Coming online in two months time, the new UV plant will process nine billion liters of water each day coming from the city’s two major sources of water, the Delaware County and Catskill watersheds located 100 miles north of Manhattan. The plant is being built in response to new regulations from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency requiring a secondary cleaning method in addition to chlorine, which has been used to clean the city’s water for years.

The $1.6 billion Catskill–Delaware Ultraviolet Disinfection Facility being built by Trojan Technologies in Westchester County, N.Y is made up of 56 ultraviolet units containing 240 UV lamps. According to Scientific American, water will move through the system at 5 feet per second just centimeters away from the lamps, which will “alter the DNA of cryptosporidium, giardia and other waterborne pathogens rendering them unable to replicate.” This will reduce the chances of water-related stomach and health issues from drinking the water.

On peak days the facility will draw 6.3 megawatts of power, but that seems like a small price to pay for clean water in the country’s most densely-populated city. The city’s only other option for a secondary treatment system was feeding the water through a massive filtration system made up of porous materials such as sand, gravel and charcoal, but that would have been even more expensive than the $1.6 billion price tag for this UV plant. Above all else, anything that we can do to encourage the consumption of tap water over water packaged in plastic bottles is worth the price of admission, and this plant should do just that.

[via Innovation News Daily and Scientific American]

Image Credit: CarbonNYC/Flickr

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Each turbine can make 1,000 gallons of drinking water using only the wind, ABC News reports. The technology is currently being tested in France and Abu Dhabi.

Inventor Marc Parent brainstormed the idea while coping with water shortages during a stint in the Caribbean.

“The WMS1000 can create water when there is no existing source available,” Thibault Janin, marketing director of Eole Water, the company that makes the turbines, said in an interview with ABC News. “That makes a difference. Our technology integrates water creation, water collection, water treatment and water local distribution. The WMS1000 can produce and distribute water everywhere.”

The turbines cost $600,000 each and last for about 20 years. They require little maintenance, as they are created specifically for rural areas with limited access to clean drinking water.

The biggest hurdle for this new technology is affordability, Janin told ABC.

Featured photo credit: Shutterstock.com

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Johnson Controls Inc., an international energy efficiency company based in Milwaukee, has won a contract to install innovative liquid pool covers in one high school and five middle schools in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The energy-efficient system pumps an isopropyl alcohol product, with a consistency comparable to vegetable oil, into the pools. It then creates a thin coating over the surface, conserving water and keeping the temperature in check. The biodegradable alcohol product and the water do not mix, and the cover does not even need to be removed from the pool when it’s in use – it simply “breaks apart” when the water is disturbed and then reforms when the water is calm again.

The company will be paid by the district, which set aside almost $8 million for energy-saving projects, including upgrading air conditioning, hot water pumps, and lights. Johnson Controls has guaranteed the school district an annual savings of $699,359 and a one-time savings of up to $400,000 through the use of the pool covers. The company estimates the liquid pool covers can save customers up to 40 percent on heating costs.

Image via Shutterstock

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But a new discovery may make these desalination systems affordable for water poor areas including Africa and other parts of the Middle East. Researchers from the Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research at Ben Gurion University in the Negev (Israel’s vast desert region) and central Arava R&D are now able to use solar energy to run a custom-engineered desalination process at a fraction of the cost of more conventional systems. Not only does the new technology generate clean water for crops, it also allows farmers to choose which of the salt water’s minerals should be retained. Tests in Israel’s Arava Valley, just south of the Dead Sea, are showing that farmers will need up to 25 percent less water and fertilizer than they had typically used.

Ben Gurion University’s Rami Messalem said the “breakthrough here was to make the system more economical and we’ve done this using nanofiltration cleverly. Our system is compatible with electricity but is based on the premise that it can be used in poor countries, in places where you don’t have an electricity source — as a standalone system.”

Main image credit: Fotopedia

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A reservoir fed by the overburdened Colorado River, which provides 90 percent of the Las Vegas Valley’s water, could be exhausted by 2021. The Las Vegas Sun has been running a multi-media series about the history and future of the area’s water.

