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