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Will Cape Town be the First City To Run Out of Water? (bbc.com)
Cape Town, home to Table Mountain, African penguins, sunshine and sea, is a world-renowned tourist destination. But soon it could also become famous for being the first major city in the world to run out of water. From a report: Most recent projections suggest that its water could run out as early as March. The crisis has been caused by three years of very low rainfall, coupled with increasing consumption by a growing population. The local government is racing to address the situation, with desalination plants to make sea water drinkable, groundwater collection projects, and water recycling programmes. Meanwhile Cape Town's four million residents are being urged to conserve water and use no more than 87 litres (19 gallons) a day. Car washing and filling up swimming pools has been banned.
The obvious solution is to just drink beer.
they were surrounded with it. Amazing what can happen in a few short years.
Most of the Caribbean islands have much smaller populations, around 100,000 or less and the islands with millions of people tend to have several lakes and rivers. It's a lot easier to deal with smaller populations, especially when that infrastructure has already been built and adjusted to meet the needs of population over time. Setting up new desalination plants to support millions of people is a logistical nightmare even if you have a highly competent team tackling the problem.
Plenty of Caribbean islands get water solely through desalination. The ABC islands come to mind
Dubai. Israel. Desalination is a solved problem.
South Africa is going through rough times - serious economic and social stresses, the sort of racial tensions the progressives imagine exist in America.
It's a solved problem, but desalination is also somewhat expensive - tough for SA in its current economic climate.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
My family of two uses 1000 gal per 6 months. Or 3 gals per person per day.
How do you use so much?
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
But that number might only push back the deadline, not stop them from running out.
Here's the thing about plotting a story: time matters.
That's the reason for the whole ticking time bomb device. Time pressure creates the possibility of failure.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Leaky pipes? Dripping faucets? It adds up.
No, this isn't related to "climate change", it's simply corruption and maladministration. Here's an interesting graph showing similar conditions 10 years ago.
South Africa sure is a bastion of paradise since the government change in 1991.
I'm in a much cooler climate, so I don't need to drink much water, but 19gal/day sounds like a ton of water when compared to necessities. If I don't shower and only flush the toilet for #2, talking 0.5-1 gallons per day. I'm sure if I needed to bathe I could figure out a way to use much less water, like a small bit of water and a sponge. The biggest influence on water consumption is how much I sweat. Most of the time I'm indoors with AC or it's winter. But even 95f with high humidity and the windows opened in the house, taking 2-3 gallons. What am I missing?
You each use only 16 gallons per month? Less than half a gallon a day? Is Saturday bath day in your house? Is the last person to bathe the one who drains the tub? I must be misunderstanding what you're saying.
If you are going to run out of water in 3 months at the current rate and you don't have the time or money to build desalination
plants fast enough then the obvious solution is to raise the price of water so that you have the time/money to fix the problem.
With the time gained from reduced consumption and the money gained from charging more for the water, this is an easily
solvable problem for a city that sits on the ocean with an unlimited supply of water they can desalinate.
There are also desalination plants built on barges that could be rented/purchased and moved there as a temporary solution.
They may be the first city in the world to have water prices be 100% market driven, and those that cannot afford the price may either die from thirst or move. There will be water to be had, but almost certainly not at the current prices.
South Africa is divided into provinces. Cape Town is in the Western Cape province and was the first major city run by the national opposition party, the Democratic Alliance. The province itself followed, and is also governed by the DA, for some years now.
The national government and all other major cities, towns and provinces have been run by the national ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), since freedom.
So you may assume that the DA has screwed up, letting the city and province run out of water, while the ANC has got things sorted elsewhere? Well, you would be wrong.
The neighboring Eastern Cape province is an overwhelming majority ANC stronghold. But by every measure it is a dismal failure - jobs, healthcare, life expectancy, education, housing, infrastructure, etc.
So people in the Eastern Cape vote for the ANC, but their feet vote to take them to the Western Cape, and in particular, Cape Town. There their kids will be educated, there is economic growth, jobs, housing and things generally work - not a paradise, but much better from their perspective.
This inrush of millions of peasants has overwhelmed the Cape Town infrastructure and ability to provide for them. The city and the province and trying hard, but even the DA is not perfect.
One final observation: Water supply is constitutionally a national responsibility, not local or provincial. Hence parliament and the national executive must account. And national government is firmly in the hands of the ANC.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Aren't there areas of California that have, at times needed to have water imported by truck?
My sig doesn't address Anons, sigs aren't visible to them.
It's a lot easier to deal with smaller populations, especially when that infrastructure has already been built and adjusted to meet the needs of population over time. Setting up new desalination plants to support millions of people is a logistical nightmare even if you have a highly competent team tackling the problem.
While what you say is true; this only makes Cape Town look like architects of their own peril. They could have started building desalination plants, or working on viable alternatives long ago before it was crunch time.
Of course, the same could be said about California and parts of Nevada. They're not doing enough, quick-enough and what happens in Cape Town could be a model for what is inevitably going to hit California eventually if they don't start working on better solutions.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Dubai. Israel. Desalination is a solved problem.
Not really, no.
South Africa is going through rough times - serious economic and social stresses, the sort of racial tensions the progressives imagine exist in America.
If you want to talk about America, instead of uselessly lambasting progressives over a strawman, why not bring up examples like Flint, Michigan, CopperHill, Tennesse, or Jackson, Missippi? Or Georgia's perennial struggles to claim its alleged water rights from bordering states?
It's a solved problem, but desalination is also somewhat expensive - tough for SA in its current economic climate.
So in other words, it's not actually a solve problem, because in the real world, you can't just hand-wave a solution, but have to pursue a long-term effort. And in fact, contrary to your statements, both countries you named have problems.
Did you count the restaurant where you dined? Did you count the car wash? Did you count your consumption at the office - water, coffee, toilet, window washing, landscaping?
Per person consumption means everything counts.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Not sure how popular golf courses are in South Africa. Golf courses in California tend to get exempt from water restrictions. It takes a lot of water to keep those golf courses lush and green during droughts.
That's a slap in the face if true. Common man gets slapped with water restrictions but wealthy man gets lush watered grass to play his rich man sport on.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I was thinking the same thing, but then I started looking a little harder at this. I was a bit shocked to see that someone that takes a shower every day has already used around 17 gallons of water. Flush your toilet once and you've just used the last two gallons of your ration for the day!
