Sustainablog

Following last week’s post on contamination of the water supply for the city of Yancheng, China, state-run media Xinhua News has released an update on the news item.

According to a government circular cited in the Xinhua article, seven officials responsible for water supervision have been punished and two have been removed from office for lacking oversight. The Mayor of the city has pledged to close over 10% of the city’s 317 chemical plants, on account of their proximity to a water source.

No additional information was released on whether any residents experienced poisoning as a result of the incident, or if there was any damage to the nearby wetland reserve.

For those who take little solace in yet another case of environmental negligence or political misconduct in China that results in a score of officials being excused from their jobs (in lieu of a hyperlink, try a google search for “Chinese official sacked”), there is a silver lining yet. The city has offered residents a month of free water to compensate for the inconveniene experienced by the temporary shut off. Pack your bags and head to Yancheng!

Authorities from China’s coastal city of Yancheng, in the province of Jiangsu, shut off water last Friday and restricted the supply for most of the weekend following citizen reports of foul smelling water. An estimated one million of the city’s 1.5 million residents were left without water due to what government identified as the presence of two variants of carbolic acid – carcinogen hydroxybenzene and phenol — in the city’s water supply.

The local government identified Biaoxin Chemical Company as the party responsible for the tainted water, which illegally discharged the toxic chemicals from its facility, said state media Xinhua news agency. Xinhua also reported that the plant has been shut down and its top executives arrested. Officials have not provided any additional information; and state media China Daily reports that no one has come forward with symptoms of poisoning have not been independently confirmed. Read the rest of this entry »

Paper appears to be high on the agenda of a number of organizations this week. It’s necessary. Paper is so ubiquitous – from tissues to toilet paper to memo pads to catalogs to the mess on your desk - that it is easy to forget, or perhaps more convenient to ignore, that paper manufacturing has significant environmental repercussions.

Paper production is the third largest contributor to climate change, the biggest source of deforestation and has a significant impact on water issues. It’s a dirty business, from the use of toxic chemicals and chlorine bleaches to clear cutting of forests like this one on the North Carolina Coast:

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By Lester R. Brown

As land and water become scarce, competition for these vital resources intensifies within societies, particularly between the wealthy and those who are poor and dispossessed. The shrinkage of life-supporting resources per person that comes with population growth is threatening to drop the living standards of millions of people below the survival level, leading to potentially unmanageable social tensions.

Access to land is a prime source of social tension. Expanding world population has cut the grainland per person in half, from 0.23 hectares in 1950 to 0.10 hectares in 2007. One tenth of a hectare is half of a building lot in an affluent U.S. suburb. This ongoing shrinkage of grainland per person makes it difficult for the world’s farmers to feed the 70 million people added to world population each year. The shrinkage in cropland per person not only threatens livelihoods; in largely subsistence societies, it threatens survival itself. Tensions within communities begin to build as landholdings shrink below that needed for survival.

The Sahelian zone of Africa, with one of the world’s fastest-growing populations, is an area of spreading conflict. In troubled Sudan, 2 million people have died and over 4 million have been displaced in the long-standing conflict of more than 20 years between the Muslim north and the Christian south. The more recent conflict in the Darfur region in western Sudan that began in 2003 illustrates the mounting tensions between two Muslim groups–camel herders and subsistence farmers. Government troops are backing Arab militias, who are engaging in the wholesale slaughter of black Sudanese in an effort to drive them off their land, sending them into refugee camps in neighboring Chad. At least some 200,000 people have been killed in the conflict and another 250,000 have died of hunger and disease in the refugee camps.

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Next time you pop open a coke or drink a VitaminWater, sip on this.  The 2009 World Environment Center’s (WEC) Gold Medal for International Corporate Achievement in Sustainable Development will be awarded to the Coca-Cola Company.  The award recognizes the beverage giant for achievements in water stewardship, packaging, climate change, and energy management.

Watching out for Water

Coca-Cola’s Signature Contribution is in the area of water stewardship.  The company’s goal is to restore to the environment all water that is used to produce of its products.  It aims to achieve this through reducing the amount of water in the manufacturing process, recycling water back into natural systems, and locally relevant conservation projects.  With a new report predicting global water shortages by 2020, increased attention to water and natural systems seems increasingly imperative.  (Hopefully Coca-Cola includes the water needed to grow and process the sugar in its calculations - approximately 200 L of water per can in Europe.) Read the rest of this entry »

Curious about new ways to save water and money?  EPA’s WaterSense Program recently unveiled a WaterSense widget that brings monthly water-saving facts and tips directly to your website or social network. Each month, new seasonally-relevant content will be added to help you increase your water efficiency and keep more cash in your wallet.

