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Would You Drink This Water?
theodp writes "NEWater looks like any other glacier-clear bottled H20. Except, reports Salon, it gushes from the toilets of Singapore instead of a bubbling spring. NEWater is the product of Singapore's new water-treatment system, and it's wastewater that's been purified through advanced synthetic membranes called ZeeWeed, which could help 20% of the world's population that doesn't have easy access to clean water."
Try this FREE article from the Syney Morning Herald. or pay Salon to read it (or Salon will allow you to sit through a commercial and then you get a free one day pass).
http://www.busyweather.com/
Most water we drink today have been recycled from sever/toilet treatment plants anyway. This is nothing more than nonsensical urban FUD.
An H2O molecule is an H2O molecule, is an H2O molecule. If the water is truly purified (A chemical/spectral/whatever analysis can find that out) it really doesn't matter. Should I remind people that the water they drink is pumped from rivers, lakes, and wells where animals (submarine and above ground) piss in it all the time? With a well, nature filters it out using the soil. Other methods require us to perform filtering to clean the water and remove any pollutants we added.
:-)
I'm not even going to go into closed system water recycling...
In other news, does the name mean "NEW Water" or "Any Water"? Both names seem somehow appropriate. Perhaps it was an intentional double-pun?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
This company plastered incredibly funny billboards all over northeastern pennsylvania to gauge what kind of marketing buzz they'd get from the idea of recycled water.
NEWater is Reverse Osmosis Water
NEWater is the product from a multiple barrier water reclamation process. The first barrier is the conventional wastewater treatment process whereby the used water is treated to globally recognised standards in the Water Reclamation Plants.
The second barrier is the first stage of the NEWater production process known as Microfiltration (MF). In this process, the treated used water is passed through membranes to filter out and retained on the membrane surface suspended solids, colloidal particles, disease-causing bacteria, some viruses and protozoan cysts. The filtered water that goes through the membrane contains only dissolved salts and organic molecules.
The third barrier or the second stage of the NEWater production process is known as Reverse Osmosis (RO). In RO, a semi-permeable membrane is used. The semi-permeable membrane has very small pores which only allow very small molecules like water molecules to pass through. Consequently, undesirable contaminants such as bacteria, viruses, heavy metals, nitrate, chloride, sulphate, disinfection by-products, aromatic hydrocarbons, pesticides etc, cannot pass through the membrane. Hence, NEWater is RO water and is free from viruses and bacteria and contains very low levels of salts and organic matters.
At this stage, the water is already of a high grade water quality. The fourth barrier or third stage of the NEWater production process really acts as a further safety back-up to the RO. In this stage, ultraviolet or UV disinfection is used to ensure that all organisms are inactivated and the purity of the product water guaranteed.
With the addition of some alkaline chemicals to restore the acid-alkali or pH balance, the NEWater is now ready to be piped off to its wide range of applications.
In fact, RO is a widely recognized and established technology which has been used extensively in many other areas. This includes the production of bottled drinking water and production of ultra-clean water for the wafer fabrication and electronics industry. RO is also becoming increasingly popular as one of the technologies used in desalination of seawater for human consumption. It is also used to recycle used water to drinking water on space shuttles and on International Space Stations.
As a Singaporean, I have personally drank Newater during one of our National Day Parades. It was given out to all the spectators of the parade. There ain't much to the taste, if you ask me to put it to a taste, I'll say it taste rather like distilled water.
Newater is currently pumped back into reserviors from the plants instead of being directly piped for comsumption. It is also currently used industrial purposes in Singapore too.
Out friendly neighbours Malaysia also had a field day making remarks such as "Singaporeans are resorting to drinking their own pee" and stuff as we had some bilateral issues regarding the sale of water from Malaysia to Singapore. This is one of the reasons why Newater technology is developed in Singapore.
You must defeat Sheng Long to stand a chance.
No.
;-)
:-)
More like an Engrish speaking ad-agency could not spell right
I think it means "any" water, because I've observed that a lot of teenagers tend to use "ne" as a chat substitute for "any" ((especially common in Asia).
"ne1 here?" --> That's just a sample
Which works well for particles, but not so for anything in solution. Los Angeles water from Owens River is high in salts and is run through ground wells to remove some of it, but the wells are overused and the salt content of the city's water is increasing. Saline content of Colorado River water is on the rise, too, as the water has been reused many times, some for agriculture which means trace amounts of pesticides.
A side note... I used to live in Midland, Michigan, years ago and the director of the water treatment plant had the last name of ... Filter. Not making it up, it's true.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
On a trip to Mars, astronauts will have to drink recycled "grey" water (washing, dishes,...) and recycled "black" water (you guessed it). Recycling will most likely be biological where the organic content is consumed by algae under strong UV illumination. The algae then become part of the food again....
