Pure Water Occasional, January 16, 2019 |
It's the time of year when all publications put out an issue dedicated to their best articles or their greatest accomplishments for the past year. We decided to look back into our archive for some really old ones. The article that follows, in fact, is from the oldest Occasional in our archive, from 2006, although the article itself is from 2003.
Most of the old Occasional issues are archived on the Pure Water Gazette website. This is a pretty comprehensive listing of email issues going back to mid-2006. We haven’t counted them, but there are a bunch.
The Occasional is the offspring of the original Pure Water Gazette which began as a mail-out paper newsletter in 1986. The paper Gazette, discontinued in 1997, morphed into an online publication which started emailing some of its content as the Occasional newsletters sometime in the early 2000s.
The Gazette has existed since then as an online publication with “occasional” email issues.
Here is the full list, and here is the first article in the oldest Occasional from the list. You'll find that although the article is almost 20 years old, the problems and issues it describes are still with us.
You can also click on the title of each article to see its original formatting.
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by Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke
December 9, 2003
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We are taught in school that the Earth has a closed hydrologic system; water is continually being recycled through rain and evaporation and none of it leaves the planet’s atmosphere. Not only is there the same amount of water on the Earth today as there was at the creation of the planet, it’s the same water. The next time you’re walking in the rain, stop and think that some of the water falling on you ran through the blood of dinosaurs or swelled the tears of children who lived thousands of years ago.
While there will always be the same amount of water, we can render water unusable for ourselves and for the planet. The growing scarcity of potable water stems from a variety of causes. Per capita water consumption is doubling every 20 years, more than twice the rate of human population growth, which itself is exploding. Technology and sanitation systems, particularly those in the wealthy industrialized nations, have encouraged people to use far more water than they need. Yet even with this increase in personal water use, households and municipalities account for only 10 percent of water use.
Industry claims 20 to 25 percent of the world’s fresh water supplies, and its demands are dramatically increasing. Many of the world’s fastest growing industries are water intensive. For example, in the U.S. alone, the computer industry will soon use over 396 billion gallons of water each year.
Nonetheless, it is irrigation that is the real water hog, claiming 65 to 70 percent of all water used by humans. Increasing amounts of irrigation water are used for industrial farming. These water-intensive corporate farming practices are subsidized by governments and their taxpayers, and this creates a strong disincentive for farm operations to move to conservation practices such as drip irrigation.
Along with population growth and increasing per capita water consumption, massive pollution of the world’s surface water systems has placed a great strain on remaining supplies of clean fresh water. Global deforestation, destruction of wetlands, dumping of pesticides and fertilizer into waterways, and global warming are all taking a terrible toll on the Earth’s fragile water systems.
The world is running out of fresh water. By the year 2025, there will be 2.6 billion more people on Earth than there are today. As many as two-thirds of those people will be living in conditions of serious water shortage, and one-third will be living with absolute water scarcity. Demand for water will exceed availability by 56 percent.
Water as a commodity
The combination of increasing demand and shrinking supply has attracted the interest of global corporations who want to sell water for a profit. The water industry is touted by the World Bank as a potential trillion-dollar industry. Water has become the “blue gold” of the 21st century.
The move to privatize water coincides with the rise of the Washington Consensus as the dominant world economic philosophy. This philosophy calls for trade and investment liberalization, and turning responsibility for social programs and resource management over to the private sector. In this case, it is an assault on the ancient commons of water.
Global trade agreements have become perhaps the most important tool for corporations trading in water and their allies. All of the multinational governing bodies, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), and the World Trade Organization (WTO), define water as a commodity. As a result, water is now subject to the same rules and regulations governing other commodities, such as oil and natural gas. Under these combined international rules, a country cannot prohibit or limit the export of water without risking censure by the WTO. Nations are also restricted from denying the import of water from any country. NAFTA’s “proportionality clause” means that if a country turns on the tap to export its natural resources, it cannot turn off the tap until it runs out of that resource.
In addition, the push to privatize water services will be greatly enhanced by new rules governing cross-border trade in services at the WTO, known as the GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services). Under the proposed GATS rules, not only will governments face added pressures to deregulate and privatize their water systems, but once a city’s water services have been taken over by a foreign-based corporation, efforts to take these services back into public hands will invite severe economic penalties under the WTO.
