Using over 1,300 gallons per day per capita, many Americans have been lulled into the misconception that we do not have to worry about our water supply. We are paying a great deal of attention to our resources for energy: coal, oil, natural gas. Debates in the Climate Bill and the upcoming Environmental Summit in Copenhagen have sharpened our focus on the sun and wind as natural resources. Of all of the resources that America focuses on, water is near the bottom and as a result we are unsurprisingly the least careful with its use and upkeep. The truth is known in other parts of the world much more poignantly than here: a clean supply of fresh water is essential and serves as the lynch pin for the interaction and function of countless other systems in the country.
America uses an average of 410 billion gallons of water everyday. I have not done the study, but I doubt many other nations (if any) can make such a boast. Whether we realize it or not, the water bill at the end of the month is only a fraction of how much we really spend on our water infrastructure. On average, U.S. cities spend $70 billion annually on water and wastewater needs according to the U.S. Census—second only to dollars allocated towards education. Part of the reason is due to our water system being a very energy-intensive process both conveying and distributing fresh water as well as removing and filtering wastewater. Together it takes our country 8 quadrillion BTUs of energy every year.
The Problems
Like our energy grid, much of our water system has gone too long without upgrades and repairs. In many parts of the country water and sewer pipes are well beyond their rated lifespans, raising the likelihood of breakages and leaks that interrupt service, waste precious water and allow for the infiltration of disease. Midrange, post-industrial cities of the country are the most prone to budgets that cannot accommodate necessary changes to their infrastructure. According to the Baltimore City Paper, there are parts of town in the coastal city that have sewers over 100 years old. Similarly, my time in Syracuse, New York revealed that as of 2005 most of the city’s water pipes are 60 to 70 years old that leave the water with a lead content 33% over the EPA limit. Their sewers are no better, with only 14% of the pipes less than 50 years old—the rated lifespan of the system.
Despite the improvement in water quality that the Clean Water Act has brought, pollution still remains a harrowing issue for much of the country. The New York Times released a disturbing report claiming that the Clean Water Act has been violated over 506,000 times since 2004 by over 23,000 companies and facilities. According to the report everything from gas stations and dry cleaners to chemical plants and power stations have dumped hazardous waste into the ground or directly into bodies of water. The report claims that one in 10 Americans has drinking water with dangerous chemicals or does not meet federal health benchmarks. I encourage the reading of the entire article as well as their great interactive map. I found the figures to be staggering, but what made it worse was that “the Time research found that less than 3 percent of violations resulted in fines or other significant punishments by state officials.”
For years now, a lack of strong federal oversight has allowed these transgressions to become business as usual. Never known as the shining star of George W. Bush’s presidency (if it had one at all) his E.P.A. was notoriously lax in its oversight of its duties for the two terms of the administration. Without federal power to invoke consequences from the highest level, local regulators often fall prey to pressure from politicians or large corporations.
“The E.P.A. and our states of have completely dropped the ball. Without oversight and enforcement, companies will use our lakes and rivers as dumping grounds—and that’s exactly what is apparently going on.” – Rep James L. Oberstar, D-Maryland
The Obama administration’s new E.P.A. head, Lisa Jackson, has noted that national drinking water quality is below acceptable levels and has vowed to renew the E.P.A.’s stance of enforcement.
Where Does the Water Go?
Finding a solution to some of our problems can likely begin with understanding how we use 410 billion gallons a day. A recent report released by the United States Geological Survey focuses on how Americans use their water. I found this publication equally as surprising. To begin, between 1980 and 2005, our water use has decreased by 5 percent! Upon reading this I was immediately skeptical and had to find out how it was possible, but before long the reason became clear.
As an architect I am often the champion of water efficiency in buildings. After all, nearly 40% of our nation’s energy is used by buildings so believing that they consume large quantities of water seemed to be intuitive. As it turns out, all domestic water use (residential applications in homes) accounts for only 1% of all of the water that we use. If you add all public water use and thereby include nearly all buildings in existence, you only get another 11%. Perhaps the culprits are all that heavy manufacturing or the mining we do across the country? Even with aquaculture, livestock, industrial and mining operations the cumulative total is only 20%. So where does the other 328 billion gal/day get used?