Then there's all sorts of other household overhead like washing dishes and clothes, cooking, and more. And you still haven't drank even your first glass of water for the day. (half a gallon is recommended every day, but that can include beverages)
We use (waste?) a lot of water every day. I'd like to see reuse of "grey water" become commonplace or even required. Most water could be reused in the toilet for example. Most "washers" (be they people, clothes, dishes, etc) are used to flush away contaminants, but then we don't bother to filter and reuse the water, we just dump it just like it is right down the drain, which is a huge waste.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I mean it's been a while since this site was relevant, but news about drinking water in a city in South Africa surely doesn't count as news for nerds, considering I can read this in better places with real journalism. I don't need a referrer to the BBC.
One editor in particular has a knack for irrelevant stories with a British taint, but still what year was it evident that slashdot finally lost it?
If it had a technical or scientific bent: How to solve water issues? Could be news for nerds. Regardless, it is news that matters. A major city running out of water matters.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
As someone who also has rentals, would recommend you look for leaks. Faucets, toilets, exterior spigots, rusty water heater in the basement... if all those check out fine, pressure test the lines. Hot water heating system leaks? Somethings wrong. The last time I used that much water 1 month I filled a pool.
Secondly I would also recommend replacing the toilet w/ high efficiency ones, inserts into shower heads to restrict water flow, update washing machine, dishwasher,etc.
Third: make sure the tenant pays the water bill as part of the lease. That will get them looking at it.
I see they placed a ban on washing cars, but I thought almost all of the commercial car washes recycled their water already? Unless you're only banning people washing them at home using a hose -- this doesn't seem like it will accomplish much?
"I'd like to see reuse of "grey water" become commonplace or even required. Most water could be reused in the toilet for example. Most "washers" (be they people, clothes, dishes, etc) are used to flush away contaminants, but then we don't bother to filter and reuse the water, we just dump it just like it is right down the drain, which is a huge waste."
should be made mandatory on all new builds
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
There are places where it is wasteful to dump water. However, I happen to live in an area where rainfall is heavy enough to support a much larger population than it currently has (and it is currently a rather densely populated region by U.S. standards). For the vast majority of the time the only reason to regulate how much water people use is to reduce the burden on the sewage treatment plants, not because of a concern about running out of fresh water (there have been occasional years, two I think, when some shallow wells went dry and the reservoirs which supplied water to municipalities were dangerously low, but those droughts ended just when people started to get worried and water supplies returned to more than sufficient in a matter of a month or two).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
You each use only 16 gallons per month? Less than half a gallon a day? Is Saturday bath day in your house? Is the last person to bathe the one who drains the tub? I must be misunderstanding what you're saying.
No, he said:
My water bill for a family of 4 is at the 2K gallon rate which is about 16 gallons each for a month
2000 gallons /month/family
* 1/4 family/person = 500 gallons / person / month
* 1/30 month/day = 16.66 gallons / person / day
* 3.785 gallons / litre
= 63 litre/person/day
That's not too bad.
We live in Cape Town, our household (comprising 2 adults, 3 kids aged 3-8) uses 5kl/month, or 33.3 litres / person / day, well below the 87l limit (but there isn't much more we can do to save water in our house). This includes:
- All personal hygeine (toilet, shower etc.) except obviously anything at work/school (we don't shower at a gym or anything like that)
- All washing (dishes, laundry etc.) and cleaning in the house
- All drinking water and food preparation
- We use grey water (e.g. collect bath and shower water) for our small vegetable garden, but haven't used any water for the rest of the garden since they started water restrictions.
- The kids share one small plastic bath tub inside the normal bath tub, adults show with a 20l container in the shower, and don't use more than that, and don't shower every day (2-3 times a week).
- We haven't washed our cars in a year.
Lots of people have installed rain collection tanks and complete grey-water systems, and some have had boreholes/wells drilled (but there are long waiting lists with all contractors who install all of these).
I don't know why they haven't reduced the limit further, as it really isn't difficult to use less. 50l/person/day is probably achievable and still relatively fair.
The city has also imposed a 10.5kl limit per household per month, and any household that needs more because they have more than 4 occupants must apply for a higher allocation, but since we are way below we don't apply.
We know of other people who used didn't abide by the restrictions when they were more lenient, they have been forced to pay to have water restriction devices installed, which limit their daily water use (unused daily water accumulates for the rest of the month, but unused monthly water doesn't accumulate/roll over).
There are a lot more issues at play here than described in the BBC article, as the majority (60%0 of the water available in the dams in the Western Cape was allocated by the national government to agriculture. That is understandable, as even that allocation is too little for them (with the amount of rain over the past year), with many farmers having to choose between killing their livestock and taking loans to buy feed (and still possibly have to kill the livestock later anyway).
For some detail on how bad the drought is, see some rainfall stats for Cape Town. The past 3 years we have had less than the 20th percentile of annual rainfall over the last 40 years.
You can also see the trend of water storage in the dams here
We really hope some of the short-term mitigation plans (small-scale desalination plants that can be completed before we run out of water, ground-water extraction etc.) are sufficient to get us to Winter (and rain), but we if the trend of the last 3 years continues, we may not make it to Dec.
It's called a grow-op.
Quite popular. Plus its close to their wine producing region
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
When it comes to California, I support them in times of drought financially by buying as much almond products from California as I can.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Protip: You can drill out your modern shower heads and get decent flow back. The restriction is typically brass, drills like butter.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
yeah, I totally messed that up. Squeezed in the post between work items. High efficiency toilet can have 1.2gal "large" flushes and 0.8gal "small" flushes. Other than that, I typically drink around a half-gallon of water a day and I have a lot of drier food to eat, like PB&J, maybe some whey concentrate with a small amount of water, etc.
If you count all the water that went into producing said items that I eat and use, then my water usage is much much higher.
Desalination is a problem for large-scale use; it's highly energy intensive, and you're left with hypersaline brine, which is environmentally destructive.
If you want to talk about America, instead of uselessly lambasting progressives over a strawman, why not bring up examples like Flint, Michigan
Flint was going to run out of water? Of course not. The issue in Flint was a combination of economics and ethics, not a matter of environmental abuse or over-use of a limited resource.
The sequence of events in Flint were, simply (removing politics as much as practical):
Flint once upon a time Flint had it's own water system, as did the neighboring city of Detroit.
Over time, Flint found it expensive to maintain it's own water system, so it opted to source all it's water from Detroit.
Then one day, Flint decided to go back to it's own water plants in a year or two, deciding it was more cost-effective.
Detroit in response announced it was going to increase the price of it's water.
Flint decided to push up the timeline and bring their own water treatment plants on line sooner than planned, to avoid bigger water bills from Detroit.
