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Foxconn Will Drain 7 Million Gallons of Water Per Day From Lake Michigan to Make LCD Screens (gizmodo.com)
Earlier this week, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources granted permission to Taiwanese tech manufacturer Foxconn, best known for assembling Apple's iPhones, to siphon off seven million gallons of water per day from Lake Michigan, despite protests from conservation groups. From a report: The massive diversion of water from the lake will be used to produce LCD screens at the company's planned $10 billion, 20 million square foot manufacturing plant set to be built in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin. Nearly 2.7 million gallons of the water -- about 39 percent of the daily intake from the factory -- will be lost in the process, primarily from evaporation. The remaining water will be treated and returned to the lake basin.
Wisconsin's DNR noted in a statement that the requested withdrawal will "only amount to a 0.07 percent increase in the total surface water withdrawals from Lake Michigan." For environmentalists in the region, the issue is not so much the diversion for the Foxconn factory itself but rather the precedent it will set for how the lake water can be used. "If we allow this to happen, it's going to happen all over the basin, with other states and then it's going to be the thirsty states and nations to come," Jennifer Giegerich, the government affairs director for the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters, warned during a public hearing about the diversion, according to the Wisconsin Gazette.
Wisconsin's DNR noted in a statement that the requested withdrawal will "only amount to a 0.07 percent increase in the total surface water withdrawals from Lake Michigan." For environmentalists in the region, the issue is not so much the diversion for the Foxconn factory itself but rather the precedent it will set for how the lake water can be used. "If we allow this to happen, it's going to happen all over the basin, with other states and then it's going to be the thirsty states and nations to come," Jennifer Giegerich, the government affairs director for the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters, warned during a public hearing about the diversion, according to the Wisconsin Gazette.
Polluted. Chinese-style. Madison Will Just Die MORE!
If you want manufacturing jobs - then you have to let them do manufacturing here. Manufacturing takes water and power... no way around it.
I'm sure that the water is not so much "used" (as in it disappears)... I'm sure they have a method for returning most of it. I would be more interested in what their controls are for the re-release of that water.
Or once the factory uses the water, is it treated to a level so that it is cleaner than when it came from the lake and then is returned back into the lake?
Passionately Indifferent
7 million sounds scary but it is not that much, only about 11 Olympic sized pools.
I would be far more worried about the treated water they return not being treated well enough. Also, why not reuse your own treated water instead of pumping more out?
Oh, wait, it's not. Lake Michigan is somewhere around 4500 cubic km of water. And seven million gallons per day means that, even if all the water removed is pumped to Arizona for disposal, it'll be 500,000 years before the lake goes dry.
And the water taken out won't be pumped to Arizona. Eventually, it'll go right back into the lake....
Color me unimpressed with the Environmental Catastrophe In The Making....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Agriculture (you know, what the midwest is all about) measures water in acre-feet, not gallons. 21 just isn't a lot. Their campus may be less thirsty than the corn field it replaces. It'll certainly produce something more valuable than yet another bag of chips for the U.S. obesity market, and have better jobs than the wage slavery that keeps agriculture afloat.
According to this study, natural evaporative losses can be up to 0.6 inches per day. Assuming it's really just under half an inch (about 12mm), natural evaporation from Lake Michigan can reach 183 billion gallons per day. That 2.7 million gallons lost per day - and as the article says, most of it to evaporation - is about 0.0014% of the current evaporation. Is moving evaporation from the lake surface to a site right next to the lake surface an issue? In other words, relocating around 1 thousandth of 1 percent o the evaporation is the concern?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Even if no water ever enters the lake again it would take 1/2 million years to use it all up. I'm not exaggerating, the lake is that big. Go nuts use what you need.
If however the return effluent is toxic that now becomes an issue. Small amounts of toxins have dramatic impacts on environment.
How many Libraries of Congress is that?
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Run a pipeline to Facebook's data center and submerge it under 7 million gallons of water.