Why Conserve Water?

With drought conditions throughout many western and southern states in the U.S., the time is ripe for increasing water-saving efforts.  More pragmatic than the infamous “Save water - Shower with a friend” campaign of the 1970s, EarthSense focuses on actionable items and tidbits.

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Sometimes life imitates art. In Karen Dionne’s new thriller novel Freezing Point, melting icebergs are viewed as both the solution to the global water crisis and the source of man-made apocalyptic horror. In reality, giant melting icebergs raise global sea levels and unleash frozen methane gases into the Earth’s atmosphere.

According to recently discovered NASA satellite data, more than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003 and have caused alarming global climate changes.

So melting icebergs are not just the stuff of fiction. Yet, one hopes that what transpires in Freezing Point (think toxic drinking water, corporate monopolies of icebergs and large-scale eco-terrorism) never becomes reality.

In our conversation, Karen Dionne, who wrote a Huffington Post column titled “Can a Novel Change the World?”, spoke with me about the power of the written word, killer rats, and environmental activism:

How did you become interested in the global water crisis?

My interest in water issues goes back pretty far. My husband and I were part of the “back to land” movement in the ‘70s. We wanted to not be so dependent on the system, so we lived in nature, grew our own food, got our water from nearby wells. I remember reading the book Silent Spring and one thing I took away from it is that there is no pristine place left on earth. I learned that DDT was showing up in bird eggs and that toxins were everywhere. For my generation, it was an awakening of how severe the problem was. So I’ve always been concerned about what man is doing to the environment.

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I try not to eco-judge people. But recently, I’ve been silently judging people at the grocery store with cases of water at the bottom of their cart. And there are a few friends of mine who I’ve thought about lecturing, but I don’t because I know there is no better way to turn someone off than to lecture.

Still, if one of my friends asked me about my views on bottled water, I’d be happy to tell them they should stop buying them. Here’s why.

1. Bottled water costs a ridiculous amount of money. According to Food & Water Watch,  the national average cost for a gallon of tap water in the U.S. is .002 cents. The national average cost for a gallon of bottled water is anywhere from .89 cents to $8.26 per gallon.
   Even at it’s least expensive, bottled water is 224% more expensive than tap. I can’t think of a single other item the average American would pay 224% more for when it was unnecessary, can you? Read the rest of this entry »

From the back cover of “Dry Spring”:

As it warms, our world is running out of fresh water - fast. Lakes, aquifers and rivers are disappearing, but we consume more water than ever. What will this mean for North America?

Veteran author and Canadian journalist Chris Wood has had a varied career contributing to national and regional publication including the CBC, Global and Mail, The Tyee, The Walrus, and many others. Chris is also co-author of the bookBlockbusters and Trade Wars: Popular Culture in a Globalized World.

In an interview with Wood last month, I asked how he came to write his latest book Dry Spring. He told me that throughout his writing career his focus has been, as he put it, “People and societies in their place”. This interest, combined with his acute awareness of the pressing environmental issues facing society, led him his work on the world’s fresh water supply, most particularly that of North America.

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Most of us know something about carbon footprints. In fact, some of us may have already taken measures to reduce the hypothetical size of our footprints–from walking or riding a bicycle instead of driving, to purchasing carbon credits to reduce the impact of our carbon emissions. But many of us may have never thought about our water footprint. The new website H20 Conserve allows users to calculate their water footprint and gain insights on how most people waste water and how to conserve this precious natural resource.

Despite my interest in water issues, I have never calculated my water footprint, so I decided to check out the website. According to the site, my individual water use is 1,073.25 gallons per day (yikes!). In comparison, the average American uses 1,190.5 gallons of water per day. I also learned that it takes 24 gallons of water to make a single pound of plastic, over a hundred gallons to make a pound of cotton, and that a single dripping faucet can add up to 20 gallons of water lost each day.

In addition to the interactive H20 calculator, the website also offers a list of practical water saving tips, an information guide on relevant water topics, and a glossary of important water-related terms. The site also provides links to educational resources for elementary and high school classrooms. These tools can certainly empower individuals to make water conservation part of their everyday lives.

“By allowing visitors to calculate their water footprint, including the water they use at home, the water used to produce their food, energy and household products, we hope to get people thinking about water in a whole new way,” commented Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food & Water Watch, in a press release.

H20 Conserve is the product of collaboration among several public interest organizations committed to water conservation, including Food & Water Watch, GRACE, and The John Hopkins Center for a Livable Future.

Photo: H20 Conserve