Flint cut corners to make a very aggressive timeline, putting resident safety at risk.
Flint adds chemicals to water supply to address one problem, but the chemical leeches lead off the old water mains in Flint.
As required by law, water tests are conducted, but the results are altered to lead residents to believe the water is safe.
Over time, health issues start occurring across Flint at an alarming rate.
Independent tests confirm the water is unsafe.
The media, politicians, and community leaders all try to find blame in everyone but the residents of Flint that were trying to save money on their water bill, apparently at any cost.
Ken
I believe Southern California (LA, San Diego) never had enough water. They get their water piped in from Colorado.
I can't figure out how they can possibly use so much; wtf people?
Look for a running toilet that flushes all by itself. Renters are famous for not thinking thru the implications of such "minor problems" in a rental unit.
Ken
I can't figure out how they can possibly use so much; wtf people?
Home illegal drug production lab or farm in the basement . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Sorry your links actually defeat your claim.
The Israel link is about how desalinized water is too expensive for agriculture - which is true, and not what we are discussing. Agriculture requires really cheap water, and cannot be supported with desalinization. We are discussing water for cities, which can afford to pay a lot more for water. And the Dubai iceberg project is intended for a different purpose - using the ice mountain to create a microclimate (its even in the subheading of the article if you did not bother to read it). Their water supply is working fine with desalinization.
It is a solved problem in the sense that any city that needs water and has access to seawater (or briny water) can build a plant that produces it at affordable cost. Just like building roads, or houses, or office buildings, or airplanes are solved problems.
Sure "hand-waves" do not build desalinization plants, just like they don't build roads, or houses, or office buildings, or airplanes. But no one anywhere claims that they do. You do have to finance and plan and build them, like anything else.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
How very Marie Antoinette of you - "Let them eat cake!"
Raising the price of water doesn't reduce the need for water to live.
Ken
news about drinking water in a city in South Africa surely doesn't count as news for nerds,
I find water infrastructure pretty interesting; it doesn't get much nerdier than that!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I consider myself an conscious user of water and yet I use almost 200 liters a day (shower + toilet + drink water + dish/clothes washing + little garden watering). I can tell you, 87 liters is too little for comfort.
Actually, California has fared reasonably well, and has a sustainable approach to water management in general. There are some things that still need to change, and much that needs to be hardened and reformed, but they are on their way to it. California's biggest water risk is really an earthquake damaging the aqueducts, pipelines, and reservoirs.
Desalinization is a last-resort for a seaside city. It is much more efficient to trade resources with a water-rich area to serve a water-poor area than it is to run desalinization. Ultimately, to make desal not kill the local environment you need zero brine discharge which requires huge evaporation ponds. If done right, this could help to add humidity and manage the problem longer term, but you end up with about 100 tons of waste salts per million gallons of sea water.
I don't know much about desalination, but why can't the salt be extracted from the brine?
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Desalination is a problem for large-scale use; it's highly energy intensive, and you're left with hypersaline brine, which is environmentally destructive.
Every thing has problems in large-scale use. Proper planning and engineering can manage and solve problems though.
Highly-energy intensive, compared to what? Current technology can turn seawater into fresh water with 2.5 kwh per cubic meter. A typical desktop PC can consume 125 watts average power consumption, so less than a day of the PC sitting there turned on can provide a cubic meter (264 gallons).
The brine output does need to be managed properly, and it is possible to do it badly - but it is also possible to have to problem at all, if the output is suitable diluted before discharge.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
My family of 4 + 2 dogs used 5,000 gallons last month, or around 42 gallons per person, per day. That is squarely in the average usage for us, between 3,000 and 7,000 gallons high and low for the year.
Our WATER bill was under $12 US. Our sewer portion of the bill was $38 US.
In the Midwestern USA, we usually have too much water, and have to be mindful that often the water we use was recently in the sewer system of the city upstream from us.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
They're not doing enough, quick-enough and what happens in Cape Town could be a model for what is inevitably going to hit California eventually if they don't start working on better solutions.
Some areas of California (Santa Barbara), which depend on local water supplies (like Cape Town) have faced this problem before (SB built a desalinization plant in the 1970s). Localities that depended on local ground water supplies have been hit by the drought, and required alternate supplies. But California is a big state. Scattered local problems do not add up to a general problem for California
In general California was plenty of water for its cities and towns, which only use 20% of the available water but produce 98% of its GDP. Agriculture, that use 80% of the water supplies only 2% of the GDP. So simply paying off farmers not to grow something can supply all of the urban water California will ever need.
The number one agricultural user of water (22% of all agricultural water usage) is a crop - alfalfa - that provides so little value that it often costs more to deliver the water than the alfalfa crop is worth (and 2/3 of that crop is simply exported to Asia), ancient water rights from the 19th century are the reason for this subsidy. Paying off all the alfalfa growers not to grow anything would only cost 0.1% of the state's GDP and double the amount of water available to the cities.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
While what you say is true; this only makes Cape Town look like architects of their own peril. They could have started building desalination plants, or working on viable alternatives long ago before it was crunch time.
To some degree this is true of just about everything and everyone though. There's all manner of things you or I could and probably should be doing today to make a better future for ourselves by anticipating problems we're likely to face and taking steps to solve them now and to some degree we likely do things like this such as investing for retirement, etc. The problem is that this particular problem is outside of the scope of any one individual.
You can blame it on governments (and by extension the people who elected them) but they're notoriously short-sighted as well and it's pretty difficult to run on and win with a platform about addressing things that may be twenty years down the road instead of the current set of problems people are facing, probably due largely to short-sighted thinking in the past. But that's just the nature of the beast. Most people don't care about identifying and mitigating problems far down the road, so the governments they elect really don't either unless they've run out of pressing current issues.
The shower is probably the best example of potential for reclamation. Most people would be very lucky to get 1/8c of actual suspended materials from that 17 gallons of shower water. (most of which is dead skin and hair) Compare that to the "super concentrated contaminants" of your morning #2, in just two gallons of water. Clearly the shower is going waaay too far in diluting things.
I'd agree though they could certainly take the filtering too far and not push enough water down the blackwater system, causing it to not flow efficiently. A single day's dishwasher, shower, and clothes washer could be over-concentrated into a pint or two of thick sludge that won't travel well.
And it's no different than those "low volume" flush toilets that you sometimes have to ring the handle a second (or third!) time to get them to empty the bowl properly. Even if you took that 17 gallon shower and only lightly concentrated it into one gallon of blackwater to (easily) go down the sewer, that's 16 gallons left to flush the toilet with. That right there will probably handle the average person's toilet use for the entire day, without placing any additional strain on the sewer system.