Leading the charge for privatization are three big transnational corporations based in Europe: Vivendi, Suez, and RWE. All three have systematically bought out smaller rivals to become the dominate powers in the business of water all over the globe. The long-range strategy of these companies began with their efforts to take over the public water systems in Third World countries where they hoped to position themselves as the saviors of the water crisis. Instead, a series of private-sector fiascoes in the Third World derailed their plans.
The case of Buenos Aires is especially instructive. Buenos Aires was to be the flagship operation of Third-World water privatization. Suez, through its subsidiary Aguas Argentinas, took over the Buenos Aires water and sewage system in 1992. A common argument for privatizing water systems is that, unlike the cash-strapped public sector, the private sector has the capital necessary to update or refurbish aging water systems. But public sources like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other smaller banks supplied 97 percent of the $1 billion necessary for the Suez privatization experiment. Suez did expand water and sewage service by a small increment, but failed to meet its projected targets in both areas. Nonetheless, the company managed to reap annual profits of around 25 percent in the mid-1990s. Recently, Suez announced that it plans to pull out of Argentina because the country’s currency crisis has cut into its profits. There have been other private-sector fiascoes in places like Johannesburg, New Delhi, Manila, and most famously in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
The effort to privatize Third World water systems has become a target of civil society protests. Representatives of an international civil society network appeared at a meeting of chief executive officers at the World Water Forum in Kyoto, Japan, in March. The group took over the microphones and offered a series of testimonials about the impact of water privatization around the world. Toward the end of the event, a water activist from Cancun, Mexico, stepped to the microphone and held up a glass of pitch-black, putrid-smelling water. He explained that he had taken the water from his home tap in Cancun, where Suez runs the municipal water system. He then requested that the moderator pass the glass of black, smelly water up on stage to the CEO of Suez, inviting him to drink it.
Targeting First World water
The big water companies are now changing their strategy and concentrating their operations and their investment on more secure markets in North America and Europe. Eighty-five percent of all water services in the U.S. are still in public hands. That’s a tempting target for conglomerates like Suez, Vivendi, and RWE. Within the next 10 years, they aim to control 70 percent of water services across the United States.
They have positioned themselves to move aggressively. Vivendi, Suez, and RWE have bought up the leading U.S. water companies, U.S. Filter, United Water, and American Water Works, respectively. These water companies had largely serviced small towns and communities, but under the tutelage of the global giants they have become the engines for privatization in the United States.
When transnational water conglomerates take over a municipal water system, it feels like a local problem, but because the same corporate players are targeting communities all over the world, we must build alliances and connections, learn from one another, and start to build a frontal attack.
At the Polaris Institute, we propose a three-pronged strategy. First, develop a water-alert network so we can know where companies are operating and where they are going next. How are they going to move? And how can we get ahead of them?
Second, we need water-action teams that bring citizens together to build local water-watch coalitions and develop campaigns to protect their water supplies and services from conglomerates. Then we should link those local campaigns with the national campaigns of groups like Public Citizen or the Council of Canadians.
Third, we need to offer alternatives. It is not enough to say we want to defend our public water systems against private takeovers. There are problems with public water systems, and we must find new ways of revitalizing them in our own communities through citizen participation. Engaged citizens can act as watchdogs for their local water systems.
Our local actions should be informed by three global principles. One is water conservation. We cannot kid ourselves about water scarcity. Water may be abundant in one place, but scarce in others. Water conservation must be a top priority.
The second principle is that water is a fundamental human right. People need water to live. Water must be provided equitably to all people and not on the basis of the ability to pay.
The third principle is water democracy. We cannot leave the management of our most precious resource in the hands of bureaucrats in government or the private corporations, whether or not they are well intentioned. We, the people, must preserve this special trust, we must fight for it, and we must take our proper role and demand water democracy.
Reprinted from Yes! A Journal of Positive Futures, PO Box 10818, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110.
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by Gene Franks
September 2008
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So much attention is given to the materials of water filter media (coconut shell vs. standard bituminous filter carbon, for example) that the size measurements of filter media are often ignored. Size, however, is very important in water filters.
Filter media are usually manufactured substances that are ground to a specific size. The “grind,” usually expressed as a mesh size, greatly affects the performance of the filter.
