WaterWired

Do You Think About What You Drink? A Modest Proposal

Jim Belshaw, the excellent columnist for the Albuquerque Journal, wrote this article after one of my rants about bottled water for sale in a Starbucks store. Note: I added a few more WWW sites towards the end of the piece that were not in the original column.

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Do You Think About What You Drink?

By Jim Belshaw
Of the Albuquerque Journal

     It isn't often a pet theory converges with just the right amount of
technological expertise to produce a good deed.
     That kind of thing isn't in the nature of pet theories, not mine
anyway, which tend toward the urban legend side of the hard sciences.
     So when a hydrologist with worldwide experience happens to agree on a
point that coincides with a dearly held theory based on no known scientific
evidence, well, who can say no to that?
     The convergence begins with Michael Campana, a University of New Mexico
hydrologist who e-mailed a New York Times essay on bottled water to friends.
     He thought that was the end of it, just something the hydrology crowd
would enjoy.
     Then he went into a Starbucks to buy a triple-half-caff latte or
something and saw a display for "Ethos," a new bottled water.
     The hydrologist thought back to the essay, written by Tom Standage,
technology editor of The Economist (note: see my January 10, 2007 post).
     Standage conducted an experiment with friends. They drank from 10
bottles of water, one of which had been filled from the tap. The other nine
were bottled water.
     Only one person correctly identified the tap water.
     Standage allowed as how tap water was perfectly fine to drink, in spite
of a bottled water industry that does something in the neighborhood of $46
billion a year worldwide.
     I mentioned this to a poker playing acquaintance of mine who in his
special, gracious way said, "Told you so."
     Meanwhile, Campana looked at the broader picture.
     "Ethos sold for $1.80 a bottle (almost 24 ounces), which seems cheap,"
he wrote. "But that is almost $10 per gallon, or for you fellow water nerds,
about $3.2 million an acre-foot."
     The Ethos display announced that the company would donate five cents
from every bottle to help people in developing countries get clean water.
     "To drive this point home, they had a picture of a smiling campesino by
a faucet," Campana wrote. "They should have had his wife and daughters,
because they are the ones who bust their behinds getting the household
water."
     Campana gave points to the Ethos promotion, though he didn't lose sight
of the irony of bottled water being sold in a developed country (us), where
perfectly good tap water is available, and using some of the profits to
bring clean water to those less fortunate.
     So he came up with a more nuanced proposal.
     "Skip the middleman," he said. "Go to your local Starbucks (or
wherever), plunk down $1.80 for a bottle of water, drink it, savor it, save
the bottle, and the next time you need water, fill it with tap water and put
a $1.80 in a can."
     He suggested doing this every time you need water.
     "When you get a pile of money in the can, write a check for that amount
and send it to an organization that works directly with people to bring
clean, safe water to developing countries," he said.
     He even supplied names of such organizations, including his own, named
after his sister, who died in the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon.

Ann Campana Judge Foundation: www.acjfoundation.org

Lifewater International: www.lifewater.org

Living Water: www.water.cc

El Porvenir: www.elporvenir.org

Pure Water for the World: www.purewaterfortheworld.org

Engineers Without Borders USA: www.ewb-usa.org

WaterAid America: www.wateraid.org.uk/usa/default.asp 

Agua Para La Vida: www.aplv.org

Flowing Streams Ministries: www.flowingstreamsministries.org

Wells for Life International: www.wfl-wellsforlife.org

     And if you want, he said, go to the Ethos site— www.ethoswater.com— to
see who they help and contribute directly.
     Oh, and Campana agrees with that technology-challenged poker player who
has argued for years that there's nothing in a bottle that can't be matched
by the faucet over at your kitchen sink.
     He doesn't think there's a dime's worth of difference, let alone $1.80.


Write to Jim Belshaw at the Albuquerque Journal, P.O. Drawer J,
Albuquerque, NM 87103; telephone— 823-3930; e-mail— [email protected].


Copyright 2005 Albuquerque Journal
Commercial reprint permission.

Remember: 'Evian' spelled backwards is 'naive'.

"Statistics are people with the tears wiped away." -- Anonymous

Some Blogs and Listservs

If you like WaterWired, here are more blogs and listservs you might enjoy.

John Fleck is the science writer for the Albuquerque Journal - check out his blog at www.inkstain.net/fleck. John could write for the New York Times, but then he'd have to live in New York, or worse, New Jersey. He is writing a book on drought.

Leslie Kryder maintains the water listserve [email protected] and has a neat water-energy blog at h2oe.blogspot.com. She's a graduate student in water resources at the University of New Mexico and a consultant.

