Tag: water

A Reflection of Your Water Consumption

A designer has created a nifty concept to show people how much water they use while they are in the washroom. A mirror visualizes how much water you are using thanks to LEDs and RFID technology so that while you are washing/looking at your face you can see your water consumption.

Designer Jin Kim’s idea is that the mirror breaks down daily, monthly and annual use of water. As you use too much water, there’s a control in the mirror so your supply can be limited. And if the lights are meaningless to the user, there are also icons for those who are affected by water misuse – kids, ecosystems, polar bears – so you’re guilted into shutting off the faucet.

At the end of a year, you can see your usage patterns and know what kind of progress you’ve made in trimming down your consumption.

More words and images at Treehugger.

Thanks Shea!

Bottle Water Sales Decreasing

The Washington Post has some good news that’s worth noting: sales of bottle water are not faring well in the current economy. This is fantastic news for the environment as bottled water is a huge drain on resources (just think about the distance a bottle of water needs to travel compared to water from your tap).

According to Food & Water Watch, more than 17 million barrels of oil — enough to fuel 1 million cars for a year– are needed to produce the plastic water bottles sold in the United States annually. And about 86 percent of the empty bottles get thrown into the trash rather than recycled. Beverage companies have responded through recycling initiatives and purchasing carbon offsets.

Hauter said she has worked on water issues for about a decade but that the movement took off about three years ago. The group fans out to festivals and other public events pouring water for attendees into corn-based, biodegradable cups or metal containers bearing the name of its campaign, “Take Back the Tap.”

PuRE Makes Swimming Pools a Good Thing

Here’s a groovy idea that will hopefully take off: use swimming pools to filter water. Swimming pools consume a lot of water and energy and this concept is designed to take these resource-hogs and turn them into something useful. It’s part of a contest to make suburbs livable.

PuRE

Using the same principles employed in constructed wetlands, puRE treats wastewater through six stages. Wastewater first flows into closed treatment tanks during the first two stages before reaching four separate purification cells in stages 3-6. These purification cells contain several species of aquatic plants and animals which remove pollutants naturally and even allow for small-scale food production as a by-product. The solids from the wastewater stream are filtered and directed to a communal methane digester, generating another bounty for its users – power.

For those of with you with pools but think drinkable water is too expensive here’s some tips on how to make your swimming pool a little kinder for the environment.

A Simple Buoy That Pumps Water

Pumping water into filtrations plants and reservoirs is not really an exciting topic, except when someone invents something that’s so simple that it seems that it should exist. A British inventor has created a pump that uses only wave power that is a self-cleaning device that essentially pumps water for free.

Dubbed ‘Searaser’, it consists of what looks like a navigation buoy, but is in fact a simple arrangement of ballast and floats connected by a piston. As a wave passes the device, the float is lifted, raising the piston and compressing water. The float sinks back down on the tail of the wave on to a second float, compressing water again on the downstroke.

What is particularly clever about Searaser, however, is its simplicity. Where most marine energy devices have sealed, lubricated innards and complex electronics, Searaser is lubricated entirely by seawater, has no electronic components and is even self-cleaning. Smith describes it as ‘Third-World mechanics’, but this belies the sophistication of the concept.

‘The beauty of it is that we’re only making a pump, and bringing water ashore,’ he explains. ‘All the other technology needed to generate the electricity already exists.’

Organic Farming Uses Less Water

In case you needed yet another reason to buy organic food it has come to light that organic farming uses less water than factory/industrial farming.

A study released by Cornell University Professor David Pimentel in 2005 reported that organic farming produces the same corn and soybean yields as conventional farming and uses 30 percent less energy and less water. Moreover, because organic farming systems do not use pesticides, they also yield healthier produce and do not contribute to groundwater pollution.

In addition to its conservation of water, organic farming has also been praised for the economic opportunities it creates for farmers in developing countries. Those farmers have not only found an international market for their organic products, but in draught-ridden India, organic rice farmers have found that using less water is not only a necessity, but is also financially practical. Indian rice farmers cited in a 2007 World Wildlife Foundation study claimed that the system of rice intensification (SRI) helped them yield more crop with less water.