In large tank-style filters, the general rule is the smaller the granules of filter media, the more effective the filter will be at reducing contaminants, but the greater the restriction it will offer to the flow of water. Performance must be weighed against flow rate. A filter is of no value if water won’t go through it, nor is it of value if it’s so porous that it won’t remove the targeted contaminant.
The size of the particles in granular filter media is usually expressed as mesh size. Mesh refers to the number of holes or openings per inch in a testing sieve. A 12 mesh screen has 12 holes per inch. A 40 mesh screen has 40 much smaller openings per inch.
Filter media is usually described with a two number designation. Twelve by 40 mesh filter carbon is a common size. If filter carbon is said to be 12 X 40 mesh, it means that the granules of carbon will fall through a screen with 12 holes per inch but be caught by a screen with 40 holes per inch. (Since nothing is perfect, some allowance is made for a small percentage of granules to be outside the size range. The undersized particles that wash out of the filter when water first goes through it are called “fines.” Over-sized chunks are called “overs.”) Eight by 30 mesh carbon is a courser blend than 12 X 40 carbon. It will fall through an 8-mesh screen but be retained by a 30-mesh screen. Water goes through 8 X 30 carbon faster, but for many jobs it is less effective.
In general, the larger the mesh number, the smaller the granules.
The familiar term “granular activated carbon,” or GAC, is used to describe most granular carbon. The technical definition of GAC is carbon of which 90% is retained by an 80 mesh screen. Finer-ground carbon, often compressed into carbon block filters, is called powdered activated carbon. Powdered activated carbon is in the 80 X 325 mesh neighborhood. Powdered carbon is more effective than GAC, but it is much more restrictive.
Microns
As things get tinier, filter makers usually switch to another measurement, the micron.
Here’s the Wikipedia definition: A micrometer or micron, the symbol for which is µm, is one millionth of a meter. It can be written in scientific notation as 1×10−6 m, meaning 1⁄1000000 m. In other words, a micron is a measurement of length, like an inch or a mile.
To put this in context, an inch is 25,400 microns long, or a micron is 0.000039 inches long.
Here are measurements of some common items:
Red blood cell — 8 microns.
White blood cell–25 microns.
An average human hair (cross section) –70 microns.
Cryptosporidium Cyst — 3 microns.
Bacteria — 2 microns.
Tobacco smoke–0.5 microns.
The naked human eye can normally see objects down to about 40 microns in size.
In water treatment, the relative “tightness” of filters is usually expressed in microns. A five-micron sediment filter is a common choice for prefiltration for a reverse osmosis unit or an ultraviolet lamp. A 5-micron filter is one that prevents the passage of most of the particles of five microns or larger. A one-micron filter is much tighter than a five-micron.
Two qualifying words are used to describe the effectiveness of the filter: absolute and nominal. An absolute filter catches virtually all the particles of the specified size, while a nominal filter catches a good portion of them. There is, unfortunately, within the industry a lot of wiggle room in defining what exactly constitutes a nominal or absolute filter rating.
The nominal pore size rating describes the ability of the filter media to retain the majority of particles at the rated pore size. Depending on the standard used, a “nominal” filter can be anywhere from 60% or 98% efficient.
Absolute is a higher standard, but again the term is slippery and its meaning depends on whose definition you accept. The standard water treatment industry’s trade associations, to accommodate marketers, in some cases lower its definition of “absolute” to as little as 85% efficiency. Other standards exist, such as industrial/commercial filtration (98%-99%), US EPA “purifier grade” (99.9%), and very high purity industry standards, e. g. pharmaceutical, (99.99%).
To clarify: a “0.5 micron absolute” carbon block filter sold by an aggressive commercial marketer isn’t necessarily as tight a filter as a 0.9 micron absolute ceramic filter that is designed to purify water by removing bacteria. Marketing standards allow some leeway because the carbon block filter isn’t being sold as a purifier (i.e., bacteria remover).
Here is some common size information regarding water filtration that may be helpful.
Granular tank-style filters are generally assumed to have about a 20 micron particle rating. Some are tighter. A multi-media filter (containing filter sand, anthracite, garnet, etc.) is considered to be about a 10 micron filter. Some of the newer natural zeolite media (ChemSorb, Micro Z, for example) are considered 5 micron filters. Good carbon block drinking water filters, which are manufactured by binding very small carbon particles together, are frequently in the 0.5 and smaller range. Doulton ceramic filters, which are very effective bacteria reducers, are in the 0.9 micron absolute area. As you would guess, flow rates are slow and pressure drop is significant. Newer technologies known as ultrafiltration operate in the 0.1 micron range, and nano filtration (often called “loose reverse osmosis”) goes down to the 0.01 micron range. Reverse osmosis membranes have a micron rating of around 0.0005 to 0.001 microns–so tight that they reduce the “dissolved solids” (minerals) in water which pass easily through carbon and ceramic filters.
