Water Affordability

From Toilet to Tap

Watch: San Diego's first beer made from recycled water https://t.co/2skclePMP4 via @oddnewsupi

— Dr.Steven D.Sanders (@DocEngineering) May 14, 2017

The Business Case for Sustainability

Consuming Water Conservation

From Where The Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River by David Owen - -

"Still, the long-term consequences of efficiency improvements of all kinds depend on what happens to the savings.  Running a kitchen faucet or flushing a toilet in a municipality with a modern sewage-treatment system is mostly non-consumptive, because the wastewater is treated and used again.  Watering a lawn, in contrast, is almost entirely consumptive, because as far as the municipality is concerned that water disappears as soon as it hits the ground.  Popular conservation schemes can sometimes merely substitute consumptive uses for non-consumptive ones.  Imagine a municipality with so-called block, or tiered, water rates, which are kept low below some threshold, to make ordinary household use affordable, and then rise dramatically to discourage people from casually doing things like washing cars and watering grass.  If residents of that municipality now install bathroom and kitchen fixtures that use less water, they shrink their non-consumptive use - by reducing their wastewater return flows back into the system - while simultaneously making watering their lawns and washing their car more affordable since now they can do it with cheaper water.  They're using water more efficiently, because they're receiving more value from every gallon; but they've shrunk the available supply of the local water system.  The same efficiency efforts can cause operational problems for municipal sewage-treatment facilities, which require volume and dilution in order to function properly.  In 2015, prompted by the drought, Californians were remarkably successful at cutting domestic water use, but an unanticipated consequence in many cities are clogging, corrosion, intrusion by tree roots, and other damage within those cities' waste systems, which were not designed to function without big flows to keep everything moving.  These are problems that can be overcome, but overcoming them costs money.  Conservation increases a municipality's per-gallon cost of financing, building, and maintaining the infrastructure that moves water in both directions, consumers inevitably complain if their bills go up as their consumption goes down."

Climate Change and Singapore

From an excellent series of articles in the New York Times Magazine:

"Much of Singapore lies less than 50 feet above sea level. A third of the island sits around 16 feet above the water — low enough to give planners the jitters. Coastal roads are being raised; a new airport terminal is being built 18 feet above sea level. All the while, the island receives more and more rain each year. “If global temperatures continue to rise,” a government official said last year, “many parts of Singapore could eventually be submerged.”"

Depleting Groundwater

Vital groundwater depleted faster than ever https://t.co/iCrIuytcU5

— Dr.Steven D.Sanders (@DocEngineering) April 14, 2017

A Paragraph to Ponder

From Arup Thoughts Column:

"The increasingly interconnectedness of today’s infrastructure networks poses additional risks to be overcome. In the event that a freak storm damages a key telecoms facility, the danger might be that the ensuing loss of connectivity creates cascading failures, such as suspending key systems at a local power plant or hospital. Hurricane Sandy in 2012 caused many such connected failures. It also damaged data centres relied on by media organisations like BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post. The issue of interconnected failures in vital aspects of our day-to-day infrastructure will require a ‘systems thinking’ response if climate change resilience is to be achieved."

Naturally Resilient Communities

Link to a guide to green infrastructure.

The Post Fossil Fuel City Contest

Link to the contest.

Rising Waters and the Costs of Inaction

From the New York Times by Michael Kimmelman and Josh Haner - Rising China Waters Imperil a World of Progress:

"That’s a trillion-dollar question, according to the World Bank, which projected the potential cost of damage to coastal cities worldwide from rising seas to be somewhere near that figure. It estimates that China is already losing 1.4 percent of its annual G.D.P. to climate change. Last spring, residents in Guangzhou woke again to flooded streets after a furious downpour swept across the delta and drowned entire neighborhoods of the city. Local news media, once more, said that there had been nothing like it in years. And as usual, Chinese social media sites buzzed with posts of people trapped in flooded cars. One man, named Pang, became an overnight celebrity for catching a fish with his umbrella, then going home and making soup with the head and tail. “It was fresh and tender,” he told The Guangzhou Daily."

Superblocks

Rethinking Coffee's Water Footprint

From Daily Coffee News:

"More than 99% of coffee’s water footprint is the water for “growing the coffee plant,” according to the 2003 coffee study. The problems is that the WF methodology does not sufficiently recognize the basics of the water cycle (or hydrological cycle), and specifically the role of green water. WF mistakenly presumes that any water utilized by crops through evapotranspiration is “consumed,” in the same way that water is consumed when it’s pumped from aquifers.

This conceptual flaw becomes extremely important for rainfed systems (such as coffee) where virtually all the water used is green water. Technically, hydrologists would say that green water is utilized through evapotranspiration, but this is not the same as being consumed. The water vapor from coffee trees cycles through the hydrological cycle naturally, becoming precipitation once again someplace else, rather quickly.

Depending on context, the utilization and cycling of green water through a landscape often contributes very positively to ecosystem services, such as mitigating floods and runoff. By changing this one assumption in the WF methodology, the water footprint for coffee would be considerably reduced."

NYC Wastewater Resiliency Plan

Link to the report.

This Is Market Street

A Model of Climate Change Resilience - Jackson Family Wines

Falcons, Drones, Data: A Winery Battles Climate Change https://t.co/XkyboxOE4B

— Dr.Steven D.Sanders (@DocEngineering) January 8, 2017

2017 Water Update

Engineering Goes on a Diet

From the Financial Times by Peggy Hollinger - How to beat a weight problem:

""If you take 1,000 lbs (454 kg) out of the weight of an engine that is worth 1 per cent of fuel.  It is a big financial savings but also good for the environment," says Ric Parker, former director of research and technology at Rolls-Royce and now chairman of the EU's Clean Sky Initiative.  "Anything you can do to reduce weight is a good thing.""

Resiliency Term of the Week - Rewilding

Arup | Thoughts | Rewilding cities for resilience https://t.co/Tvfzplbrxu

— Dr.Steven D.Sanders (@DocEngineering) December 10, 2016

Flood Town U.S.A.

When Climate Change Meets Sprawl: Why Houston's ‘Once-In-A-Lifetime' Floods Keep Happening https://t.co/M32Jpg6zot

— Dr.Steven D.Sanders (@DocEngineering) December 8, 2016

Climate Change and the Great Barrier Reef