It's not only doable, it's actually not that difficult to do right.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
File it under stuff that matters.
Why news for nerds *and* stuff that matters? Because nerds knowing about stuff that matters is a very good thing. Nerds matter, today more than ever.
There was a time not so long ago that every major city had multiple daily newspapers (sometimes with morning and evening editions), and at least one paper in every city had a science desk. The reporters in the science desk would put out a weekly science section, but their real purpose was to provide science and tech background to stories like the one we're talking about.
Those people are largely gone now. All the world has is *us*, god help it.
You complain there isn't enough of a science or technology slant on the story? What do you expect? News gets reported by people who probably couldn't define "molecule" or explain "entropy" if their life depended on it.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Lets say you have a city with 1 million people, your current water sources can supply 3 million people, the population doubles every 5 years, and it takes 10 years to plan and construct a desalination plant that can supply water to 1 million people.
Temporary barges and free market solutions will not be able to cope with the realities of exponential growth. By the time the market signals there is more demand for water, its already too late.
Sure it can. The human population doesn't reproduce that fast. Those people are coming from some where. If the water becomes too scarce or too expensive then the people will stop coming and/or move to where they can get water. What you don't want to happen is for the water to stop then people don't have time to make the necessary move but if the price of water is also increasing exponentially and doubling every month then that will naturally cause the population to stop increasing exponentially. Even without desalination plants, there are solutions. Lots of people live in situations where water must be carried long distances. It would be highly inconvenient but individuals could walk to the ocean, get water, carry it back to their apartment, boil it, and produce clean drinking water.
Generally speaking everyone, everywhere is drinking treated sewage from all the cities upstream anyway, so what's the problem with just pumping your own treated sewage back up to the purification plant and reusing it a few times in the same city before flushing it down the river to the next one?
Greywater is of course also a wonderful solution - why bother making water potable first if you're just going to wash/flush/etc. with it? I've even heard some cities have greywater systems running parallel to the potable water systems, so purifaction plants don't have to work as hard, and your greywater consumption isn't limited to your own production.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Would running brine through an osmosis power plant generate meaningful amounts of power?
The one I know of uses river water and sea water, but brine and sea water should work too. And the output is diluted brine.
How very Marie Antoinette of you - "Let them eat cake!"
Raising the price of water doesn't reduce the need for water to live.
You don't need 19 gallons per person a day to survive. You need less than 1 gallon per day per person of drinking water. If water is going to run out in 3 months then limited everyone to 1 gallon per day gives you almost 5 years to bring more desalination plants online and/or relocate some of the people.
The point is that you don't want to run out of water because then you have death by dehydration, mass riots, and chaos. If you really are going to run out of water in 3 months then you better come up with a game plan now that prevents mass hysteria and death.
The alternative to raising the price of water now is to just wait until it's all gone in 3 months and then everybody dies. Personally, I would rather pay $10 per gallon for water now than die in 3 months. Likely, if water was $10 per gallon then people would start moving elsewhere which would buy even more time.
"My water bill for a family of 4 is at the 2K gallon rate which is about 16 gallons each for a month and the bill is around $27. "
That's pretty cheap for a civilized country.
A shame that you can't drink it safely.
California sends half its fresh water directly out to the ocean without use other than scenic rivers and other environmental desires (like delta smelt). Agriculture is second place, at 40%, and urban is about 10%. Reduce the scenic rivers demand, and we'd have plenty of fresh water.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Desalination is a problem for large-scale use; it's highly energy intensive, and you're left with hypersaline brine, which is environmentally destructive.
All true though running out of water is a rather more acute problem than energy use or toxic byproducts.
Agreed. A city like Santa Barbara California doesn't have space for drying ponds. Land is not available or the cost is astronomical. Conserve or move to another area where your water consumption needs are available.
Highly-energy intensive, compared to what?
Compared to pretty much every other commonly used method of getting fresh water. Hard to compete with simply pumping it from a freshwater lake/river or from an aquifer for cost. Even aqueducts and reservoirs take a lot less energy to manage.
A typical desktop PC can consume 125 watts average power consumption, so less than a day of the PC sitting there turned on can provide a cubic meter (264 gallons).
Apples to oranges my friend. Pumping ground water takes FAR less energy.
You had gallons per day? Damn silly-con valley richie-rich arseholes! Why when I was growing up, we had to stand behind old man Smithers' horse, catch the urine, filter it with our hair which served as our daily bath, save the teaspoon of water gathered, use it to boil some rocks for sustenance, use the cook water to wash last week's corn husks we used for clothing, and then feed it back to the horse so it wouldn't die. And we were happy! Kids today have it so easy...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Or 10 gallons if it's a Navy Shower.
A dual flush toilet uses as little as 3 liters (0.8 gallons) for liquid waste or 4.5 liters (1.2 gallons) for solid waste.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
If I tried to do that, I'd probably save less water than I wasted while I cussed and fiddled with the hot and cold knobs as I oscillated between freeze and fry trying to get the water resumed properly.
(why aren't temperature controlled showers more common??)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Make the first 19 gallons per person free or very low cost to give everyone enough water for their daily drinking and sanitation needs. Then price each additional gallon at whatever rate will stabilize reservoir levels: when levels are low, raise the price, and when levels are high, lower the price. Check the reservoir levels and re-price the water every few months to avoid overcharging water customers while preventing the water from running out. As new desalination plants and other sources of potable water financed by the high water rates come online, and as residents move to places with cheaper water, the prices will naturally drop.
Meanwhile, it only costs about 10-20 cents per gallon to truck water in, so I don't see $10 per gallon rates ever happening.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
I thought that was the sound effect that came with the discussion of toilets?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Well they have centralized water treatment plants, but then the water is usually released to a river, where it usually flows to the ocean. I suppose there's any number of areas where the amount of energy could be lowered to make the water suitable for reuse and lowering your standards is also an option, the one you've chosen.
I got one of those surprise bills once. My city bills for water quarterly and one day Igot a $170 bill for water when normally it is in the $60-80 range. Turns out that the problem was the basement toilet's flapper valve had worn out and was leaking a bit and since no one really ever uses the damn thing it went unnoticed. That damn toilet used as much water as the rest of the house normally. A small continuous leak over a long time adds up to a lot of water. The next bills was back to normal. As a side bonus I figured out where all the water valves in the house were and what things didn't have them and probably should.
Time to offend someone
Forget required, in many places I'd settle for allowed. In my jurisdiction for instance it's illegal!
