue for the state and 'encourage' recycling.

A strong alternative to recycling is using a biodegradable PET-type of plastic to form bottles. For example, ENSO is billed as "the world's first truly recyclable and biodegradable pastic bottle". It claims to be biodegradable in a landfill environment (anaerobic degradation, in the absence of oxygen), rather that just compostable (aerobic degradation, in the presence of oxygen) as most PET alternatives actually are. Crucially, it does not contaminate regular PET recycling methodolgies (in which plastic is reduced to pellets before being reformed into new objects), so ENSO can go on to become another bottle again.

Glass bottles are often more attractive than their plastic counterparts. A number of water cooler businesses now market glass bottles to their customers, as do we at Just Water Now. It is a great opportunity for a restaurant/cafe/hotel/leisure centre to market itself by having their glass bottles personalised with their company logo. They can be washed out and reused multiple times and they can look great on a dining table. However, glass is potentially dangerous: the Starbucks Coffee Company has had a nightmare this year within month of launchng their own glass bottles in North America. Starbucks had to recall over 12,000 bottles after receiving 10 reports of shattered glass - 8 of which involved customers. Ouch!

So there is no easy answer - and legislation is another dose from the nanny state that we live in. What is the way forward? Perhaps we just have to stop, think and be prepared to take a little personal responsibility for our lives of convenience and consider whether a few voluntary inconveniences now may ultimately save us from future involuntary hardships with respect to our natural resources. After all, with 25% of the world's population being without safe drinking water today, we in the UK are very fortunate.

Water is weird! A few odd things about the wet stuff

Water is the stuff of life. 70% of the Earth's surface is covered with it and our bodies are mostly composed of it: our brains alone are 75% water. We can last for a month or more without food but less than a week without water. Man has always been facinated with it: seeing insects able to walk on water using its surface tension, fish surviving in liquid water at the bottom of a frozen pond, the awesome power of ocean waves or falling water.

Water is a simple molecule consisting of one Oxygen ion and two Hydrogen ions, hence its formula H2O. It is a polar molecule and so tends to form hydrogen bonds between individual molecules. When water is a solid (ice), these additional intermolecular interactions give rise to an ordered tetrahedral shape. As heat is applied to ice, the number of ordered tetrahedral structures is reduced causing a more disordered arrangement in which the molecules are more densely packed at 4oC. Hence weird fact number 1: water at 4oC is ~9% more dense than ice so ice floats. But... as more heat is applied to water, it causes the water molecules to vibrate more so they move apart and density drops again, so that water starts to follow the same rule other liquids: it is less dense than its solid state.

Going on to weird fact number 2: it takes a lot of energy to heat up water compared to other liquids. The reason is that stable ordered tetrahedral structure: much of the extra heat energy is needed to convert it into the disordered structures, rather than make the molecules vibrate more. Most energy is required between 0oC and 35oC when it steadily removes regions of ordered tetrahedrons from the water. Above 35oC, there are so few tetrahedrons left that water can behave like a regular liquid.

Weird fact number 3: water is unusually hard to compress. The strong attraction between disordered water molecules keeps them closely packed already, more so than other liquids, so there is not much to compress when pressure is raised.

Weird fact number 4: water molecues are more able to diffuse at higher pressures. High pressure produces more disordered structures which are more mobile than the ordered tetrahedral molecules.

Weird fact number 5: water has an unusually high melting/freezing point (0oC) and an unusually high boiling point (100oC). All due to those intermolecular interactions binding the water molecules together.

Weird fact number 6: liquid water exists at very low temperatures and freezes when the temperature is raised. We all know that water solidifies at 0oC, but it is possible to supercool water at normal pressure and maintain it as a liquid down to about -42oC. This is not just an experimental phenomenon, it's found in nature when frogs and fish can survive long winter.

And finally my favourite weird fact number 8: once its evaporates, a water molecule spends around 10 days in the air before coming back...

Remember it's just water now, not magic!

Good news about global warming, at last!

I normally try to write about drinking water, but I stumbled across some good news about global warming. It's a bit bizarre, but the take home message is that we could be so much worse off, apparently.

Global warming by production of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide and methane, has lead to concerns over the survival of the planet. Actually, it's the survival of humans on this planet that is the real issue - the Earth will muddle along without us very well, and even probably do better without our polluting ways!

We have just completed a string of ten relatively stable years, 2000-2009, with respect to Earth's temperatures, that has been partly attributed to a reduction in water vapour in parts of the middle atmosphere, the Stratosphere, according to an article published online at the journal Science this week. Water vapour absorbs solar energy and then re-emits it as heat down into the lower Troposphere and the Earth below, thus acting as a heat-trap or 'greenhouse'. This fall in concentration of water vapour in the Stratosphere (for reason(s) unknown) has slowed the rate of Earth's warming by a staggering 25%. So that's 25% slow-down from a 10% change in water vapour, 10 miles over our heads, over the past 10 years. Not bad.

Compare this to 1980-2000, when an increase in water vapour in the Stratosphere sped up the rate of warming. This was due to higher rates of methane emission; methane oxidises into water vapour and carbon dioxide, which trap heat:


NB: not all carbon dioxide comes from methane, the majority of it comes directly from our activities.

It has long been known that water vapour in the lower Troposphere, the layer nearest the Earth, amplifies the effect of greenhouse gas emission, but this finding of its effects when present in the Stratosphere is novel.

Good news as far as it goes, but it doesn't let us off the hook there is no doubt that the Earth is still warming, its just not doing it as fast as we used to see.