Meshes
Comparing and converting mesh sizes to microns is most easily done by visiting one of the many web sites that offer conversion charts. Some common equivalents, to give you the idea:
10 mesh equals about 2,000 microns.
100 mesh equals about 149 microns.
400 mesh equals 37 microns.
If you’d like to figure it out for yourself, an engineer has worked it all down to this neat formula: microns = 14,992 X mesh(-1.0046). This can be rounded off to mesh = 15,000/microns. That’s certainly a lot easier than looking it up on a chart.
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Water softeners have been around for several decades. Most people are familiar with them.
Water softeners aren't water filters. They are ion exchangers. They function by swapping sodium for calcium and magnesium, the minerals that make water "hard." As water passes through the softener's resin tank, the hardness minerals lave the water and attach themselves to the resin beads in the tank. The beads release sodium into the water in exchange. Salt has to be added to the softener's brine tank from time to time to replace the sodium that has been released into the water.
Water softeners are very effective at what they do. They can turn water that is unusable due to its scale-forming hardness into good water for domestic purposes. Softened water protects and extends the life of expensive appliances, prevents scaling of fixtures, and makes soap work better.
However, softeners also have some disadvantages. First, they consume a good bit of salt and this salt ends up in waste water systems and subsequently in fresh water supplies and irrigation system. For this reason, a growing number of communities have banned softeners and labeled them as harmful to the environment. Also, many people genuinely dislide the "slick" feel of softened water on their skin. Then there are concerns about the health effects of high amounts of sodium in drinking water, the expense of upkeep, the hassle of dealing with heavy bags of salt, the use of consierable amounts of water for regeneration, concerns about the damage discharged brine might cause to septic systems, and sometimes confusion about how to program and maintain the softener.
In spite of the negatives, the water softener has been so popular that it is the cornerstone of the modern water treatment industry. Most conventional "dealerships," from lucrative multi-site franchise operations to one-man shops, owe a good part of their income to selling, renting, servicing, and providing salt for water softeners.
For years, softeners have been among the most aggresively marketed products in America. Most of us have had a visit from the smooth salesman with a slick demonstration, a forceful "close," and a long-term purchase contract in his briefcase. For the dealership, the stakes are high. A single softener sale can bring a large initial profit, ongoing maintenance business, the subsequent sale and maintenance of a reverse osmosis unit to take out the sodium that the softener puts into the customer's water, and years of steady income from the dealer's "salt route."
It isn't surprising, therefore, that dealers and dealer associations do not take kindly to attempts to market substitutes for their cash cow.
Although alternatives to the water softener have been around as long as softeners themselves, it is only recently that some of the alternatives have gained wide acceptance. The most basic alternative systems have traditionally been natural or electrically-powered magnets that are said to alter the molecular orientation of the hardness minerals and take away their tendency to stick to pipes and metal appliances. In recent times, the electronic "softening" alternatives have become more and more sophisticated. Many now feature rapidly cycling changes in wave frequency to scan the spectrum of possibilities and thus assure complete treatment of hardness.
The difficulty in assessing the effectiveness of the alternatives is that they don't actually remove calcium and magnesium, as softeners do. A softener actually takes away the calcium, so it's easy to do a simple test for hardness that shows effectively and with complete objectivity that the water is "soft" (free of calcium and magnesium) after it has passed through a water softener.
Sellers of alternatives, however, make no claim that their product "removes" calcium. After water has been treated with a magnet, it still registers as "hard" on a hardness test. The calcium is still in the water although, according to the magnet seller, it is no longer offensive.
You can see the difficulties faced by early magnet sellers and their prospective customers. Since no test of a magnet's effectiveness at water conditioning existed, the best way to demonstrate the product's efficacy was to run test water through two identical pipes. One pipe had a magnet attached and the other was a "control." After a copule of years, when the pipes were cut open and examined, the treated pipe looked better than the control pipe (or it didn't) and conclusions were drawn. There was no uniform explanation of why magnets seemed to work in some areas and not in others, or in some applications of the same area and not in others, or if some natural magnets worked better than others, or if electromagnets worked better than natural magnets.