#FuckZuck
The next petitioners will be the farmers in Kansas and Nebraska who have already depleted the enormous water tables under their farms. They'll demand a pipeline from Lake Michigan to the middle of the country so they can keep growing grain to sell to Russia and China. People who say this is a small amount of water should take a look at the Caspian Sea, which was killed by all the industry around it. It really pains me to see this start happening to the Great Lakes.
Seriously, the US just need a bunch of Ocean Water Filtration facilities, to replenish the empty basins and nourish the people. Instead of building massive pipelines for oil from one side of the country to the other, do it for Water, to deliver the freshly filtered water to the rest of the US.
Could even charge a reasonable "water tax" on it, like $25 per year or something. Would essentially pay for itself within a few years with the amount of people it would serve.
Progressive scum and nibbers drain 16,000,000 gallons per-day of LM water ... the stains suck-it-up just to keep their unproductive sorry meatbag asses alive. Chop off that human waste and smiley friendly useful LCD screens can purr & coo & drink to their hearts content. Feed the dead prog-slut bodies to Lake trout ... they eat water-rats anyway.
we Taiwanese... we things make... we go pee-pee in your lake!
This is a minuscule amount of water. A single Golf course uses FAR more water per day and there isn't some big push to ban them. As long as they're properly treating whatever they discharge and there are provisions to idle the plat if lake levels ever went critical this shouldn't be an issue.
The water is not lost.
The water is either returned to the lake
or the water goes into the air and then returns to the environment as rain, snow, etc.
This is much hubaloo over nothing.
...to place a tiny light bulb on a base? This makes no sense.
And it all has to got back into the Great Lakes basin, per Article 201(1)(a):
All Water Withdrawn from the Basin shall be returned, either naturally or after use, to the Source Watershed less an allowance for Consumptive Use.
* http://www.gsgp.org/media/1332/great_lakes-st_lawrence_river_basin_sustainable_water_resources_agreement.pdf
Definition:
"Consumptive Use" means that portion of Water Withdrawn or withheld from the Basin that is lost or otherwise not returned to the Basin due to evaporation, incorporation into Products, or other processes.
So if you grow something with the water, then it doesn't have to be returned. But the water used for LCDs is simply for processing, and so must be cleaned and returned to the hydrological cycle.
This does establish a legal argument for other corporations to use when they want large quantities of water and it spells the same trend that has caused other areas to be a total mess. It resembles the problem of building a new road. If you build a decent new roads business will line it. Those businesses need employees who will move near by thus ruining far more land than the actual road does. That seemingly innocent looking building of a good road can create a situation like we have in S. Florida with a suburb containing nine million people shoulder to shoulder in a 200 mile line. The effects of this are awful.
I worked at the Linwood water filtration plant, one of two in the City of Milwaukee. There was a North and a South side section of the plant and the slowest rate the plant could handle was 30 million gallons per day. That doesn't count how much the Howard Avenue plant was pulling. Lake Michigan has one quadrillion gallons of water, that's 1,000,000,000,000,000 gallons. http://blog.livnfresh.com/how-... If this group was truly concerned about Lake Michigan, they would be complaining about the untreated sewage that MMSD (Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewage District) discharges during heavy rainfalls. The city of Milwaukee has combined sewers (sanitary and storm) so that heavy rainfall overwhelms the treatment plants. The deep tunnel system can't always hold enough, thus the "diversions" The city of Milwaukee doesn't want to spent the money to separate their sewers like most everyone else has.
Just that.
Dennis Onstenk
The bastards in cali want to build pipelines from lake michigan to california to siphon it off so they can live in their desert paradise, btw. So, yea, this sets a bad precedent. What makes it bad is that lake michigan is already rapidly flatlining, the underground pressures are pushing up the ground and pinching off inlet streams that used to keep the lake full. This has been happening faster because the weight of the water has been declining over the past century. It is predicted that the lake will be completely gone in 1000 years. Imagine humanity completely wiping out one of the biggest lakes in the world and turning it into a veritable desert in only a millennium. And, that's even if we did nothing, let alone additional shit like this.
If you are opposed to this what would you want to happen instead?
As others here have said, it's not really that much water. Personally I would prefer my second item, but I am willing to pay more for a product whose manufacturing doesn't unreasonably pollute my drinking water. My assumption is that permitting and regulatory processes will have already required the company to meet the bar of not polluting the water too much.