The second highest source is irrigation which is mostly comprised of farming. 31% of our water is used to irrigate 61.1 million acres in 2005. The number one source of water use is cooling for thermoelectric power plants. 49% of our water goes to creating power from such sources as coal, oil, nuclear and natural gas. All of a sudden, the nature of where to target efficiency for meaningful change has a very different appearance and that is why our water usage has dropped over the past 25 years. Due to more sprinkler-system irrigation and more efficient cooling systems in power plants, water consumption has ebbed despite a rise in population.
Response
Though a complicated problem, moreso than can be addressed in one article, the information does not leave us without places to go or reasons to get there.
- Our infrastructure needs to be raised to acceptable levels that allow for efficient systems that can bring water safely to end users. This could include a more distributed system of supply along with onsite water collection and filtration of waste water.
- Our governing bodies need to accept the responsibility of their offices to enforce laws that keep our water safe.
- Efforts targeting efficiency should focus on our largest sources of water use: farming and power generation. This could lead to more research devoted to vertical farming and hydroponics. It also provides a seldom mentioned strength to renewable energy sources like wind and solar given that, once installed, their use of water is negligible.
Failure to progress on these initiatives could lead to an increase in national water-related sicknesses, more natural waterways polluted beyond safety for human use or ecological function and a further increase in drought and drinking water shortages for communities.
Photo Credit: Flickr Wester
November 9, 2009 at 11:43 am
GREAT post! Very imformative! 🙂
http://www.ThePrettyProject.com
November 9, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Water’s ability to destroy or create is a gift to humanity. It’s a creative force that we must learn to cradle as if it was our own. This article highlights what we can do on a national level to respond but no others. Most know by now that if we wait for governments to act we will be sorely let down. There is need to act on a community and individual level response. First we need to actively harvest and reuse water. Yes the majority of the water used is by big industry but all of us have a watershed. A major reason for the crumbling infrastructure is the overload of water into these pipelines. If we prevent water from entering these systems, we can affect the need for governments to spend huge volumes of money on constant repair. This is called degenerative investment. Constantly reinvesting in something that is bound to need continuous repair or replacement is quite foolish. Water is meant to first enter the soil, be filtered by the biology there and exit into streams and springs. So invest regeneratively into earthworks that capture and store rainwater and allow for infiltration rather than runoff. Invest regeneratively into forests that are multifunctional that help to house the ecosystem functions we need to cleanse water.
Next actively take charge of where your water ends up. It now a law in Albuquerque that you have to harvest your own greywater (all water from sinks, washing machines, and showers but nothing with fecal matter). Use this water to recharge dehydrated landscapes and bypass the sewers and allow plants to take up excess nutrients and toxins. With your position as an Architect, please incorporate bioswlaes, retention ponds, rain gardens, rainwater cisterns, and greywater infrastructures into your design. The E.P.A. is investing in some of these technologies in my locality so please consider them in your designs. Design of systems is what we need to assure people that they have a hand in purifying water. A great Design Methodology for this is Permaculture Design. This teaches how to use simple, low tech solutions to runoff- the real threat to flood, drought, and pollution. Notice how hundred year floods keep happening every 11. It’s not global warming, it’s runoff from water not infiltrating. Therefore cleanse water and develop bountiful landscapes by harvesting this gift. It has a ripple affect all the way down to those who are burning the coal to power the refrigerators
November 9, 2009 at 12:43 pm
Doug, thanks for stopping by and your comment.
You are right in there being many ways that water issues can be addressed on the local level. When it comes to water efficiency, the impact that single buildings can make may be smaller than farms and power stations, but when it comes to waste water, the figures are not as clean cut. Though mining only comprises 1% of our nation’s water consumption, the water that is discharged from coal mining is much worse for the environment than water passing through thermoelectric cooling. By the same token, households and businesses run the risk of releasing many harmful substances into the watershed.
Greywater is an excellent example of localized solutions and although greywater systems are actually illegal in some municipalities, their use is becoming more widespread and accepted. Managing stormwater through rainwater capture tanks, bioswales and green roofs are all methods to help mitigate how water leaves our constructed, hardscaped environments in a kinder way. When it comes to waste, constructed wetlands are a step above greywater filtration, actually taking car of remediation of all waste and doing it on site, in a natural way. These installations are even more rare, partly due to the limited number of people that can successfully install them and also due to municipalities not trusting them as a solution. However, their benefit is undeniable.
