Slashdot Mirror
Intel Sucks Up Water Amid Drought In China
An anonymous reader sends along a Bloomberg piece on Intel and the coming water wars. "Intel is going head-to-head with businesses like Coca-Cola to swallow up scarce water resources in the developing world. According a 2009 report ... 2.4 billion of the world's population lives in 'water-stressed' countries such as China and India. Chip fabrication plants in those countries, as well factories such as the soft drink giant's bottling plants, are swallowing up scarce resources needed by the 1.6 billion people who rely on water for farming. ... Li Haifeng, vice president of sewage treatment company Beijing Enterprises Water Group, told Bloomberg, 'Wars may start over the scarcity of water.' China's 1.33 billion citizens each have 2,117 cubic meters of water available to them per year.... In the US, consumers can count on as much as 9,943 cubic meters."
I suspect they included the amount of water used to produce the goods you consume, not only your immediate personal consumption.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
There's a lot of indirect water use associated with modern life. The food you eat comes from crops and animals which need water irrigation and feed. The computer you're using has parts in it which were smelted and refined in processes which used lots of water. The electricity you're using comes from a plant which uses water as part of its cooling system. etc.
And in the process you're nearly the most wasteful place on Earth, claiming almost 3 times more resources per capita than the most "lean" places with comparable standard of living.
One that hath name thou can not otter
yea. a single fucking dictionary entry, encompasses the entire spectrum of a political ideology. alright. after all, if we look at the definition of human, it will come out that we are just 'monkeys with advanced advanced tool usage'. since we are homo sapiens sapiens. that makes us, well, just the same.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
Read radical news here
Well coca-cola has been a leader in pretty sophisticated and very very large scale water purification systems. The water they put in put in their soft drinks is clean, clear, odorless and tasteless. They use the same water in their Dasani bottled water and charge 2x more than a coke, too bad their bottled water is so tasteless that you can pick up the smells of the plastic bottle before you get anything interesting from the water.
But you do bring up a good point, coca-cola uses water and then ships it out on trucks and boats never to be seen again locally because it is part of their product. While Intel would be using the water for an industrial process and would need to dispose of it. Let us hope that their waste water doesn't contain arsenic or antimony, two common silicon doping agents. I wouldn't want to drink Intel's waste water even through a simplistic purifier unless it was carefully tested.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
It's not interesting, it's stupid.
http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/gwdepletion.html
I think in Phoenix, Arizona they banned any further homes from having a grass turf and going instead with native vegetation which is what they ought to be doing.
Golf courses are a major culprit:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91363837