They should have put it in Detroit (their water is already contaminated) or in New Orleans/Houston plenty of areas in both regions that would love less water around seeing as both groups of dumbasses built in active flood zones.
So many on the far left scream about the pollution and heavy resource use of manufacturing, and they absolutely should. BUT, many of these ppl are fine with offshoring. IOW, they are fine with driving their gas cars and using laptops, phones, etc. as long as the oil comes from Africa, middle east, with America oil companies that cut environmental laws, and resources that comes from Africa/South America, where Chinese companies ignore not just environmental laws, but also have no issue with using 7 y.o. labor.
Now, some of this manufacturing is coming to America and they fight it wanting it to go away. Do not like the amount of water that it uses? Then they should work towards cleaning it up and to use less water.
Just shipping this to other nations does not solve a thing.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
For reference Michigan eventually drains over Niagara Falls which drains (managed) about 3.24 billion gallons of water per day into the ocean. Fox is only going to use 0.21% of what is discharged every day.
There are treaties between the US and Canada governing the removal of water from the Great Lakes. It helps prevent little things like ships going aground or having to carry lighter loads. No reason now that Canada can't start removing water as well. Let's drain those suckers.
7 million? really?
>> Nearly 2.7 million gallons of the waterâ"about 39 percent of the daily intake from the factoryâ"will be lost in the process, primarily from evaporation. The remaining water will be treated and returned to the lake basin.
>> Wisconsinâ(TM)s DNR noted in a statement that the requested withdrawal will âoeonly amount to a 0.07 percent increase in the total surface water withdrawals from Lake Michigan.â
0,07%! oh noes its the zombie apocalypse!
That's the truth
Thanks Obama
Seven million gallons does not even rise to the level of being insignificant.
The real issue is whether or not chemical pollutants are being released in the waste water.
Assuming the wate water is pretreated at the plant to remove manufacturing chemicals, either with clarification or ultrafiltration, there is no issue with significant water "usage".
Evaporation gives me a minor cause for concern, as I assume the evaporation occurs in curing or drying ovens, which allows for the potential of VOC/SVOC releases, but I assume they will have the customary protections used in modern Western plants, such as wet scrubbers and after burners, along with real time participate monitoring and emissions sampling. Generally, permits for any reasonable sized heating operation in Wisconsin requires an extended evaluation and environmental safety plan.
Yes, I'm in the environmental industry in Wisconsin.
Lake Michigan contains 1.5x10^15 gallons. 7 million gallons equals 1/2 of one millionth of 1 percent of that water.
61% will be returned back to the lake, the rest will evaporate into the atmosphere, contributing to precipition somewhere downwind, sooner or later.
What's the problem, other than the Left's hatred of Capitalism?
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Cancel the FoxConn project. The water is much better used to pump into Zuck's data storage facilities, preferably combined with some hydrochloric acid. Then throw the Zuck in it and tell him to suck it.
They would stop manufacturing them. Simple solution.
Nearly 2.7 million gallons of the water -- about 39 percent of the daily intake from the factory -- will be lost in the process, primarily from evaporation. The remaining water will be treated and returned to the lake basin.
From what I remember from 6th grade Earth Science classes, water evaporating simply cycles back into the ecosystem, being redeposited on earth as rain, entering creeks and streams which feed int rivers that feed lakes like Lake Michigan...
The rest of the water is used and returned to the lake, so the issue is what, exactly?
Ken
This is why tech manufacturing is being done by communists now.
And yes, it's intentional, they don't believe a word they say in this pieces.
Water doesn't just disappear. I mean, they'll put it back when they're done with it, right?
Right?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
The Panel factory by itself is not the main concern, it is the precedent to allow others similar access, eventually could(x years, decades, minutes ?) reach detrimental extraction levels. So put in place supply / demand cost factors. Surrounding states agree to their levels. Can address the issue without delaying the factory.
But was it 'proven'? Because without proof as a cleaver scientist said it must just be 50/50.
It's what they put back in, that matters. Contaminated sludge. 3-eyed fishes coming to a fish market near you.
