Archive for the ‘Water’ Category
Posted on January 3rd, 2012
by Cath Hassell of ech2o consultants
I was in Delft recently with my partner where, as usual, we ordered tap water with our evening meal. It was pleasant enough, no discernable chlorine taste, but it certainly wasn’t worth the three Euros sixty that appeared on the bill! This slightly surreal experience was closely followed by a visit to Bruges where the restaurants and cafes refused point blank to serve tap water at all. So I decided to investigate the bottled water industry in more detail, and to ask whether we, as construction professionals, can reduce the amount of bottled water consumed in the UK.
Value of the bottled water market
It is an industry that has grown rapidly in the past 25 years, with global consumption in 2010 at 225 billion litres and a worldwide market worth £52 billion pounds a year. [1] It is a staggering fact that the world spends over six times as much per year on bottled water than it does on water supply and sanitation.[2] Despite a slight downturn in sales in the last few years in the US (due to pressure from both environmentalists and municipal water suppliers) it is still the world’s fastest growing consumer beverage, and likely to remain so as increasing sales in China more than make up for any decrease in the States. Whilst consumption of bottled water per head in the UK is low compared to many European countries at 38 litres per head, it has also risen rapidly since the 1980’s. In 2009, 2.1 billion litres of bottled water were bought and the bottled water market in the UK is estimated to be worth between £1.4-2 billion.[3]
The decline in drinking tap water
So why is the number of people drinking tap water in the UK declining? As with most countries it is due to three main factors: a fear about the quality of tap water, preferences of taste, and convenience.
We don’t need to drink bottled water in the UK because our tap water is unsafe; in fact, the tests that tap water is subjected to before it reaches our taps are more stringent than those required for bottled water. The “Story of Bottled Water” (from the same people that produced the “Story of Stuff”) and available at http://storyofstuff.org/bottledwater/ explains how the bottled water industry in the US systematically set out to persuade consumers that tap water was essentially unsafe, and did so very successfully. In the UK the British Soft Drinks Association has been accused of doing the same thing, though they have denied it.
The taste issue is more subjective. Certainly there are areas in the UK where tap water is heavily chlorinated and unpalatable. However, filtering the tap water or allowing it to stand before drinking solves that problem, both at a far lower monetary and environmental cost than drinking bottled water. Depending where in the UK you live, tap water costs between 0.2 and 0.5 p per litre directly from the tap. Filtering at point of use will double the price at worst.
The environmental impact of bottled water v tap water
There are several environmental issues that are of concern when bottled water replaces tap water. Excessive withdrawal of natural mineral or spring water to produce bottled water can threaten local streams and groundwater, transporting the water to the consumer results in a far higher carbon load than delivering to a tap; the manufacture and disposal of billions of plastic bottles causes pollution, litter and fills landfill sites.
The carbon load of mains water in the UK is, on average 0.35kg CO2 for every m3 of tap water delivered to the tap. Compare that to the carbon load of trucking bottles of water around the UK, a heavy and bulky commodity. To exacerbate the situation, of the 2.1 billion litres of water we drink every year, only 1.6 billion are UK-produced, meaning that 24% of the bottled water we consume in the UK is imported.[4] Whilst most of our imported water is from France, bottled water from Turkey and Fiji and even bottled rainwater from Australia (Cloud Juice) is available in our shops.
To reduce bulk and weight most bottled water is now sold in plastic rather than glass bottles, which brings extra environmental problems. Most plastic water bottles are made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which is recyclable but research in the US has shown that less than 20% are recycled, with the bulk of the remainder going to landfill. Whilst figures are not easily available for the UK, the figures are likely to be similar. In both Sweden and Germany there is a substantial deposit on plastic bottles at point of sale and therefore recycling rates are far higher, but there seems little political will to introduce such a system in the UK in the near future. Because so much bottled water is consumed outside of the home environment, many empty bottles are disposed of in street bins where recycling rates are far lower than from home bins. Even recycling does not completely solve the problem as only 4% of PET bottles are recycled back into new bottles; most are merely downcycled.
Design solutions
At first sight this does not seem an issue that those of us who work in the building industry can affect. But when we design kitchens we can specify a separate filtered water tap outlet and in the commercial sector we can design in water fountains or space and water connections for chilled water units fed directly from the mains water supply.
[2] $100 billion a year to $15 billion a year
Posted on December 8th, 2011
By Jim Allen | E&M West Ltd | www.eandmwest.co.uk
And yet here we are rushing towards 2012 with alarming rapidity. Remember the disastrous floods that overwhelmed parts of the South West in 2007, and Cumbria in 2009? As I write the rain is lashing the north again, last month it was Mevagissey, bringing back memories of Boscastle, shrinking the distance of time. Flooding is a direct cause of human misery, dislocation on a local and national scale, with a heavy cost directly to individuals, their insurers and the country as a whole.
The Pitt review in 2008 led directly to The Flood and Water Management Act 2010. This seeks to make management of flood risk a pro-active, rather than a reactive mopping up exercise. Local authorities are key to the brave new world it seeks to create, looking up towards the Environment Agency for a strategic framework, and outwards to drainage boards, water companies and the design community to create, implement and manage solutions on the ground. Management of surface water is the issue, and the adoption of sustainable drainage systems the key component.
All well and good, but over 3 years on from Pitt almost none of this is in place, and the current framework for enactment will not complete until the very end of 2014, over 3 years hence. So why the delay?
The Bill will impact on planning processes, with sustainable drainage solutions a requirement for all but the very smallest schemes. This at a time when one of the coalition’s much vaunted strategies for recovery is the abolition of red tape and reform of the planning processes.