By equipment, golf is less expensive than skiing. What makes them rich people sports is accessibility to places where you can play. Golf is much more accessible with public courses with cheap green fees. However there are still private courses which you have to pay a membership to access as well as golf courses with high greens fees that don't require membership.
Skiing is a rich man sport in the same sense and it's worse than golf. There's capital investment necessary for a ski lodge plus the equipment to enable people to ski down the slopes. This makes it a lot easier to charge higher rates for access than even with golf.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Or 10 gallons if it's a Navy Shower.
10 gallons??? Listen sonny boy, back in my day we'd get NJP for wasting that much water.
Here is a "real" navy shower:
1. Turn water on and get wet
2. Turn off the water, and then soap up face, hands, and groin.
3. Turn water on and rinse.
4. Turn off the water and dry off.
5. Wait a week for your next shower rotation.
Even when the water was on, it wasn't much more than a trickle.
We'd use 3 gallons, tops. And this was on a gator. Submariners have it much worse. They can do it with one gallon, and would consider 3 gallons to be a "Hollywood shower".
Semper Fi.
You boil the water in an enclosure or over a sheet of metal or glass and collect the condensate as it drips â" that should be obvious. Anyway, there are much cheaper and better ways to desalinate water though. For african villagers i bet the cheapest to setup/make is a solar still .. you just need some clear plastic and a cup (and the sun). Thats if they dont want to pool money together to buy or maintain a reverse osmosis system which btw is cheap nowadays even for household use. We have a system like that in my lab that if I recall correctly cost only around $500 (filters have to be changed periodically though).
You got one bit wrong. It doesn't invalidate your argument, though.
Flint adds chemicals to water supply to address one problem, but the chemical leeches lead off the old water mains in Flint.
Flint didn't add the necessary chemicals, which allowed the calcites that coated the pipes to break up. Then, other corrosive chemicals in the Flint River leached the lead out of the pipes.
Remember that GM stopped using Flint water because it was corroding the engines of their cars.
The media, politicians, and community leaders all try to find blame in everyone but the residents of Flint that were trying to save money on their water bill, apparently at any cost.
Completely unfair. The emergency manager of Flint didn't like the deal struck with Detroit Water, and instead of waiting for the Lake Huron plant to become operational, decided to use untreated water from the Flint River, despite the advice not to. It was also that rat fuck who ensure bottled water was made available to certain city workers months before they advised residents to boil water.
Without showering, diseases will spread like hell. You need 19 gallons. One gallon to drink, the rest for showering, and keeping a clean house. What good is a tank of saved water if the plague gets you?
I suspect that the water shortage problem started quite a long time ago. In 2005, there was a sci-fi show called "Charlie Jade" that was set in Cape Town. Charlie could transition between different dimensions when he came into contact with water. The show lasted only one season.
1. Build nuclear powered desalination barges.
2. Tow them to wherever there's a drought.
3. Profit?
We live in Cape Town We really hope some of the short-term mitigation plans (small-scale desalination plants that can be completed before we run out of water, ground-water extraction etc.) are sufficient to get us to Winter (and rain), but we if the trend of the last 3 years continues, we may not make it to Dec.
Isn't December summer in Cape Town?
Winter is the traditional rainy season in Cape Town, although not so much in recent years... it's known as the green season.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
So you think not raising the price of water and having people dying of dehydration in 3 months is better?
Yours is an all too-common error in reasoning - comparison to a nonexistent alternative. The alternative here isn't everyone has water to drink for as long as they want as you erroneously assume. The alternative here is they run out of water in 3 months, at which point people start dying of thirst. If raising the price of water can stave off that scenario, then it's an improvement. If you can't offer an alternative solution which doesn't involve raising prices, then the "solution" you're voting for is people start dying of thirst in 3 months.
Money is simply a representation of productivity. If not enough potable water is available, then you've got only two choices - increase the cost of water, or decrease consumption of water. The latter may not be possible if the population is growing. If reducing consumption is not possible, then clearly more productivity needs to be shifted into acquiring or generating more water. And that productivity shift will show up as more money being spent on water (be it acquisition or production), thus increasing its price (assuming the system has been operating rationally by acquiring the cheapest water first). If you're concerned about the poor being unable to afford higher-priced water, then you work out some sort of ration allowance system or water purchase assistance subsidy. But these do not alter the fundamental problem that water is currently priced too low for the amount of demand, and must be priced higher in order to increase supply to meet demand. Insisting that prices not increase breaks the economy, and will result in people dying of thirst.
Do you honestly believe that if everybody doesn't get an 18 gallon shower every day that we're all going to die?
There's absolutely no water savings to be had below 19 gallons?
just build a cross continent water grid and suck it out of the great lakes
If the Earth is flat, then why do I live near a hill?
It takes several miles of distribution pipe and very low recovery rates to not be a problem after 100m from the pipe. You can mix with gray water to improve things... but that just wastes gray water. You also have all the anti-fouling chemicals to contend with b
two of us live on my off grid house, using rainwater stored in two 10 ton tanks. That'll just last us 4 or 5 months. That's 33 US gallons a day for two people. There are no leaks in the system. I'll admit to taking luxurious showers.
Shorter you: "Let them eat cake"
You should probably check the water supply there first, and see if they're actually using aquifers that are about to run out and turn the middle part of the country into a giant desert.
he biggest issue with the "Navy shower" is that it is, pretty much by definition, a COLD shower. Having had a few years experience with them on a boomer many years ago, I can assure you that you won't get hot water into that shower before you have to turn it off.
A Hollywood Shower, on the other hand (the one 99.9% of us think of when we think "shower" - turn the water on, wash, shampoo, rinse, spend time under a spray of hot water) is really seductive - hard to go back to Navy Showers after just one Hollywood Shower....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
just build a cross continent water grid and suck it out of the great lakes
This has been proposed before. It would be extremely expensive... but probably worthwhile. Water may not be the most expensive commodity, but it is the most valuable. Access to safe water is probably the most important thing any country can do. With climate change and shifting patterns in local climates across the country a trans continental water pipe, won't just provide for states like California that consume more than is produced there; it will act as a safety net for the much of the country.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
So, don't be responsible, because you can just take water from someone else?
Yea, I can imagine how well that would work out.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
California sends half its fresh water directly out to the ocean without use other than scenic rivers and other environmental desires (like delta smelt) . Agriculture is second place, at 40%, and urban is about 10%. Reduce the scenic rivers demand, and we'd have plenty of fresh water.
Except that pretty much completely wrong. The outflow from the rivers keeps saltwater from intruding into ground water and pumping stations:
Here in the US that is only true if your toilet was manufactured 30+ years ago.
