Of waters and wastes

BIG BROTHER

By Alex F. Patio

===Modern developed societies use water as lavishly and wastefully as they have been using fossil fuels, and have seen themselves as possessing even more cogent economic reasons for doing so===

There is an analogy between the citizen’s reaction to water and its uses for human benefit and the recent careless “slosh-on” approach to energy. At its core is the virtual impossibility, in most developed lands, of believing that there is any reason for conserving water. Most developed nations are in temperate zone which quite simply have all the water they need. True, the fresh water available for all human uses, evaporated and desalinated by the sun from the land and the oceans (which contain 97 percent of the world’s water) and then returned to the earth’s rivers, lakes, and ground water through rain and snow and hail and dew, is only a tiny portion of the earth’s fresh-water reserves, since most of the planet’s fresh water is either frozen at the poles and in permanent glaciers or lies too deep in the ground for human use. But the minute percentage nonetheless adds up to over 25 quadrillion gallons every year. It also falls most reliably in the temperate zones, and even the most confirmed pessimist would find it hard to worry about the availability of millions of billions of gallons on such a scale.

The results of this abundance are predictable. Modern developed societies use water as lavishly and wastefully as they have been using fossil fuels, and have seen themselves as possessing even more cogent economic reasons for doing so. Water costs virtually nothing. On the average, water makes up no more than 0.5 percent of industrial costs. Industry uses almost unbelievable amounts – up to 125,000 gallons for a ton of printing paper, 200,000 gallons for a ton of aluminum. A ton of synthetic rubber can require 500,000 gallons. Another symptom of disregard lies in the remarkably different amount of waters used in industry for identical processes. In making soap, for instance, precisely the same unit of output and the same type of product can use anything from 1,000 to 37,000 gallons.

Yet all these millions of gallons inevitably pick up poisons and chemical impurities along the way, and as they reach rivers, lakes, and estuaries, add to the filth of inadequately treated sewage and fertilizer runoff – a load of contaminants already threatening most major rivers and inland seas. The billions of gallons used everyday for cooling thermal power stations are not so prone to direct pollution, but they can increase the temperature of lakes and rivers and thus drastically distort and aquatic ecosystem.

Domestic use of water presents an equal number of inconsistencies and stupidities. The water needed in a house for cooking, drinking, and bathing, the uses where total cleanliness is essential, amounts to only about a quarter of all that is in fact used. The rest goes to watering lawns and washing cars, to the laundry and the toilets (in any one year a typical user contaminates 13,000 gallons of clean water to flush away only 165 gallons of the body’s wastes).

In temperate zones, agriculture relies overwhelmingly on rainfall, not on specially diverted irrigation water. But even in temperate farming, a particular form of wastage cannot be ignored. Overuse of fertilizers or biocides leaves behind in the fields more nutrients and toxins than plants need or the soil can absorb. So the surplus is washed off into the watercourses. Fertilizers stimulate the growth of aquatic plants, upsetting the ecological balance, and can so over stimulate the growth of algae that the decaying plant life consumes virtually all the water’s dissolved oxygen, leaving a virtually dead, foul-smelling swamp behind. Biocide runoff can, as we have seen, cause massive fish kills – and all agricultural chemicals can poison water downstream or underground and thus contaminate other people’s potential supplies of drinking water. Although in theory (and usually in practice) ground water is renewed by the cycle of raining days and months, there are cases of pumping levels which so far exceed any replacing flow that the result can be severe subsidence of the ground itself.

Then there remains the lack of any real reserves or fallback positions in the case of drought. Few meteorologists will hazard any very exact predictions about future weather. Yet in the last or so a consensus has developed that weather systems appear to be on the way to becoming more “unstable.” Within the range of instabilities must be included the possibility of further and perhaps longer droughts. To be without reserves or alternatives could threaten every sector of society – industrial, agricultural, or domestic.

The conclusion is obvious. As with so many other human uses and abuses – of the earth’s materials, a conserving strategy both provides more of what is required and does so at a much diminished cost, occasionally even at the a profit. If we take our three divisions – domestic, industrial, and agricultural – each offers its own particular opportunities for less wasteful use.