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
This is old news .. it has been listed as part of the massivechange.com project for a long time. In fact we had some in our studio and it wasn't bad at all to drink :P
The link to that story is here.
is beer!
Seriously, having working in the IT sector of water treatment (yes there is one), I can say that, at least in Southern California, the water from the tertiary plants are cleaner than from your tap.
At one particular tertiary plant wastewater is dumped in basins, allowed to filter through the ground, then extracted via well pumps. The water is then run through one of the largest UV light arrays that I've ever seen. Impressive.
Done right reclaimed water is viable.
"Give me taste, give me funk, give me fury, gimme some more."
Yeah, and DaSani was laughed out of the UK because it turned out that it was actually less safe than the tap-water it was made from. The "purification" processs unwittingly added carcinogenic processes (the ozone they treated with the water turned the bromine they added into the carcinogenic bromate). And to think that people were prepared to pay for that crap...
Check this story out. Dasani Water comes from city tap water. City tap water is purified sewage water.
I've noticed the same preconceptions people have about rain at various places. For instance, most of the southeast US gets at least 50 inches of rain a year (far more around the Gulf coast...), but it is sunny for much of the year. The northwest coast though generally gets much less rain (outside of a very small line right on the coast) but is generally not very sunny. If you were to ask most people though, they would tell you that it is far more "rainy" in Portland, OR (1029 mm or 40.5 inches) than it is in Memphis, TN (1244 mm or 49 inches) or even New Orleans, LA (1574 mm or 62 inches).
Personally I would have thought that London would have received more rain than Sydney OR Melbourne. To learn that London is actually pretty DRY definitely shatters some preconceptions I had...
Fascist, possibly.
!sig
one thing to keep in mind is how fast those inches come down. For SW states, most of the rain comes during short severe thunderstorms when maybe several inches can fall in an hour. For northwest, they can have the same inches spread across several days of drizzle.
Water recycling to this extent is only useful in areas with water systems. ZeeWeed, and all other municipal systems such as this, are just too expensive for people in poor rural areas, such as much of India, China, and major parts of the African continent.
A much more practical solution for poor rural areas with abundant dirty water is household filtration and chlorination. This can be done with low-tech methods. The only middling tech item is a small bottle of sodium hypochlorite (bleach) that is used on a household basis. Since the bottle costs under US$0.40, and is lasts for several (six to ten) weeks depending on the household size, this truly is an affordable solution.
Science News ran the details some time back.Out in the Rural areas of USA (where sewers don't run) we have these things called Aerobic septic systems. Basically they take the waste water from homes, bubble air through it, chlorinate it (using some sort of a biosanitizer tablet chemical), and then store it in a tank until there's enough to spray off through a series of sprinkler heads.
My family cut the sprinkler heads off and uses it to water our flower beds and landscaping... but supposedly the water that comes out of it is clean enough to drink. We haven't had anyone brave enough to try it, though.
It is Outhouse Springs, and if I remember correctly the tagline is something like "It's number 1, not number 2!"
I've seen billboards for it, but only along a small stretch of I94 in southern michigan. The fact that I only ever saw the billboards in that one area and have never actually seen it sold anywhere has led me to wonder whether the whole thing was just a joke.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
And don't forget that Dasani even managed to start with London tap water and actually make it worse.
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
As a Singaporean i feel compelled to explain why i feel NEWater is important to us.
To understand why the development of NEWater is necessitated you need to know some background about us.
We(Singapore) are tiny(640km Square) and have no natural resources, our water supply is mianly from Malaysia(northen neighbours) and our reservoirs and some from Indonesia(Southern neighbours).
The bulk of water supply agreeements with Malaysia were made just before and after UK left Singapore (no longer colonised).
However in recent history, Politicians in Malaysia (namely Mahathir) have used Singapore as a whipping boy in their domestic elections. They have many a times delared their intent to cut off our water supply(which will lead to war) if we do not "do" as they wish(numerous interference in our domestic issue).
That of course is impossible as we are a sovereign nation in our own right.
This is because of baggage from the past as Singapore was once part of Malaysia before the Brits colonised us. And Malaysia and Singapore were part Malaysian federation for 2 years after the Brits left (We left because we wanted a society built on meritoracy, not based on racial preferences which to this day Malaysia still has - affirmative action for Malays, which forms the MAJORITY of the population in Malaysia, meaning minorities(Chinese, Indians) are discriminated against!!!!).
So somehow, the older generation of leaders there are resentful of the fact that we have separated and have done very well without them for the past 38years.
Hence the need to develop altenative sources of DRINKING water. For our SURVIVAL, Should they go against international law and revoke the water supply contracts.
I've got a distiller; it's like a big coffee maker.
The tap water in New Jersey is over-chlorinated, and we've got lots of very old pipes too. I had a Pur filter, but it wasn't really doing the trick.