Local authorities are the key to successful implementation, and while they have skilled engineers they are too few in number, and not always trained in the design of sustainable drainage schemes. Yet they are charged with establishing Sustainable Drainage Boards to sanction development and management of schemes and other assets post construction. They are not ready.
On the other side of the fence, sustainable drainage schemes, done well, use space that could be used to raise scheme density and payback for developers on their expensively acquired land-banks. Compliance will generate upfront costs and potentially delays. Government is desperately keen to raise new housing starts, and is looking at ways to incentivise rather than discourage development.
Perhaps no surprise then that implementation is so slow, although so far no one seems to be admitting to any dragging of the feet.
The design community must put the counter arguments as strongly as we can. We have a golden opportunity to use good design to improve amenity and biodiversity to the benefit of the wider community. Permeable paving has its place, but it’s not paving paradise. The existing system is broken, and is full of inconsistencies and hard to reconcile interests. Reform is essential if we are to move forward and make the right kind of investment, saving costs to the wider economy in future years.
The politicians would do well to remember the misery flooding creates. It’s twice this year residents in Mevagissey have mopped out their homes; they may not know much about the Water Bill 2010 but they will surely want to know why this is happening again.
Posted on April 15th, 2011
by Cath Hassell of ech2o consultants
Language is important; it is one of the things that define us as human. As the environmental building industry expands, new systems, processes and products are introduced and new words start to become common currency. I am interested (and often surprised) by the way technical terms become misused by building professionals as well as the general public.
Rainwater and greywater
Rainwater and greywater (two completely different types of water, with differing requirements for treatment and storage) are increasingly referred to as greywater. So much so I now routinely ask whether the speaker really means greywater, regardless of the conviction with which they state the word. Rainwater is obviously rain that has fallen out of the sky, which in a conventional building is discharged to a surface water sewer, combined sewer, or a soakaway; if it is stored for use back in the building it is still rainwater, until it is used. Once it is used it becomes either foul water (if used to flush WCs or urinals) or waste water if used for washing clothes. If wastewater from a bath, basin or shower is collected for re-use it becomes greywater. If greywater is used to flush WCs it becomes foul water. If it is used in washing machines it becomes waste water (but would not circulate through the greywater recycling system again as waste water from washing machines has too many detergents in it to be considered as suitable for greywater recycling). Simples!
Greywater and “blackwater”
When I first heard the term greywater used for waste water (back in 1997) I naively assumed it to be a reference to the appearance of the water due to the effect of scum formation, and the colour wastewater becomes after it begins to biologically decompose. But then I started to hear the term “blackwater” to describe water from toilets. “Blackwater” categorically does not describe the appearance of foul water either in the sewers or whilst undergoing treatment at a sewage treatment plant. It is an example of using the term black to describe something that has negative connotations, rather than an actual description (such as blackboard). We have a perfectly adequate term to describe water from toilets, which is foul water, and in the 21st Century our language should be smarter than this.
Sewage treatment for direct or indirect re-use
Now the term “blackwater treatment”[i] is being used in the UK to describe the on-site treatment of sewage in an eco town or on an eco development, where the effluent is used back in the development for certain non-potable purposes. Although this is a different process to normal sewage treatment in so far as the sewage effluent is treated beyond normal secondary and tertiary treatment, (and the effluent may meet drinking water standards), the technology is not new, is not confined to just “eco” developments, and has a technical term that describes it perfectly, which is sewage treatment for direct re-use. In the US, home of the term “blackwater”[ii], such treatment and distribution schemes, of which there are an increasing number, are now being referred to as simply “water re-use” systems.
~ Direct re-use: the planned and deliberate use of treated sewage. At its most extreme, the sewage effluent is cleaned to potable water standard and injected directly into the mains supplying a town or city. However at present most direct re-use systems clean the sewage effluent so that it is considered fit for purpose for irrigation, WC flushing and urinal flushing, and supply a secondary network of distribution pipework for this water as well as a mains supply network. A separate distribution network is very costly. Therefore it makes economic sense for sewage treatment re-use to be directly into the mains. From 1985 to 1992 the City of Denver, USA, ran a large scale trial of direct re-use and found that water quality parameters were equal to or better than the city’s drinking water. However, public perception about direct re-use for potable water supplies is still mostly negative, and is holding back large scale take-up of this process.
~ Indirect re-use: water that is taken from a river, lake or aquifer that has received sewage or sewage effluent. Much of the water we use in our buildings in the UK could be classified as indirect re-use, i.e. effluent from one town’s sewage treatment plant is discharged into a river, taken out from the same river further downstream, to be cleaned and supplied to the next town. Hence the saying that every glass of water we drink has passed through seven other people’s kidneys first. With planned indirect water re-use the sewage effluent is discharged immediately upstream of the water treatment plant or used to recharge aquifers. Indirect re-use of sewage effluent is beginning to be used far more around the world as water demand increases and the water suppliers need a guaranteed supply.
In the UK the most high profile example of a sewage treatment plant with direct re-use is on the Olympic site. Whilst I have seen some publications refer to it by its technical term I have also seen it referred to as a “blackwater” sewage treatment facility and a “blackwater” treatment system. It is sewage treatment with direct re-use for non potable purposes. It is a highly technical solution; let’s call it by its correct technical name.
[i] The term isn’t even used correctly as “blackwater” treatment plants deal with both foul and waste water (i.e. “blackwater” and greywater).
[ii]The first reference I could find to it was in a US patent applied for in 1974 where water was divided into “white water” (drinking water) and “black water” (sewage from the building).
This article was first published in Green Building Magazine, Spring 2011.