Water efficiency, waste water filtration and stormwater management are all separate issues that, though interlinked, require particular attention and different solutions for different climates. Without a doubt, we should be pursuing them all in time. The question is merely which we have to attack first and how we can make the largest difference in the least amount of time.
November 9, 2009 at 1:40 pm
That is quite a bit of research there! How informative! It’s amazing that there is not more being done about this issue. I am amazed that even though they must be aware of all of this information out there, that our government officials have still not taken the time to address these issues. It will be interesting to see how the new Obama administration addresses these issues and what they will do to help shed some light on the problems our water systems are facing. Kudos on a job well done. Hopefully more people will start reading this and other related articles and become aware of the problems our country is likely to start facing as a result of the present issues.
November 9, 2009 at 1:43 pm
Tiffany, thanks for giving it a read. Even as an architect who works with sustainability regularly, I was awe-struck by some of these facts. I agree that getting more people educated is the best way to keep the administration accountable for the goals that it is setting as well as allowing people to contribute on their own.
November 9, 2009 at 3:30 pm
Thanks so much for writing about this, good information to share with all.
November 10, 2009 at 3:23 am
Excellent post. We are really aware of water concerns in Australia and most of us think about our usage everyday. Ours is more concerned with our water storages being finite resources, but awareness is the key. Water management needs to be given greater thought at an international level.
November 10, 2009 at 4:55 am
thanks for focusing on very sensitive resources which is our daily requirement and we are neglecting it knowingly or unknowingly
November 10, 2009 at 5:02 am
This is a timely post and should be a real wake up call. We certainly have taken our water resources for granted. If you look outside of the US, in some developing countries where drought has been ongoing for many years -e.g. Chad and Ethiopia
then the lack of water and the literal fight for water (see nomads versus settled agriculturists) will cause severe problems in the near future. Apart from attitudinal change which is always difficult and long term, technological solutions can help here. Some small scale interventions can be important and there needs to be more South/South technological exchanges as well as North /South.
Before we have water wars -we need to take this issue seriously.
Good posting!
Ray
http://rayharris57.wordpress.com
November 10, 2009 at 7:25 am
it is just impressive how such a simple product which has two moleculas (not more!) can be so useful and mysterious! it is life! what a conclusion can we make? Life is simple and mysterious at the same time!
November 10, 2009 at 1:52 pm
Since irrigation water use is such a large issue regarding the amount of water we use for irrigation why not start there in designing and using a better product? http://www.IrrigationThatMakesSense.org is a non profit group trying to battle our national water issues by providing funding and installation of green irrigation products. They have a irrigation product that conserves up to 80% of water use after two years. Their product is installed sub-surface therefore you never see it watering. It makes the plants stronger, uses less fertilizer along with water and no over spray onto sidewalks and roads. The cost to install their underground irrigation product is comparable to overhead sprinklers but this is the green irrigation choice.
November 10, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Michael, thanks for your comment. Without a doubt the goal should be to target irrigation systems for improvements in efficiency.
Drip irrigation is certainly more efficient than using sprinkler systems, and worlds better than trying to utilize surface/flood irrigation. I think using such a system for landscaping at the residential and commercial scale in addition to sports fields and golf courses could made a lot of sense. However, a large portion of our irrigation needs come from farming. I suspect the plowing/tilling/planting/harvesting of crops could made a drip system complicated or very labor intensive to impose increases in cost, but we should certainly use them where we can.
Perhaps more important is becoming more cognizant of planting things in their native environment and not trying to grow any medium outside of its habitat (that goes for landscaping and produce.) Trying to grow cranberries in Nevada or putting greens in Texas is a prime way to waste water quickly.
November 12, 2009 at 8:36 am
I like this article, except I must have missed where you explained what thermo electric cooling is, and why it uses so much water.
I do remember attending a meeting in Santa Monica, CA that discussed water usage, and was dismayed to find out that building cooling systems (HVAC) (and maybe this is part of what you are referring to as thermo electric cooling) would use 100s of 1000s (100,000+) per day. Basically, the water was brought into the building, run through a cooling unit to absorb some of the heat that was removed from the building, and then pumped out into the sewer to be processed at the sewage treatment plant… for what? Pipe contamination?