My wife and I switched to bottled water, which was costing us around $0.25/gallon from Costco, in bulk. That wasn't too expensive, but we were creating a mountain of plastic bottles, and sometimes a whole case would be bad: if they sit out in the sun, the plastic leaches into the water.
So I got a distiller; every night I fill it with a gallon of tap water, and four hours later I have a gallon of very pure and good-tasting water to drink. I've got a two-gallon storage container in the fridge, and another gallon on the counter.
Between the cost of the distiller ($400) and the cost of electricity, it'll take a few years for this to be more cost-effective than the water from Costco. But the advantages are worth it:
- No more trips to the store or running out of water
- No more 'bad' water
- The costs are hidden in my electric bill, which is less painful
- No more plastic bottles
- Less money for Costco
It is not about the amount of rain people have the perception of, it is the percentage of time or the amount of days it is raining. A thunderstorm pattern consistant with the mid west and east coast summers can drop several inches of rain in an hour and then turn sunny and hot again. In Portland, it can rain for a week straight before that accumulation occurs. Most people have issues if it is raining in general, not how much is failing in a certain time.
Portland
Rainy days per year: 122
Total rain per year: 36 in
Memphis
Rainy days per year: 89.7
Total rain per year: 52.1 in
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Gimme a break! Glacier water isn't clear. Anyone who's actually seen runoff from a glacier knows that the water yielded presents with a cloudy appearance (Turbidity, for all of us Geology enthusiasts). It's actually a very interesting characteristic, as is any natural Earth process...
I'm a Malaysian, I dont like water issue flame war.
I admit that the price singapore got to pay to Malaysia is very low, because it was signed a long time ago. It's time to negotiate better price.
not too low, not too high.
Forget politics, for me, Malaysia should continue supplying water to singapore for humanitary reason.
I hope both party not take any advantage such as setting pricing too high or too low.
Malaysian X-PM is quite anti Singapore, but the currrent one is not.
-- Hasbullah bin Pit (sebol)
the water drank by astro/cosmonauts in the ISS is nothing more than purified humidity/urine/sweat/etc. If I remember correctly, the Mir space station was the first to make use of this sort of process.
-Cnik
1: London is not wet. It's on the east side and all the weather has already fallen on the western side of the country. I'm from Glasgow. That's wet, it's just north of Ireland and all that weather from the atlantic just drizzles in constantly.
2: The tap water in the UK is as good as it gets. It's as good, it's better than any bottled water you can buy. It gets sampled in thousands of locations and tested for *everything* on a weekly basis. Water quality is taken very very seriously indeed.
I worked at a water purification board during university, each day samplers went out to hundreds of locations across the region and took samples, this was done *every* day, covering the whole region they were responsible for, the samples were all tested the same day in state of the art labs for anything you care to mention, including hormones and drugs.
http://www.dwi.gov.uk/
So, basically you *are* full of shit, but it's your own shit, not somebody elses.
Deleted
Since you ask, by the time the water was output it had gone through several processes. However, the last process required a treatment which resulted in a raw output at a pH of about 9.5, and a chromium content of about 1-2 parts per billion. This actually suited the water company since their bacteria need a tiny amount of chromium. To recycle the water at this point would have required an expensive two stage treatment to remove the last tiny amount of chromium and then lower the pH, followed by another pass through the DI system. Since the water company preferred to have the water just as it was, there was no point. Even so, the plant consumed less than 1/3 the water of a conventional plant. It is still running, though I have long ceased to have anything to do with it.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
IAAAC (I am an analytical chemist) and feel qualified to answer this. When something is "volatile", that means it evaporates readily at normal temperatures and pressures. This works wonderfully for distilling purposes. The idea being, you start heating your initial charge, let everything go to waste until you get to ~100 degrees C, then start collecting only the stuff that comes over at that temperature. Water itself isn't considered a "volatile" substance in this case, since you're probably talking about VOCs, or "Volatile Organic Compounds". These chemicals will burn off well below 100 degrees C and won't be collected in the recovery system.
Hope this helps, lemme know if you have questions.
While I understand why Singaporeans such as you feel you have the need to 'defend yourselves' from the 'big brother' Malaysia north of you, here is the other point of view.
:)
p.s. I am Malaysian, but I like Singaporeans, and I don't understand why the fuck we need to blow this all out of proportion. Kisses to the Singaporean girls
Most stills over a couple liters per hour do run in continuous mode.
Nobody is going to use a batch system. What you need is a distillation column.
Think of a non-corroding metal column usually several feet high. Different heights are maintained at different temperatures. You have an outlet at the boiling (which is also condensation) point of the material that you wish to remove and an outlet at the point in the column that is maintained at 100C.
The lower-temperature outlets will contain mixtures of water and whatever you want to filter; you can recycle this back to get some of the remaining water (you cant get all).