With the looming threat of a dry reservoir, the area’s water authority is planning a pipeline to take water from under the desert and transport it more than 300 miles to the city. The authority is buying up water rights and ranches to the east of Las Vegas.

The situation sets up a classic city-versus-country conflict. Ranchers and others outside the city say the pipeline would devastate their rural way of life, destroy wildlife and turn huge stretches of land into dead, dusty space. But the water authority and many city dwellers argue that the state couldn’t survive without Las Vegas. The Vegas strip alone provides 70 percent of Nevada’s gross state product. Supporters of the pipeline also say growing crops like alfalfa in the desert is far from an optimal use of water.

The state engineer will have the final call about whether the pipeline is an acceptable solution to Las Vegas’s problem.

Las Vegas has already implemented a range of programs to reduce water use in the city, including incentives to plant local, drought-resistant plants instead of traditional water-hungry lawns. Seventy percent of residential water use is for landscaping.

Still, everyone involved seems to agree that no amount of conservation will allow Las Vegas to survive without an influx of water from a new source. The city is allowed 300,000 acre-feet of water from the Colorado River. It actually uses 440,000, returning treated wastewater to the river in exchange for the permission to use the extra 140,000 acre-feet.

Ultimately, the question raised by the water shortage in Las Vegas is a familiar one: how can finite—and even shrinking—resources support a growing population?

Image credit: jimg944/Flickr

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The solar bag concept, designed by industrial design students Ryan Lynch and Marcus Triest for use in Sub-Saharan Africa, utilizes the power of the sun’s UV rays to purify drinking water. The outside of the bag, designed as a shoulder/messenger-type bag so users can carry water from distant sources, is made from polyethylene plastic which allows UV rays to penetrate into and kill bacteria within the water. The inside of the bag is lined with a black polyethylene to help heat up the water and reflect UV rays back through it, and the bottom has a spigot for easy access. The team estimates that their design cuts the purification time of 2.5 gallons of water down from a localized standard of two days to just 6 hours.

While a prototype of the bag has been built, the bags are not currently being manufactured and Lynch and Triest are looking for financial backers to make that happen. They say that each bag would cost less $5 to produce, a small price to pay for the human lives it could save by providing clean drinking water to those in need. Kickstarter project, anyone?

[via CNET and Phys.org]

Image Credit: byrye.com

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Hydraulic fracturing has pushed gas prices down more than 70 percent over the past four years. Fracking allows the petroleum industry to extract vast quantities of natural gas from shale. The process involves blasting a huge amount of water into the ground. With the drought, companies find they need to haul that water in from farther away.

One alternative is recycling water for fracking, but the industry says that costs 50 to 75 percent more than sending polluted water into deep wells. Of course, there are noneconomic costs to that standard practice. Not only does it mean removing fresh water that might have other uses — like, say, drinking, or keeping plants and animals alive — but pumping the water deep into the earth has also been linked to earthquakes.

The use of water is a major battleground between fracking companies and local communities. In Texas, environmentalists are pushing for water-conservation legislation, and other western states are likely to follow suit. In Pennsylvania, a commission has suspended several companies from pulling water from the Susquehanna River Basin.

Between the higher costs of bringing in fresh water and new, drought-inspired government oversight of water use, companies may need to bite the bullet and accept the price associated with using recycled water. If that means natural gas costs rise, it could be a boon for alternative energy industries, which have been battered by the need to compete with cheap gas.

At the same time, the drought is also raising the cost of ethanol produced from corn and other food crops. There are multiple issues around that sort of ethanol, from the use of petroleum and pesticides in corn production to the repurposing of farmland that could feed people. If its price is rising, that could also have positive results for the development of alternative ethanol sources like agricultural waste and algae.

No one wants to pay more for energy, but drought-driven price increases could offer a push in some valuable directions.