Also, stop flushing every time you #1. It is both wasteful and silly.
yikes, you don't have to chase me of your lawn...
---
The restrictions are on the water usage of devices you sell, not devices you possess.
I can tell just from that mistake that you're a right winger, and all your politics are rooted in hatred of hippies. Pathetic.
Were I am we've recently gone to metered water a couple years ago and I get weekly reports by email.
About 2-3m cubed a week.
Avg 0.41m cubed a day.
That's for a 2 person household, and I even leave the tub on all the time as a trickle as one of our cats doesn't like drinking out of a bowl...
Google says 0.41 cube meters is 410 liters! Which even divided by two is 205L each! At 2m cubed thats 2000L a week!
Maybe I should turn my tub off...
and fucking CONgress does NOTHING.
Here in COlorado, we depend on our snow melt which is way down. Problem is, that other states also depend on OUR water. The worse is southern California which draws a great deal more than they should be, which is causing the 2 reservoirs to drop fast.
I have written to my 3 critters and pushed them to create a bill that basically says that all communities within 50-200 miles of the oceans have to use desalinated water, and not to take from upstream rivers. With that, it would allow a number of rivers to come back, while recharging the ground water as well.
Ideally, we would fire up a program for nuclear SMRs, that also used the waste heat for desalination. This would encourage states to use excess heat to solve a major issue.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
which was major with millions of ppl?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Why do you persist in slandering Marie Antoinette? You've been told before that this is a false attribution. Why don't you look up quotes before attributing them? Is your whole life and all your "knowledge" just a big game of telephone where you believe everything your friends claims to have "read?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
1) It was written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau when Marie Antoinette was 9 years old
2) He doesn't attribute it to her at all, but to some unnamed princess
3) His actual context was that he stole a bottle of wine and felt he was too well-dressed to enter a bakery to buy bread to eat with it, so he bought brioche from a fancier store instead.
Only if they're so stupid that they stop washing their hands and save all up all their washing water for a silly shower.
Handwashing before preparing food is important for sanitation; showers are not.
We live in Cape Town
We really hope some of the short-term mitigation plans (small-scale desalination plants that can be completed before we run out of water, ground-water extraction etc.) are sufficient to get us to Winter (and rain), but we if the trend of the last 3 years continues, we may not make it to Dec.
Isn't December summer in Cape Town?
Yes, it is.
I should have been more clear. If you manage to see the graphs on dam levels in the links I posted before it broke (is slashdotting still a thing?), you would have seen that the dams in the Western Cape had the following min/max levels and the total precipitation for the year in Cape Town:
2014 - 72%-100% 511mm
2015 - 48-65% 235mm
2016 - 30%-62% 221mm
2017 - 20%-38% < 200mm (153mm up to Dec 18, we did get a bit of rain towards the end of Dec., but not very much).
The dam levels are now at about 30%, with 4 months left until we can reasonably hope for rain, we would have just about run out of water. Assuming we get about the same amount of rain, we would have a peak of about 20% in July/August, and have 4 months of water left -> Dec 2018 we will again be short of water.
The target daily water usage is 500m l/day (to avoid running out of water before May), but we aren't managing to reach that, I think the city is using about 580m l/day at present.
The first desalination plant that was planned to be producing drinking water by April will provide about 200m l/day, so if it is finished according to plan, that could help us run out of water in April until it hopefully rains, and then extend the next possible "day-0" by another ~ 100 days.
Of course, this assumes everyone keeps using water as sparingly as they do now.
My family of two uses 1000 gal per 6 months. Or 3 gals per person per day.
How do you use so much?
Is this your entire water consumption, for all washing (all laundry, all dish washing) all hygeine (no cheating by showering at the gym) and food preparation (no pre-cooked meals)?
We live in Cape Town, and our family of 5 uses 5kl/month or about 33l/person/day, or 8 gallons / person / day for all of our needs (except for the ~ 1l of coffee and water I drink at work).
I don't think it is very feasible to use much less than that ...
As far as I know, the golf courses are not exempt (no other sports facilities are exempt, and the city has closed most public pools and many schools have closed theirs too).
However, a number of golf courses (including the one near my house) have either access to bore-hole/well water, or have some storage dams of untreated rain water, that they use just to try and keep the grass from dying entirely on the fairways and prevent the greens turning yellow.
If your left, you will see that the article is about how the evil white people subjugated the black people so that they don't have any water. If you are right, you will see that the article is all about how the evil lefties ruined South African and can't supply water to their people. Obviously there some affirmative action is involved somehow.
Now is the time to get in the fight and either call the Republicans racist Nazis, or the Democrats dumb snowflakes who live in their mothers basement. Whatever side you are on, it is certain that the internet needs your definitive analysis.
Posts that don't involve name calling or canned political talking points will be modded down and deleted.
85% of California's water goes to farmers, who aren't willing to pay desalinization prices. The agriculture only exists because of cheap water.
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You don't need 19 gallons per person a day to survive.
Ideally, we would like to keep some semblance of an economy, so that people also have food to eat, can pay their rent or home loan etc. If they aren't to buy food, then they would need water to grow crops ...
You need less than 1 gallon per day per person of drinking water. If water is going to run out in 3 months then limited everyone to 1 gallon per day gives you almost 5 years to bring more desalination plants online and/or relocate some of the people.
At the moment, I believe the plan is that when there is less than 13.5% water that can be used from the dams (e.g. at the 23.5% level, assuming that it is challenging to extract the last 10% due to silt etc.), they will start water rationing of 25l per person per day, and no homes will have running water (in taps), but have to collect water in person.
The point is that you don't want to run out of water because then you have death by dehydration, mass riots, and chaos. If you really are going to run out of water in 3 months then you better come up with a game plan now that prevents mass hysteria and death.
Solely relying on price just means that the ultra-rich will continue to waste water, even if it costs them $500/month, because they don't feel it. I think they could raise the prices a bit, as that may provide some small motivation to the middle class to save more. However, they are preventing abuse; households that use more than 10.5kl have to pay for the installation of a water demand management device that limits their household water consumption to ~330l/day (unused can accumulate) and 10.5kl/month (unused can't accumulate/roll over to the next month). In order to raise funds for the desalination plant that is being built, the city has proposed a drought levy (based on property value) to be added to normal municipal levies/rates/taxes.
I lived on a sailboat for three years with my family. Five people went through 60 gallons a month. It wasnâ(TM)t that bad.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
About 1980, I sailed a small boat across the Atlantic. Water was a major concern as we had to allow for double the trip time of 22days in case we had severe problems (we didnâ(TM)t, fortunately ). We had limited tankage, and desalination had not been invented.
