Saving water runoff
Have you ever driven down the street during a rainy day, avoiding the large puddles or temporary streams running rapidly towards the corner drain pipe? Or if like many others, have you driven rapidly through the puddles to make the biggest wave possible? Most do not have to wonder where that water ends up because they know. Society hears the news about the storm-water run-off problems, or the pollution of the beaches because the storm drains cannot handle the volume of water. Even with drought conditions, there are billions of gallons of fresh water being dumped into the ocean every year, becoming salt water, unusable for human consumption, unusable for agriculture, only to be pumped back through a desalinization plant for redistribution to the public. Moreover, given California’s water shortage, billions of taxpayer dollars are being spent to build a plant to make salt water into fresh water. However, besides the cost there is the issue of what to do with the waste created as expressed in the book The Ripple Effect:
Perhaps the most contentious aspect of desalinization, however, is how to dispose of the highly concentrated salt brine left over from the plant’s water cleansing. Every hundred gallons of desalinated seawater yields fifteen to fifty gallons of drinking water (depending on the process, and the water to begin with), and fifty to eighty gallons of brine. Where, the highly concentrated brine is flushed back into the sea. It can destroy aquatic species, particularly those in the egg or immature phase of development. (Prud’homme336).
Why not invest smart dollars conserving the fresh water already available? Of course, society must learn to change old habits: It should start conserving, quit calling water purified from sewer waste “toilet to tap,” which has been widely used by the media as well as politicians and has only a negative effect on the public’s perception of reclaimed water, and start investing in a system for saving rain water runoff. Although
Perhaps the most contentious aspect of desalinization, however, is how to dispose of the highly concentrated salt brine left over from the plant’s water cleansing. Every hundred gallons of desalinated seawater yields fifteen to fifty gallons of drinking water (depending on the process, and the water to begin with), and fifty to eighty gallons of brine. Where, the highly concentrated brine is flushed back into the sea. It can destroy aquatic species, particularly those in the egg or immature phase of development. (Prud’homme336).
Why not invest smart dollars conserving the fresh water already available? Of course, society must learn to change old habits: It should start conserving, quit calling water purified from sewer waste “toilet to tap,” which has been widely used by the media as well as politicians and has only a negative effect on the public’s perception of reclaimed water, and start investing in a system for saving rain water runoff. Although
Cited: Twenty-first Century. New York: Scribner, 2011. Print. "Water." Mandatory Use Restrictions. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Nov. 2014