“I always thought this was the most beautiful place under heaven.”
But this earthly paradise is disappearing fast. The proliferation of factories, farms, and cities—all products of China’s spectacular economic boomis sucking the Yellow River dry. What water remains is being poisoned. From the canal bank, Shen points to another surreal flash of color: blood-red chemical waste gushing from a drainage pipe, turning the water a garish purple. This canal, which empties into the Yellow River, once teemed with fish and turtles, he says. Now its water is too toxic to use even for irrigation; two of Shen’s goats died within hours of drinking from the canal.
China’s economic boom has, in a ruthless symmetry, fueled an equal and opposite environmental collapse. In its race to become the world’s next superpower, China is not only draining its rivers and aquifers with abandon; it is also polluting what’s left so irreversibly that the World Bank warns of “catastrophic consequences for future generations.”
Covered various places. Apparently you don’t need 8 glasses a day. You get most of your daily water needs from food.
A suitable allowance of water for adults is 2.5 liters daily in most instances. An ordinary standard for diverse persons is 1 milliliter for each calorie of food. Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods.
Update 3/27/08: Wired has a little bit more information on the magic water machine. The new and improved part of Kamen’s distiller is that it is super efficient.
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I’ve been trying to find out more about Dean Kamen’s water purifier and am not getting much. It is a vapor compression distiller which is not a new technology. So, I don’t know what is so new or exciting about Kamen’s version. Perhaps it is destined to be like the Segway (”[it] will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy”). Much ado about nothing.
On a related topic, Phillippe Rekacewicz has produced some great maps of world access to drinking water, sanitation, etc.
The Colbert Report is not my usual source of news, but this is interesting. Stephen Colbert’s guest last night was Dean Kamen (inventor of the Segway) who presented his Vapor Compression Distiller. The distiller is a chemical, membrane, and filter free water purifier. Kamen claims the box draws pure drinkable water from oceans, poison, a 50-gallon drum of urine, anything. It is designed to require little maintenance and uses no chemicals or filters. The purifier can produce 10 gallons of water an hour on 500 watts of electricity.
If true the potential here is astounding. Forget OLPC, kids in Africa don’t need computers, they need access to potable water. But apparently Kamen’s purifier does not yet have outside verification of its reliability. I want know if this is legitimate. How does it work precisely? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Like many people I was once a devotee of the Brita water filter. Now I just drink straight tap water.
One day I was at the sink filling the pitcher, and just as I finished and was turning to return the now full pitcher to the fridge, the cat decided it would be a good time to attack my pant leg. This of course resulted in me dropping, and breaking the pitcher. No more Brita. I put the broken Brita in a corner of the kitchen and forgot about it for a few days. In the meantime I debated buying a new pitcher, drank straight tap water, and did some research.
Filtered water is not noticeably safer or healthier. Most people filter their water because it makes the water taste better, and they think it removes the “bad stuff” from the water. In reality, unless you buy an expensive filtration system, your simple fridge or tap filter isn’t doing much. Most filters are just activated carbon and maybe an ion exchange resin (to reduce heavy metal ions in the water). The big sell is that they remove lead from your tap water. In the United States lead in drinking water is already limited to 15ppb. And in many places it is a lot less (i.e. undetectable). My point - the amount of lead in tap water is so low your filter isn’t doing anything.
What about taste? Its true, filtered water does taste better. But only if you’re drinking it side by side with straight tap water. At first, after my pitcher broke, the difference was very noticeable. But after three days, I could not detect any taste at all - no hint of copper or chlorine. In fact, it tasted just as good as filtered water had before.
Bacteria in your Brita. Have you ever examined one of your old filters when you’re replacing it? Nice and damp and aerated, and after a couple months your filter becomes a bacteria breeding ground. An old, unchanged Brita filter can be dangerous because it may add bacteria, which had been killed in the tap by chlorine, back into water in your pitcher. There are other health benefits in tossing your Brita. Brita pitchers are made from styrene methyl methacrylate copolymer. The EPA has described styrene as “a suspected carcinogen” and “a suspected toxin to the gastrointestinal, kidney, and respiratory systems.”
Cost savings and environmental damage. Annual savings of $50-70 in replacement filters. Plus you’re making the environment happy by foregoing all that plastic.
Siel over at Emerald City, and many other people, advocate using water filters. I say try just straight tap water for a week.
The news that there are a host of pharmaceuticals in our drinking water has got everyone talking about water. I agree with Stats Blog that we should chill out until there is more information available. Switching to bottled water doesn’t make a whole lot of sense:
In many cases bottled water is just reconstituted tap water,
The bottles leach worse chemicals (phthalates) into your water,
Producing, transporting, and disposing of all those plastic bottles is bad for the environment.
I’ll stick with tap water and my Sigg bottle for now. On that note Angry Toxicologist reports from Seattle that Bisphenol A still sucks, so stay away from those Nalgene bottles. More on plastic water bottle types here, metal or glass is still the best bet.
If you really want to learn about water check out EWG and NRDC, and EHSO.