It would be great if we could approach this from three angles, either reusing all or some of that water in the cooling cycle, using reclaimed water for this use, and after discharge, either using that water for municipal purposes, or putting into ponds to recharge ground water.
Until such time, I’m double flushing… kidding.
Thanks for the info.
November 12, 2009 at 11:00 am
Thanks for stopping by.
The HVAC systems you are referring to (most likely cooling towers) are a very similar process to the cooling used in power stations, merely at a different scale. The water used for most buildings is not included in thermo-electric cooling figure, but lumped in with public water supply as most of that water comes to buildings from municipal water manes (which means it is also usually potable water.) “Cooling tower make-up” is slightly different from the water that is absorbing the heat within a building. Most often there is a closed loop of water that circulates through pipes that either add heat to space (with heat from a boiler) or remove it from space (by venting that heat to the outside air via a cooling tower.) In order to release that heat, the cooling tower draws on another source of water and evaporates it, taking the unwanted heat with it.
There are many buildings that are beginning to do more than one of the things you suggest such as One Bryant Park which uses captured rainwater for it’s cooling tower make-up. Reclaimed water can also be used as long as it receives from primary filtration so as to not damage the equipment with particulates.
Thermo-electric cooling refers to water that is used in power generation, often to help condense steam back into water once it has already moved through a turbine. It is also used to cool the buildings and equipment used in power generation. Your suggestion still holds true though. More and more power stations can utilize closed-loop systems rather than open-loop which takes water from a natural source at one temperature and pumps it back into the environment at a warmer temperature. The problem with this is that the excess heat often makes the discharged water inhospitable to ecosystems, killing wetlands life. There are even power plants that are beginning to utilize dry-cooling methods that significantly decrease the necessity of water.
This is a good, quick overview of power plant cooling. http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/nuclear_power/20071204-ucs-brief-got-water.pdf
November 12, 2009 at 2:50 pm
My apologies, I did reread that, but thank you for the extended explanation and further links.
November 14, 2009 at 8:51 pm
Hi T,
Really informative! When you mentioned the part about using water for cooling systems, I read about that when I was getting the links for my post “once through cooling towers eat fish” (http://michellelouie.com/once-through-cooling-towers-eat-fish) and couldn’t believe all the water those things were using just to keep buildings cool! It’s crazy.
Right now I’m reading a book called “Unquenchable: America’s Water Crisis and What to Do About It” by Robert Gennon. It’s quite the eye opener.
Just wondering, as an architect, what do you think of purple pipes?
November 14, 2009 at 10:32 pm
Michelle, great to hear from you. Thanks for stopping by. I too continually find myself amazed at numbers for the resources we use in America–water included.
Purple pipe construction brings many advantages. For those unfamiliar, purple pipe refers to a third pipe plumbed to fixtures (in addition to supply and return) that provides water that is recycled/reclaimed and minimally treated but not potable. Usually these are part of a greywater system that reclaims water from things like showers, sinks and appliances or utilizes captured rainwater. If you add up toilets, washing machines and dishwashers which are all perfect recipients for greywater, it can significantly lower the water use of a building and save potable water (which is very energy intensive to create) for things that require it and lower the amount of waste water that leaves a building to be treated (also very energy intensive.)
Naturally, the only real drawback to utilizing purple pipes is the extra labor and materials involved. I am not familiar with reports that using purple pipes causes functionality or reliability issues. In the end it is just a question of cost. One is basically adding 50% of the time and cost to the plumbing for those fixtures which can make it a more expensive addition to a list of measures taken for sustainability (and as a result, scratched off the list.) Many water specialists/engineers believe that greywater and some level of on-site remediation will be the next industry shift in standards for how we use water in our buildings. I am certainly a proponent.
December 5, 2009 at 6:02 am
It is very necessary. There are so many different technologies. There’s multi-media filtration, distillation, reverse osmosis, and UV disinfection systems. I got my water filter systems from here…
http://www.isopurewater.com/
December 5, 2010 at 10:14 pm
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