We washed in salt water, washed dishes in saltwater, the toilet use saltwater. Our consumption was about 2.2 litres per day each. Not 22, 2.2.
This was basically for drinking and cooking. It was ok. We did have a limited supply of drinks (one per day), and there was liquid in the cans of food we used.
Somewhat extreme, perhaps; these days Iâ(TM)d get a desalinator and wash in freshwater, for sure. But it does show how far you can go.
In Gibraltar, salt water was piped to taps, I imagine they no longer do this, again, needs must!
"Cats like plain crisps"
There is also a political dimension that hasn't been reported very widely. According to this opinion piece, part of the issue is that the national government is led by the ANC, while Cape Town is led by the (largely white) Democratic Alliance party. This leads the national government to be unsympathetic to the city's needs.
The
I see no reason to believe a theory about the earth which was invented in the 19th century and then attributed to ignorant people from the past.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I can guarantee, if the people producing 98% of the GDP don't have food on their tables, that GDP number will go down very quickly. Agriculture may not be as sexy as tech or finance, but without it society would cease to function.
Remember that towing glaciers to Dubai business?
https://nypost.com/2017/05/17/...
Antarctica is much closer to Cape Town than Dubai is.
But look at all the salt water you used, and things like bathing by taking a swim. It doesn't work that way on land unless you live on a lake.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Delta isn't scenic rivers. Cut scenic rivers spill - and we'll have quite a bit more water, until desal is up and going strong...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Submariners have it much worse. They can do it with one gallon, and would consider 3 gallons to be a "Hollywood shower".
Dang straight.
Except sonar techs, of course, or as we called them "#$%^ shower techs". They needed long luxurious showers, from all that sweating they didn't do, sitting in their little air conditioned shack ...
Last I heard, it's still possible for California to bring in food from other places.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Use seperate seawater lines for non-potable water use... Washroom sink, toilet and shower. Only half the plumbing needs to be redone in plastic... The drainage side stays as is. Maybe start with government built or funded buildings.
Agriculture uses about 80 percent of the water in California. It takes a lot of water to make deserts bloom. As far as cities like Cape Town, there is a limit to how many people certain areas can support. Eventually you reach such a high population that the land can't support it without massive projects.
Maybe skip washroom sink (for safety; gets ingested during toothbrushing).
Cape Town is on the coast. Seawater is the ultimate grey water :)
Nope. You literally can't take our water no matter how much you try, we've got an 8 state commission protecting it with cuckadia in there too.
Water from my showers, toilet, washing, whatever, that goes down the drain goes into my city water treatment plant. From there, it is cleaned and put back in the local river. It could be further cleaned and re-used for drinking/household re-borrowing.
So household use doesn't actually USE any water from the local environment that isn't returned. I borrow it and recycle it.
Landscape use (watering plants) does, however, USE water. It evaporates and isn't really recyclable for local use.
Household water use therefore need not be a drain on water resources. Landscape use pretty much is a drain.
--PeterM
Yes, you personally. ... not sure if that works.
However rising the price of water above the price of beer
Then again people need to flush the toilet.
And then again, last time I checked, but I might be wrong, a gallon is 2.6 liters. So in a climate like Cape Town a person needs about 3 gallons. In a random german city people already are supposed to drink about 2 gallons per day.
And then again, 1 gallon per day for $10 is $300 per month, and you have neither washed, showered or flushed the toilett for that price.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Welcome to the black market of water trade: "Suk! Suk!"
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
South Afrika is a first worl country.
No one is or will be dying of thirst there.
How stupid are you?
But thanx for your brain dead suggestions.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
It would be highly inconvenient but individuals could walk to the ocean, get water, carry it back to their apartment, boil it, and produce clean drinking water.
Seriously?
No comment ... facepalm.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I really wonder what happened to common sense.
You are now the second person bringing up that brine issue.
Last time I checked, desalination plants where placed at places where large amounts of salt water were available. A coast of a majour sea comes to mind. Cape Town actually can chose from two of them.
What to do with the brine I leave as an mental excercise for the reader ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You must have the patience of a saint. If we did that for three days at least one person would be thrown over the side and another would jump voluntarily.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"I actually recycle my shower gray water. It is in fact easy to do correctly. We redid about 10 feet of plumbing to include a second outlet from our drain."
So you decide when to reclaim or not? Because I just know this would bite people in the ass the day they wash out the red dye in their hair and send it straight into the washing machine with their whites... :/
I was thinking the same thing,
gal: a term used to refer to a girl or woman
I can't imagine that 80% of the population subsists on $2 a day or less, but 75% has a television. Better to raise the price and let those who most value it buy it than to have a price that fails to convey the information that prices are supposed to convey -- in this case, that they should use less water.
"No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session." -- Judge Gideon J. Tucker
With nearly 300 comments already, I'm not sure there's a point in posting, but...
Los Angeles ran out of water decades ago. Or they would have if they hadn't built aqueducts to bring water from Mono Lake and the Colorado River.
Santa Barbara nearly ran out of water. They started to build a desalinization plant. Then one rain storm refilled their primary source of water. They cancelled the plant and sold the equipment to one of the dunes countries IIRC.
The real question should be why did Cape Town wait so long to start dealing with it?
I don't think you use gray water for washing things, you use it for flushing the toilet, unless it's filtered and cleaned first. I don't know though, I don't have a gray water system or anything.
I drink more than that per day. Just drinking, forget about toilet, shower, etc. No thanks!
One question:
Where do you get the energy to run the desalination plants?
"Or 10 gallons if it's a Navy Shower"
When water restrictions really start to bite, you run the shower to get wet, stop, soap yourself and then run it enough to rinse off.
That can be done with as little as 2 gallons in total.
Hypersaline brine can be either piped back to the sea with distributed release to prevent toxic concentrations in one spot, or fed to a salt farm.
There are a number of ways of desalinating and an environment like Cape Town (hot and lots of sun) is ideal for evaporation-style glasshouse setups rather than pressure-fed RO ones.
"This has been proposed before. It would be extremely expensive... but probably worthwhile. "
And whilst the US dithers, China is doing exactly that to solve its water problems.
"Did you count the car wash?"
Here in the UK (which isn't exactly short of water most of the time), car washes must recycle their water. Their daily consumption is quite low
My consumption is about 11 cubic metres/6 months (about 2900 US gallons - 15g/day) and at least half of that is that is toilet flushes due to the ancient cistern (you can reduce the flush volume in older toilets but it tends to result in inefficient flushing.)