The seller's difficulties, and the consumer's confusion, were augmented by the water treatment industry's reluctance to sanction a competitor for the conventional softener. For years no serious efforts were made in the U.S. to find reliable and less cumbersome methods of evaluation for anti-scaling devices. Professional organizations for water treatment dealers, with an obvious vested interest in the conventional softener, were very slow to take initiative when it came to exploring ways to quanity and certify the performance of alternative conditioners.
Fortunately, Europeans have taken the salt-free softening issue more seriously, and reliable, effective tests are now available, espeically in Germany where standards of performance for salt-free conditioners have been established. Some U.S. sellers are now testing their own equipment with tests based on European models.
Watts/Alamo, for example, recently completed tests on a conditioning system that they offer in which treated and un-treated test water of 17 grains per gallon hardness was fed at 0.5 gpm for 2 minutes every hour into transparent testing tanks. Heating elements like those in a conventional hot water heater maintained a 180 degree Fahrenheit temperature in the test tanks. It took only a few days for heavy scale to form on the element in the untreated tank; in the treated tank, the element remained scale-free. When the feed tubes to the tanks were reversed, so that treated water was sent into the tank with the scaled element, the scale graduatlly disappeared. This result indicated treated water can reduce existing scale. And, what is more surprising, when untreated water was fed into the formerly treated tank, scale was very slow in forming, indicating that treated water acutally forms a protective shield against future scale formation.
The Watts/Alamo unit is indicative of what appears to be the trend in alternative softeners. It is not magnetic but consists of a single mineral tank, not unlike the tank of a conventional softener, which holds a small amount of relatively expensive treatment medium. As water passes through the tank the calcium ions are converted to tiny calcium crystals which are stable and cannot attach to pipes and appliances. The process is often called "template assisted crystallization." No regeneration of the medium is needed and no salt is consumed. This technology is now being sold under a variety of brand names and the results seem good.
Water softener alternatives appear to be here to stay. This is indicated by the fact that many of the mainstays of the conventional water softener industry (like Watts/Alamo and the Nelsen Corporation, for example) are beginning to offer and endorse the alternative units.
Our webpage on Watts Scale Prevention Systems has more details.
Pictures from the Watts/Alamo tests. The heating element on the right was protected by Watts ScaleNet.
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Animal agriculture is a major polluter of our water that we usually odn't say a lot about. Below are a few facts about animal feces from a 2009 piece by Pure Water Gazette columnist B. Sharper.
Introduction
by Gene Franks
The Agriculture Committee of the U. S. Senate, directed by chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), performed an extensive study of the state of our nation's manure. Although the findings of Harkin's committee were called "staggering" by the Associated Press, the story was essentially ignored except for a few page 22 newspaper stories. Our numbers columnist, Bea Bee Sharper, intrigued by the big numbers that figure into animal manure statistics, decided to turn the committee's findings into a column. B. Bea's numerical facts are taken from an excellent article on the Harkin findings, Pamela Rice's "Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Manure," which appeared in the Fall 1999 issue of Vegetarian Voice. Here are B. Bea's findings.
- Pounds of waste produced each year by farm animals in the US: 2.74 trillion
- If this waste were loaded on the boxcars of a single train (heaven forbid!), the number of times this train's length would reach around the earth: 12.5
- Human population of a city that would create the same amount of excrement as the dairies in California's Central Valley: 21,000,000.
- Estimated number of manure-generating animal-feeding operations in the US: 450,000
- Percentage of rivers that have been identified by the EPA as "impaired"in which agricultural runoff from animal waste is the largest problem: 60%.
- Number of Olympic-size swimming pools that would fit into one of the innumerable large "lagoons" (temporary excrement storage facilities) spread throughout the US: 200.
- Percentage of the older lagoons in North Carolina that are leaking enough to contaminate groundwater: 50%.
- Number of separate noxious gasses that contribute to the foul odor which emanates from hog barns: 150.
- Number of dead birds that are composted or incinerated by the poultry industry each year: 160,000,000.
- Factor by which US animal excrement exceeds humans': 130 times.
- Pounds of manure and urine produced in a single day by one dairy cow: 100 to 120.
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