Oh, yeah - I have a personal blog, Aquablog. Like Seinfeld, it's the blog about "nothing".

And don't forget to subscribe to The Oregon Water List (TOWL), maintained by yours truly: lists.oregonstate.edu/mailman/listinfo/oregon-water-list

"Give me the man and I will find you the crime." -- KGB saying

Just Add Two Eggs, Flour, Sugar...to Puget Sound?

The January 2007 issue of U.S. Water News Online reports that University of Washington researchers found significantly higher levels of cinnamon and vanilla (natural and artificial) in Puget Sound during the period November 14 - December 9, with the levels spiking right after Thanksgiving. Natural vanilla showed the highest increase. UW researchers (your tax dollars at work) speculated that over the Thanksgiving weekend, the people served by the West Point treatment plant in Magnolia consumed the daily equivalent of about 160,000 chocolate-chip or butter-type cookies and about 80,000 cookies containing cinnamon (not to mention caffeine, some of which was found as deep as 640 feet). The spices could pose a problem for fish, since they use their sense of smell to find food or, in the case of salmon, to find their way back to their home stream for spawning. Read the entire story at:

http://www.uswaternews.com/archives/arcquality/7univofxx1.html

I suppose finding spices in our natural waterways is marginally better than the antidepressants, painkillers, birth-control pills, etc., that have turned up in the past few decades. I used to joke about the infamous "nine-eyed carp"; we may be closer to seeing them.

Hot off the press! The January 2007 newsletter of the Institute for Water and Watersheds at Oregon State University is now available. Go to:

http://water.oregonstate.edu/newsletter/20070101.htm

"Water is the true wealth in a dry land." -- Wallace Stegner

Bad to the Last Drop? What Else? Bottled Water!

Here is an article from the New York Times on one of my favorite topics - bottled water.

************************************************************************************

August 1, 2005
Bad to the Last Drop
By TOM STANDAGE
London

It's summertime, and odds are that at some point during your day you'll reach for a nice cold bottle of water. But before you do, you might want to consider the results of an experiment I conducted with some friends one summer evening last year. On the table were 10 bottles of water, several rows of glasses and some paper for recording our impressions. We were to evaluate samples from each bottle for appearance, odor, flavor, mouth, feel and aftertaste - and our aim was to identify the interloper among the famous names. One of our bottles had been filled from the tap. Would we spot it?

We worked our way through the samples, writing scores for each one. None of us could detect any odor, even when swilling water around in large wine glasses, but other differences between the waters were instantly apparent. Between sips, we cleansed our palates with wine. (It seemed only fair, since water serves the same function at a wine tasting.)

The variation between waters was wide, yet the water from the tap did not stand
out: only one of us correctly identified it. This simple experiment seemed to confirm that most people cannot tell the difference between tap water and bottled water. Yet they buy it anyway - and in enormous quantities.

In 2004, Americans, on average, drank 24 gallons of bottled water, making it second only to carbonated soft drinks in popularity. Furthermore, consumption of bottled water is growing more quickly than that of soft drinks and has more than doubled in the past decade. This year, Americans will spend around $9.8 billion on bottled water, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation.

Ounce for ounce, it costs more than gasoline, even at today's high gasoline prices; depending on the brand, it costs 250 to 10,000 times more than tap water. Globally, bottled water is now a $46 billion industry. Why has it become so popular?

It cannot be the taste, since most people cannot tell the difference in a blind tasting. Much bottled water is, in any case, derived from municipal water supplies, though it is sometimes filtered, or has additional minerals added to it.

Nor is there any health or nutritional benefit to drinking bottled water over tap water. In one study, published in The Archives of Family Medicine, researchers compared bottled water with tap water from Cleveland, and found that nearly a quarter of the samples of bottled water had significantly higher levels of bacteria. The scientists concluded that "use of bottled water on the assumption of purity can be misguided." Another study carried out at the University of Geneva found that bottled water was no better from a nutritional point of view than ordinary tap water.

Admittedly, both kinds of water suffer from occasional contamination problems, but tap water is more stringently monitored and tightly regulated than bottled water. New York City tap water, for example, was tested 430,600 times during 2004 alone.

What of the idea that drinking bottled water allows you to avoid the chemicals that are sometimes added to tap water? Alas, some bottled waters contain the same chemicals anyway - and they are, in any case, unavoidable.

