Tag: Water

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Recover More

Water Use as a Result of Recycling: Is it Worth It?

As children we are all taught a few of the fundamental ways to act environmentally friendly, including turning off the lights when you leave a room, turning off the faucet immediately after use, shutting doors and windows when the air conditioner is running, and recycling as much as possible. But what do we do when one of these sustainable acts negates the other?
People recognize recycling as a simple way to protect the environment. Unfortunately, depending on the material being recycled, the act of recycling can expend a large amount of water. For example, appropriately recycling plastics often means using a lot of water to ensure the package is decontaminated before putting it in the bin. On the How2Recycle Label, we provide instructions such as “Rinse Before Recycling,” “Rinse Tray,” and “Rinse and Replace Cap” to remind consumers to remove contamination before recycling the package.
In regions such as the Western United States, people might opt to conserve water and throw away a package rather than waste a resource that is currently insufficient in the area. Recycling to conserve materials versus not recycling to conserve water… it’s quite the apples to oranges comparison. I’m hoping a few at-home experiments, will give us a better feel for how much water it takes to recycle different plastic packages.
I used a couple items from my lunch today for the experiment:
1) A spaghetti frozen meal packaged in a polypropylene tray. A meal that left quite a bit of food residue on the package after consumption. It took me about 3 cups (.7 liters) of water to clean this item enough to recycle it appropriately.
Spaghetti_recycling
2) Yogurt in a polypropylene tub (don’t worry, I didn’t eat the whole tub…). Due to the product’s soft texture the yogurt did not stick to the sides of the tub much, and I was able to clean the package out for recycling with about 1.5 cups (.35 liters) of water.
yogurt_recycling
Using the anecdotal evidence from my at-home lunch experiment, preparing truly recyclable packages to be recycled doesn’t have to be wasteful at all. In fact, you know all of the water you used to wash your big frying pan? Don’t let it immediately go down the drain. Instead, reuse the water to rinse out your packages. Remember, packages don’t need to be sparkling clean, they simply need to be clean enough to avoid contaminating the recycling stream.
 

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Uncategorized

USGS reports U.S. Water Use Down

The US Geological Survey has just released the latest data on water use across the US, and the good news is that it is down dramatically – 13 percent lower than in 2005. Even though our population is growing, water conservation tools and practices by farmers, factories, and households are becoming widespread and are having a noticeable effect.
Despite the overall reduction in water usage across the country (and that’s a great achievement, don’t get me wrong), we need to do a lot more to use our water resources wisely. This is important everywhere across the country, but of critical importance in the western third of the US, where according to the US Drought Monitor, more than 50 million people are currently living in drought conditions. According to the Monitor, the entire state – yes, 100% – of California is experiencing at least a minimum level of “moderate drought,” with 58.4% of California’s area suffering the maximum level of “exceptional drought” conditions.
Of interest to all who live in California should be the fact that Californians continue to use the most water of any other state (11% of total withdrawals of all water categories and 10% of total freshwater withdrawals).
Total water withdrawals by State
The top use of water in California, by a wide margin, is for agricultural irrigation (60.7%). Next comes thermoelectric power generation (17.4%), followed closely by public use (16.6%). Yes, it’s important to continue installing more efficient cooling systems in thermoelectric power plants and encouraging residents to conserve water at home. But we need to acknowledge the elephant in the room: unless we address the delivery and use of water in agriculture, the big picture won’t change much. We need to support the agriculture industry, but we also must insist on finding and implementing technology and irrigation practices that use our water wisely, leaving more for the natural environment while still growing the food we need to feed our population.

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GreenBlue

WRI Shows Us What the Risks to the Global Water Supply Look Like

The recently released Aqueduct tool from the World Resources Institute is an excellent example of the effective visual presentation of complex data. Aqueduct measures and maps water risk, and the project recently completed new research that “scores water-related risks facing 180 countries and 100 river basins. This is the first national-level data of its kind, evaluating competition for available water supplies, annual and seasonal supply variability, flood occurrence, and drought severity.”
We at GreenBlue appreciate the science behind the tool, as well as its interactive design and visual impact. Check out the tool here: http://www.wri.org/our-work/project/aqueduct

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GreenBlue

Your Company’s Commitment to Reducing Eutrophication Just Became Easier

It’s pretty likely that your company’s sustainability goals do not include a commitment to reducing the amount of eutrophication associated with its activities. In fact, I’m willing to wager that most readers might not even know what eutrophication is. That’s okay. It’s a bit science-y, and it doesn’t elicit half as much response from consumers as, say, carbon footprints and waste generation. For the purposes here, let’s just say that it’s a water quality problem caused by an overabundance of algae, which is caused by excess nutrients introduced by certain emissions. Maintaining good water quality is an important part of sustainability, so in short, eutrophication is a pollution problem that we ought to address.
The typical mentality used to address pollution is to think that it should be prevented at the source. Usually it is advocated that companies should try their very hardest to drive those emissions down to zero, and that usually means awaiting new cleaner technologies. The newer mentality, however, applies the idea that any output, wanted or unwanted, is a resource. This mentality was made famous by the recycling industry and the problem of solid waste generation, but it certainly also rings true for the problem of eutrophication. After all, eutrophication is caused by an overabundance of nutrients, and nutrients are certainly a resource.
To put this mentality into practice, a startup company called Algix is partnering with the University of Georgia and SPC member Kimberly-Clark. Their plan: capture the nutrient-rich water emissions from industry and agriculture, let nature take its course in a controlled environment, and then harvest the algae before releasing the water. Then instead of causing eutrophication problems in our freshwater resources, the algae is used as a feedstock for bioplastic conversion. Pretty neat, huh?
Along with Novomer’s efforts to create plastics from carbon dioxide emissions, it goes to show that “pollution” is an unwanted problem only until we can figure out how to make something out of it. Once the value of eutrophication-causing emissions are understood, your company’s commitment to reducing eutrophication might be a bit easier – and possibly even profitable.