There are other factors to consider too, such as the cost of water vs the cost of "doing it another way" - and frequently "more water" is cheaper than "more energy"
Everything you say is true except this:
5. Wait a week for your next shower rotation.
Marine bunks are 4 high whereas Navy bunks on the same gator are only 3 high. I assume you are a Marine because of:
Semper Fi.
Essentially Marines are packed in like sardines in a gator (compared to Navy). You guys absolutely MUST keep VERY clean or else the smell would just about kill you. Even with all of the cleanliness, Marine berthings in active use on a gator (USS Peleliu LHA 5 (you know you are getting old when they decom your ship)) still have a recognizable "stench" to them.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Actually, California has fared reasonably well, and has a sustainable approach to water management in general.
Owen's Valley was a great success.
California proposed that with the Columbia river being the target. In a fit of rationality, Oregon realized that California would never forgo altering the deal and declined to participate.
I was thinking the same thing, but then I started looking a little harder at this. I was a bit shocked to see that someone that takes a shower every day has already used around 17 gallons of water. Flush your toilet once and you've just used the last two gallons of your ration for the day!
Then there's all sorts of other household overhead like washing dishes and clothes, cooking, and more. And you still haven't drank even your first glass of water for the day. (half a gallon is recommended every day, but that can include beverages)
We use (waste?) a lot of water every day. I'd like to see reuse of "grey water" become commonplace or even required. Most water could be reused in the toilet for example. Most "washers" (be they people, clothes, dishes, etc) are used to flush away contaminants, but then we don't bother to filter and reuse the water, we just dump it just like it is right down the drain, which is a huge waste.
If you are in NY, you can waste water. However, raise the water tax or the meter rate (where water is metered), and you can get consumption reductions.
We have changed our shower heads to 2.6 litres per minute flow. thats under 3/4 gallons per minute.
Our flush toilets are new ones that are about 2 litres (1/gallon) per flush.
Where you records 87 gallons per person, we consume half of that for a family of 7 on most days. On laundry days, the water consumption goes up by 10 gallons per washday,
If Capetown fixed leaking watermains, and had replacement showerheads with the 2.6 litres/minute rating, and more efficient flush toilets, they could last through the drought
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
What will the effect be on penguins that run into the brine from the desalination plant? I fear it would be deadly for the poor little critters. What's worse, making the people drink bottled water until it rains, or killing penguins?
15 years ago I went on holiday to Senegal and met a local girl. Her shower was a circle of poles 1,5 meter high, with 1 bucket of water and a 1 liter can, out in the sun on some stone slabs. 1 can gets you wet, you soap up, and then 2 cans rinse it off. Stand around naked drying in the sun.
One funny fact was that the dutch nurses who helped at the local hospital were much taller than the Senegal women (and the poles around the shower area), so they got a lot of attention when they went showering.
A pretty secretary walks past a few business men at the coffee machine. She asks one of the men "Do you shower after you had sex?"
Taken off-guard by this out-of-place question he says "Yes, of course. Why?".
She replies "Then it's about time you had some sex..."
I built my house in the Netherlands 24 years ago with a rainwater collection system: 2 filters in the pipes of the largest roofs, and a 10 m3 concrete water container. I use the water for flushing the toilets, the washing machine and occasionally the garden. Although it has drinking water supplementation it very rarely runs dry, it's usually a signal for me to clean the water filters in the rain pipes.
My year water utilities usage for 2017 was 18 m^3, which is 49 liters per day, for daily showering, weekly dishwasher, daily kitchen use and drinking. The average dutch water usage for one-person household is 52 m^3, which is 142 liter per day. 65% of my water consumption is done with rainwater.
Even when it does no longer rains as much in CapeTown, any water you collect is saved drinking water, and also does not burden the sewage system at the time of the rain.
Wow. That sounds horrid. You realize it's 2018 not 1018 right? We're in the future. But you're living like some tribe that just figured out huts.
The reason we try and conserve as much water as possible is due to the severe drought in the Western Cape.
Each of the past 3 years we have received less than the 20th percentile of the annual rainfall over the past ~40 years.
Unfortunately, some of the possible mitigations were prevented by the national (ANC-led) government's failure to recognise this as an emergency more than a year ago (or a strategy to undermine the DA-led provincial and local government for political reasons).
We are more advanced than many European countries and probably about 25% of U.S. states ...
Time to move to a place that doesn't suck.
There are very few places that suck less ...
We live in Cape Town, our household (comprising 2 adults, 3 kids aged 3-8) uses 5kl/month, or 33.3 litres / person / day, well below the 87l limit (but there isn't much more we can do to save water in our house). This includes:
Just received our bill for Dec/Jan, and we used 4kl for the month, or ~ 27l/person/day.
85% of California's water goes to farmers, who aren't willing to pay desalinization prices. The agriculture only exists because of cheap water.
Then the solution is (left) subsidize farming if they consider farming important to remain in the state or (right) tell the farmers to go elsewhere where farming is more affordable and sustainable.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
The environmental destructiveness COMES from discharging it into coastal ecosystems. The more the technology is used, the worse it is.
Diluted with what? The whole point is you're taking fresh water out of it. You're not going to add it back in.
It can be, but then what? You get a bunch of salts (and not just sodium chloride) that tend to be highly reactive, and you'll get a lot more than you actually need for culinary and industrial uses. Best thing is to stick them in deep mines (e.g., salt mines), but eventually you can run out of room.
And it's no different than those "low volume" flush toilets that you sometimes have to ring the handle a second (or third!) time to get them to empty the bowl properly.
You must have never used newer low volume toilets.
I will agree that 1st generate low-flow toilets were horrible (my parents have one installed, it is not great). They were just old-style toilets with less water, and they clogged more than the old ones (which still clogged and required double flushing).
I had some new toilets installed in a bathroom remodel 4 years ago; approx. 1.3 gal per flush. Never once have they clogged or needed plunging. Only rarely do they need a 2x flush. Better in every way than my old normal-flow toilets. Not sure how they do it - seems like more pressure during the flush, so maybe it just drops that 1.3 gallons through a thicker pipe.
And then again, 1 gallon per day for $10 is $300 per month, and you have neither washed, showered or flushed the toilett for that price.
Still beats dying. Another solutions would be to pipe salt water directly to the pipes. That would allow toilets and showers to operate then you would just have to carry in water for drinking and cooking.
Yes, that was my first idea, too.
But I guess, corrosion or other hassles make it impractical.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.