Researchers at the University of Texas found that showers and dishwashers liberate trace amounts of chemicals from municipal water supplies into the air. Squirting hot water through a nozzle, to produce a fine spray, increases the surface area of water in contact with the air, liberating dissolved substances in a process known as "stripping." So if you want to avoid those chemicals for some reason, drinking bottled water is not enough. You will also have to wear a gas mask in the shower, and when unloading the dishwasher.

Bottled water is undeniably more fashionable and portable than tap water. The practice of carrying a small bottle, pioneered by supermodels, has become commonplace. But despite its association with purity and cleanliness, bottled water is bad for the environment. It is shipped at vast expense from one part of the world to another, is then kept refrigerated before sale, and causes huge numbers of plastic bottles to go into landfills.

Of course, tap water is not so abundant in the developing world. And that is ultimately why I find the illogical enthusiasm for bottled water not simply peculiar, but distasteful. For those of us in the developed world, safe water is now so abundant that we can afford to shun the tap water under our noses, and drink bottled water instead: our choice of water has become a lifestyle option.
For many people in the developing world, however, access to water remains a matter of life or death.

More than 2.6 billion people, or more than 40 percent of the world's population, lack basic sanitation, and more than one billion people lack reliable access to safe drinking water. The World Health Organization estimates that 80 percent of all illness in the world is due to water-borne diseases, and that at any given time, around half of the people in the developing world are suffering from diseases associated with inadequate water or sanitation, which kill around five million people a year.

Widespread illness also makes countries less productive, more dependent on outside aid, and less able to lift themselves out of poverty. One of the main reasons girls do not go to school in many parts of the developing world is that they have to spend so much time fetching water from distant wells.

Clean water could be provided to everyone on earth for an outlay of $1.7 billion a year beyond current spending on water projects, according to the International Water Management Institute. Improving sanitation, which is just as important, would cost a further $9.3 billion per year. This is less than a quarter of global annual spending on bottled water.

I have no objections to people drinking bottled water in the developing world; it is often the only safe supply. But it would surely be better if they had access to safe tap water instead. The logical response, for those of us in the developed world, is to stop spending money on bottled water and to give the money to water charities.

If you don't believe me about the taste, then set up a tasting, and see if you really can tell the difference. A water tasting is fun, and you may be surprised by the results. There is no danger of a hangover. But you may well conclude, as I have, that bottled water has an unacceptably bitter taste.

Tom Standage, author of "A History of the World in Six Glasses," is the technology editor of The Economist.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

"Character is doing what's right, even if no one is looking."

Terrorism and Ground Water

I might as well jump in feet first with this topic, which sounds like the basis for a season of Kiefer Sutherland's 24. But I'm deadly serious.

Most of the concern for water terrorism has rightly emphasized the protection of water intakes and other entry points into water distribution systems and the development of emergency supplies and response procedures.  The contamination of reservoirs is generally considered difficult because of the large volumes of water involved and the resulting significant dilution.

But what about the intentional introduction of a chemical, biological, or radiological (CBR) agent into an aquifer, so as to cause a large number of deaths?  At first, this appears so ridiculous as to promote immediate dismissal of the concept.  If the contamination of a reservoir or storage tank with a lethal dose of a CBR agent is difficult to accomplish, then what about aquifers, whose water volumes are often measured in cubic kilometers?  But it may be possible that a biotoxin might prove more appropriate to contaminate an aquifer than a chemical or radiological agent.

Here are some of the questions that I think are important:

• Which aquifer types would a terrorist seek to contaminate?
• Which aquifers in the USA (and the world) have recharge areas that are well-known and accessible?
• Which aquifers have short travel times from recharge areas to supply wells?
• Which aquifers provide little opportunity for a toxin to disperse, sorb, react, or degrade? 
• Which aquifers have relatively low storage volumes between recharge areas and supply wells?
• Which (bio)toxins might be suitable for terrorist acts directed at aquifers?

In terms of vulnerability, certain types of aquifers come to mind - karst, fractured rock, and volcanic rock aquifers.

I have attached a pdf of a brief article I wrote a few years ago that was published in Ground Water News and Views, a newsletter of the National Gorund Water Association. At the time some criticized me for broaching this topic, lest I give some people ideas. If that's the case, we should probably not discuss anything unpleasant, since there may be some "copycats" out there. I like to think that if more people had thought about commercial airliners being used as weapons of mass destruction we might have avoided 9/11.

I am also attaching a recent excellent article by Peter Gleick on "Water and Terrorism".

Download weaponization_and_ground_water4282005.pdf

Download GleickWaterTerrorism06.pdf

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." - attributed to Edmund Burke