This is the raw material that our drinking water is made from.
Many of these drinking water preparation plants are also old and do not
remove all the latest generation bad stuff. Across the United States,
more than 260 contaminants have been found in public tap water, and more
than 140 of them have no enforceable safety limits.
These include
pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals. A 2008 study by the Associated
Press discovered that these unregulated pharmaceuticals were found in
the drinking water systems of 41 million Americans. This does not count
those who get their drinking water from untested private wells, as 40
percent of North Carolinians do.
Before the mid-1800s, city people all over America had toilet buckets in
their apartments, which they emptied into the streets in the morning.
Cholera outbreaks created support for public waste removal systems. The
first solutions were horse-drawn carts that made neighborhood rounds and
collected the contents of the buckets.
When municipal water supplies began delivering fresh drinking water to
apartments and homes in the late 1800s, the flush toilet became
possible. Using the running water now in the homes, human waste was
carried through sewer pipes to a central place by the flowing flushed
water. At the central place, it was put in ponds, where living critters
already in us ate the bad stuff. Over time, the goop settled into
liquids and solids. The solids were used to fertilize farmers’ fields.
The leftover liquids were put in a nearby river. The civil engineers of
the day were taught a slogan: “The solution to pollution is dilution” —
and as long as the sewage was only human waste, this was largely true.
It no longer is.
We have gone from a nation whose sewage was from humans to one where we
annually add millions of tons of drugs and chemicals to human sewage,
which mix together and make new dangers.
One solution is to take wastewater and treat a portion of it for reuse
for purposes other than drinking water. You take the waste water, clean
it and use it for landscape irrigation, flushing toilets or building
cooling, while lowering the need for new under-the-street plumbing or
expensive large drinking water preparation plants.
One example of a success story is the headquarters building of the Port
of Portland in Oregon. By including an “on-site reuse wastewater
treatment plant” that put two sets of waste-water plumbing into the
design of the new 200,000-square-foot building, water use was reduced by
75 percent Instead of sending all the waste to the sewage plant, the
cleaner water is kept on site, where it is treated for reuse for
irrigation, flushing toilets and cooling buildings.
Because of the success of this concept, the city of San Francisco has
adopted it for use in their new Public Utilities Commission building,
where it will save water, energy and money, and serve as a role model.
A third example is an installation at Furman University in South
Carolina, where this model was selected over the “business as usual”
systems based on low life-cycle costs for both energy and water.
On a personal level, one thing you can do is install a charcoal filter
on your faucet, which significantly reduces the amounts of many
pollutants. You can buy a charcoal filter at the hardware store.
Societies require safe air, water and food in order to survive. We need
to keep the issue of safe and secure water supplies on our radar — for
our sake and the sake of our children.
By Francis Koster@The Salisbury Post
Mr. Koster can also be read@The Optimistic Futurist.org
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