Photo: Pond storing water for fracking in Fort Worth Texas. Image credit: Jeremy Buckingham MLC/Flickr

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Gary Harrington of Eagle Point, Oregon has been sentenced to 30 days in jail but not for something you would think would warrant it: he collected rainwater on his own property.

Stemming from a dispute that started in 2002 over three pond reservoirs that Harrington had on his own 170 acre property, his conviction was decided under a 1925 law handing all against private reservoirs and that according to Oregon water laws, all water is publicly owned. As such, you can only collect and store rain or snow runoff with special permits. While he was initially issued the correct permits by the Water Resources Department in 2003, the state took them away – and he has been fighting them ever since.

“The government is bullying,” Harrington told CNSNews.com. “They’ve just gotten to be big bullies and if you just lay over and die and give up, that just makes them bigger bullies. So, we as Americans, we need to stand on our constitutional rights, on our rights as citizens and hang tough. This is a good country, we’ll prevail.”

Reportedly the 1925 law says nothing about collecting and storing rain or snow runoff, which Harrington plans to note in appealing his conviction. However, Tom Paul from the Oregon Water Resources Department stated that it’s not that law he is in violation of, but rather Oregon’s public water laws which state that if one wishes to divert or store water, permits are needed. The department insists that Harrington built two 10-foot dams and one 20-foot dam which block a tributary to the Big Butte River, which he denies. He says his dams collect rainwater and snow runoff on his own property.

However,in 2007 Harrington entered a guilty plea for illegally withdrawing water from the tributaries, receiving three years probation for his act and ordered to open his dam gates again. He did so, only to close them back up a short time later to refill his reservoirs. Because of his refusal to meet the conditions of his probation, the water department filed this recent lawsuit.

The court has given him two weeks to report to jail to begin his 30 day stay, which he says he will comply with if his appeal is unsuccessful. But he also says he won’t stop fighting the law, stating that “when something is wrong, you just, as an American citizen, you have to put your foot down and say, ‘This is wrong; you just can’t take away anymore of my rights and from here on in, I’m going to fight it.”

The city of Portland allows rainwater catchment in barrels and cisterns but not private dams and reservoirs. At issue here is the damming of rivers and tributaries, which Harrington says he has the right to do on his property but the water department disagrees with.

[via CNS News]

Image Credit: Bull Run Reservoir in Oregon | Sam Beebe, Ecotrust/Flickr

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Each year the temperature increased one degree, cases of infection by the Vibrio bacteria rose almost 200 percent. Victims can be infected if they’re exposed to seawater or undercooked shellfish.

Vibrio is typically found in warmer environments, but outbreaks have appeared in colder regions like Chile, Israel, northwest Spain and the United States’ Pacific Northwest. The scientists said these outbreaks can be linked to global warming.

In addition to making oceans warmer, climate change reduces their salinity as more rain falls and the polar ice caps melt. The less-salty water along with the warmer temperatures encourages bacterial growth.

The scientists chose to study the Baltic Sea because it is one of the areas most affected by climate change. While rising greenhouse gas emissions raised global surface temperatures by 0.17 degrees celsius per decade between 1980 and 2010, the Baltic Sea warmed around four times as fast.

Main photo credit: romtomtom/Flickr

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I recently heard that any given person could be wasting up to a gallon of water with every flush of the toilet, so I decided to test it out. After performing a simple test, I discovered that I was actually wasting more than a gallon with each flush.

I decided to shoot a short video showing how to perform the test yourself, how to fix it, and how to save water in 10 minutes and for about $10.

The culprit is the toilet’s fill valve. The simple solution requires replacing the current fill valve with one that can regulate the fill rate of the water in the bowl and the water in the tank. One quick exchange will have you saving gallons of water and, hence, buckets of money. I used the BlueSource H660 HydroClean fill valve, but there are similar models available.

If you used a toilet 10 times a day and saved a gallon of water with every flush, then you’d be saving 3,650 gallons of water per year for a simple 10 minute fix that cost $10. Something to think about.

Check out the video:

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