Water

By Ben Block

If the full water requirements of a morning roast are calculated - farm irrigation, bean transportation, and the serving of the coffee - one cup requires 140 liters of water.

This notion of a product's "water footprint" is gaining traction. Defined as the total volume of freshwater required to produce a nation's goods and services, the tool tracks domestic water demand and the impact of consumption on water resources across the globe.

As world water availability begins to decline as the result of population growth, overconsumption, and climate change, more water advocates are encouraging governments and consumers to internalize the true cost of water through an account of their water footprint.

Pressed for water resources, California's Orange County has spent millions of dollars to build and recently open a state-of-the-art water treatment system that processes and transforms formerly flushed sewage into drinkable tap water.

Interface sells carpet to the tune of $1,100,000,000 each year. That is just one reason why the business world listens up when Ray Anderson speaks. Ray describes his ecological awakening as “a spear in the chest,” a wound he has used to both his company’s advantage, and the planet’s. Giving rebirth to 133 million pounds of carpet is just the beginning. Anderson and his design teams are hard at work studying nature’s delicate technologies—like the sticky feet of geckos—to make products better, cleaner, and more beautiful. Here, the founder of Interface share his insights on biomimicry, right-brain thinking, cradle-to-cradle design, and our innate “biophilia.” :...

The team behind the Danish pavilion at the World Expo 2008 in Zaragoza, Spain consists of three Copenhagen-based firms — architects Spektrum Arkitekter, graphic agency Loop Associates and communications agency 2+1.

The Danish pavilion houses Círculos de Agua (Circles in the Water), an exhibition about sustainable living and lasting solutions that echoes the World Expo 2008 theme of water and sustainability. Círculos de Agua highlights Danish technologies that have started out small yet have the potential to affect global change. The underlying message is that everything we do spreads like ripples through water.

Here’s a potentially live-saving and thirst-quenching design prototype that we like: British designer Alon Alex Gross has created fog and dew collectors that build on existing, traditional techniques of rain harvesting with lightweight, modern materials. (Apparently, the device can also be connected to the internet for better accessibility and remote monitoring.) Yet, the gadgets are low-tech enough for people living in water-scarce developing areas to collect clean drinking water....

In Medieval times, you couldn't trust the water and most people, including kids, drank beer for breakfast, lunch and dinner. After reading Elizabeth Royte's new book Bottlemania: How Water Went On Sale and Why We Bought It, one is tempted to take up the practice. One learns all the water that we drink, from bottle to tap and, yes, toilet, is fraught with compromise. Yes, the bottled water boom is all about hype and marketing (as is the bottle backlash) that there is much, much more floating around in the stuff.

Drink tap water? it can have contaminants, hormones, fertilizers, pesticides, arsenic, sodium and radon, let alon...

We've written many posts on how to save gas on land. Power boaters, too, are shortening their trailering and over-water journeys. According to a Wall Street Journal staff writer, some boaters are considering a year-round dry dock solution. Power boating for fun is changing: driven by higher fuel costs, reservoirs getting too low to launch, budget pressures, and more. A cruise past the waterfront in our area tells the tale: Marinas usually filled to capacity sit half empty, and many of the smaller recreational boats, such as ours, are adorned with "for sale" signs. ...

www.cascadiagbc.org/lbl

The argument about whether or not the tremendous challenges our planet faces - now and in future years - can be reversed by proactive human action falls short. We have enacted the planet’s decline, and together we can and must move to affect vital regeneration. Yet the heated debates over defining how and the means by which this action will take place wage on.

Amid the politics and global chatter that translate to more talk and less action, a few enlightened groups around the world are engaged in leading a straight-forward, inspired charge with impacting vision.
In the heart of the United States’ Pacific Northwest, a veritable hotbed of sustainable development and leader in the op-timization of natural resources, a movement is emerging that has the potential to rival anything else of the sort in the world with respect to its aggressive approach, and potential lasting impact for change.

Resource: Watershed Locator

Do you know what watershed you live in? Neither do many people (including those who are well-informed about resource management), according to Howard Silverman of Ecotrust in Portland, Ore.

A greater understanding of our regional resources helps us gain perspective when we look at where we fit within the natural world. Ecotrust has developed a new tool -- the watershed locator -- that makes it a cinch for Pacific Northwesterners to find and learn about the watersheds they live and work in.

Way back when TreeHugger was a babe in the woods we posted on Walden, who at the time made roto-moulded kayaks from recycled plastic. They alas closed their doors, and we found Hydra, who made a portion of their craft with recycled content. But the overall Walden idea was kept alive by Earth Friendly Kayaks. Recently the whole concept was reinvigorated by Necky Kayaks of Washington state, USA.

