beyondthegeek+

Around the world and across the all peoples the one thing we all share is water: every being on Earth is fully dependent on it and we’re no exception. Fresh water is more than just the key to life for humanity though, it’s the key to our civilization. Think for a moment about the major cities of the world and you come to realise that their greatness very much depends on their proximity to fresh water. New York has the East and Hudson rivers, the Ancient Romans built the great aqueducts to feed Rome, London has the Thames, Paris the Seine, and Venice is itself set upon a seies of lagoons. Water’s primacy as a building block of civilization is so fundamental that Plato incorporated it as the central medium for his famed 12000 year old advanced civilization: Atlantis.

Plato’s description of Atlantis

What’s all this to do with water today? Well, we’re running out of it. One of every six people in the world don’t have access to fresh water. Pollution in the form of industrial runoff (like sludge and PCBs), raw sewage, and post-consumer dumping (basically garbage) is to blame for much of the growing shortage of water but global climate change is contributing as well. Warming leads to less snowfall in places that require mountain melt-water to furnish their reservoirs.

With a population slated to hit 9 Billion people in by 2050, we’re going to need new sources of freshwater. Desert dwelling societies have worked with these problems for thousands of years and in the UAE, they’ve come up with a novel, modern solution; they make freshwater from sea water.


The UAE’s water Desalination Plant

They call the process desalination. The current method is to boil sea water, freeing it from the salt and any other particulates. The steam has the added benefit of powering electricity-generating turbines. They collect the salt-free condensation and pump that water, fresh water, into cities— but only at terrible expense. The boiling is achieved through burning oil, and it takes about 300,000 gallons of it to make every 10 million gallons of fresh water.

The solution’s effective, but expensive, unsustainable, and actually adds to the problem by putting more CO2 into the atmosphere.

There’s a new way to pull this off though. It’s called The Water Theatre. The machine is relatively simple. Using a process that’s best described as a “seawater greenhouse,” a series of plastic pipes is cooled by pumping cold seawater into them. The salt water’s then sprayed onto a mesh surface, where the warm sea winds blow. The water vaporises when the warm air hits the mesh, freeing it from the salt, and forcing it to condense against the previously mentioned cool pipes. Gravity causes the condensation to slide down the pipes and into trays where the water can be transported and then piped into cities or large agricultural areas.

The device’s space and design needs leave it as a structure that can double as an ampitheatre turning a water-making industrial site from an eyesore, in the case of the UAE plant, to a cultural hub, free from polluting fumes and the steady, cranking noise of machinery.


Artists rendering of the Water Theatre

What better way to enjoy the purity and pleasure of life’s most essential beverage? I just hope they install a wind & solar powered brewery nearby ;-)

I’m not going to write very much on this one. But this I have to say— this is bad. Really bad. China’s got a lot of people, and India does too. As they both become urbanized and focus more on material-based, consumer economies, waste is going to become more and more of a problem, and despite the fact that both nations are strong and independent, they may very well need help getting pointed in the right direction.

There are alternatives to incineration. Gassification, Recycling, Upcyling, Re-purposing, and Composting are just the beginning of the solutions. Installing these practices in the fastest growing industrial societies could save billions of tons of CO2 from harming the environment, and trillions upon trillions of Yuan and Rupees in dealing with those effects, along with the fossil fuels used to run these incinerators. Add the fact that many of these populations are mostly under forty years of age, and we have a recipe for success in alternative waste management.

There are a variety of ways to deal with consumer waste and I look forward to exploring those options in detail in this blog over the next few months.