That's not how proven works...
If it were, global worming would have been proven a long while ago.
check it out, Australian companies have been using this water for years for fruit orchards, cotton etc and its a disaster. The river is a shadow of its former grand self. I pity anyone relying on this waterway in Michigan, unfortunately, its the beginning of the end.
You want local manufacture? You are going to use water and if it goes back polluted, it's because your government allowed it. China pollutes within regulations, Chinese businesses in the US are going to pollute within US regulations. But go on, blame the Chinese guy. Heck, maybe someday you'll find a way to blame them for Flint, too. That's nearby, right?
"Earlier this week, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources granted permission to Taiwanese tech manufacturer Foxconn, best known for assembling Apple's iPhones"
..
And also manufacturer for Amazon, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Microsoft
Both environmentalists and Paul Ryan's pro-Chinese corporate shills are missing the point. This isn't about the total amount of Lake Michigan water used or even the significant percentage of treated water used. As the article points out, Paul Ryan's pet project sets a precedent of diverting water out of the Great Lakes basin. Only a few kilometers and a few meters of elevation divide the Great Lakes water from the Mississippi river system. Where the plant is located, wastewater would flow away from the Great Lakes but they applied for permits a few miles away n Racine on the Lake Michigan shore.
To put things into perspective, the city of Racine (pop 77,571) consumes 16.9 million gallons per day. So this plant would increase the city's consumption of treated water by 41%. But under the Great Lakes Compact (2008) nearly all of Racine's water and water from other cities bordering the Great Lakes must return to the Great Lakes. With this, 40% of Racine's consumption would diverted outside the Great Lake's basin. This sets a precedent so that Milwaukee, Chicago, Toronto, Detroit, Gary and other large cities with reason to sell or divert Great Lakes water can point to Racine and say, "They did it, so why not us?"
Hand-waving arguments about man's insignificant effect on the Great Lakes system fall flat. As one who grew up in Racine I've watched Lake Michigan's eco-system change several times with algae, lamprey eels, alewives, lake perch, salmon trout, zebra-mussels and the Asian Carp (coming soon). The latest threats come from a 100-year old project to divert Great Lakes water to prevent Typhoid fever in Chicago. The damage and/or cleanup from this may cost billions.
The administration and politicians owned by Foxconn have lost all credibility when it comes to the use of scientific principles to assess the wide-ranging and long-term economic, social and ecological effects of short-term business misadventures such as the Foxconn con job.
APK will drain 7,000,000 gallons of cum a week into his ass.
Then he will call everyone soy boys and ne'er-do-wells
Finally he will spaz out, stalk, and shitpost about Zontar the Mindless, arth1, and anyone else on his enemy list
It looks like the "dry Lake Michigan" movie trope (I, Robot; Johnny Mnemonic, etc) is actually going to come true.
Kriston
An olympic size pool holds about 660,000 gallons. So, the 2.7 million gallons of water "lost" in the process amounts to 4 pools worth.
Do any of the other boarding states get some input into this? Or is there some outline for what each state can allow for a shared body of water like this?
Any company as big as Foxconn can afford to desalinate their own seawater for whatever purposes they need. Make 'em take it out of the ocean, fresh water is far too precious a resource to let corporations drain by the millions of gallons.
Same goes for hydrofracking companies. If they want water, make them use seawater. If they complain there's too much salt, tell them to build a desalination plant. Yes, they cost millions of dollars to build and maintain. Thankfully these companies not only have millions of dollars to spend, they're also guaranteed to make a lot more back in return on their investments. Plus, they could sell any surplus desalinated water and have guaranteed buyers, since fresh water is always in demand.
Siphoning fresh water at this rate is just lazy and cheap when you're actually in the position to be able to afford making your own viable fresh water.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Any chance someone in site-planning misunderstood what a Liquid Crystal Display is?
Bob Stein, http://bobste.in
wasn't it Nestle that go and drill sink holes wherever they like across the mid west and drain the water table dry - having paid $100 to do so.....
You want big business to rule the roost, you got it..... Party on.
And 27 billion gallons per day evapoates from Superior alone