They make several lengths of their Manitou kayaks ...

Australia has been in the grip of a one-in-a-thousand-year drought. A while back we looked at how this was affecting the ability of cities to provide basic drinking water services and what it meant for agriculture. Then we perked up with stories on how individual Australians and their municipalities have again embraced rainwater harvesting. With gusto. (Governments have even being

The notion of nuclear energy saving the earth's climate is so romantic. We simply must open our parasols. With light cascading down from openings in the forest canopy, illuminating the possibilities, it is just so exciting to think on a neglected technology saving the planet.

Not so fast! Like ants at the climate-action picnic, costs increases are eating away at that bucolic vision. Stainless steel ants: very expensive to keep in control. Concrete ants: gone wild. Copper motor coil ants: hugely expensive. Even the engineering ants are charging more, in spite of design outsourcing. Getting so bad, it is, even the nuclear pandering-mos...

We've oohed and aahed at the Lifestraw, the cigar-sized personal point-of-use water filter produced by Vestergaard Frandsen. While it certainly has the potential to provide clean drinking water to a lot of people, a family of five would potentially need five Lifestraws to insure access to clean water. That's why they de...

We have noted that it takes 2500 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef. An Australian academic has suggested that there should be water labelling on food to let us know how much water has been used in producing it. "The majority of water consumption is by agricultural industries and in particular things like rice and also meat production. I think perhaps if consumers knew the quantities of water embedded in those products they might question or they might change their purchasing decisions.”

Collin did such a fine job of putting together our Earth Day posts last year that we decided to practice what we preach, conserve energy, and recycle them.

Cleaning products are everywhere in our homes, and get everywhere when we use them; on our dishes, countertops, floors, hands...the list goes on and on. They're so pervasive that we follow this general rule: if you don't want it on your skin or in your body, don't use it. Thankfully, there is a large (and growing ever larger) contingent of green cleaning products, strategies and ideas to help you keep your house clean and green. :

There's not enough time and money to build a Great Lakes pipeline; nor will there be enough water in the Great Lakes to sustain Lake Mead (Colorado River System). If the climate coin flips the wrong way - there's an estimated 50% chance that "live storage" in the major reservoirs will be gone inside of 14 years, as discussed in the following abstract - those with enough money will be moving to Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, etc. And poor Mexico...

See also::Jeremy's coverage of this in "Las Vegas Strip Could Run Dry by 2021" AND for further background see Tim's "

The size of food product packaging may have to increase, not contract, if recent thinking on providing more information on environmental impacts was to be enacted. We’ve heard about carbon labelling for food in the UK, now an Australia academic is proposing also adding water impact labelling to the mix.

Speaking from last week’s Water Down Under conference in Adelaide, James Hazelton, a senior economics lecturer from Macquarie University, floated the concept of packaged food carrying a label indicating how much water was used in its...

Unilever has teamed up with Zerofootprint to develop the One Minute Water Calculator. This customized piece of software asks simple questions in order to calculate the amount of water individual lifestyles require. With water availability looming as a potential world crisis, this calculator arrives at an important time so as to offer individuals the opportunity to not only monitor, but also reduce their water consumption. ...

Photo credit: Getty Images

Here's an interesting new way to think about energy efficiency: a study done by researchers at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University revealed that it takes between 3,000 gallons and 6,000 gallons of water to power a 60-watt incandescent bulb for 12 hours a day over the course of a year.

The researchers -- Virginia Tech professor Tamim Younos and undergraduate student Rachelle Hill -- are crunching the numbers to determine the water-efficiency of some of the most common energy sources and power generating methods. The most water-efficient energy sources are natural gas (th...

Dangers of Nalgene water bottles and other plastic sport water bottles

Many Nalgene water bottles and other hard plastic sport water bottles are made of polycarbonate (#7 on the bottom) , which may leach Bisphenol A, an estrogen-like chemical. Canada is considering a ban of products containing Bisphenol A (BPA) and a new American study links it to breast cancer and early puberty, and is particularly concerned about the effect on babies. Others have raised concerns ab...

On March 22, World Water Day will continue to draw our attention to the pressing issue of global water supply.

We’ve written about World Water Day before and its efforts to bring attention to the more than 1.2 billion people who lack access to safe drinking water. This year, the UN will focus the day’s events on water sanitation. According to the UN, 2.6 billion people lack access to proper water sanitation, which kills nearly 1.8 million children a year.

Water shortages are a major looming crisis. We've covered lots of good resources for understanding the water crisis and looked at some new innovative tools for tackling it, by, for example, converting sea water into drinking water.

Now, researchers at the Delft University of Technology have come up with an interesting idea -- combining windmills with reverse osmosis filters to produce comparatively rugged and low-cost desalination systems: