CHILEAN authorities have approved a $2.8 billion plan to dam two rivers in Patagonia for hydro-electricity, triggering angry protests and claims that swathes of pristine wilderness will be destroyed. …

Chili wants progress, but is a high-energy future the way to go? OK, how about Floodagonia?

When I lived in New Orleans a few decades back, one thing was sure: rats living amongst the rocks near the river lose these homes when the river rises. So, wear thick boots down at the French Quarter.

Rats can’t swim (I don’t think), they have teeth, and they can transmit diseases.

They’re finding I-131 in the Philadelphia drinking water, and it’s not from Japan. But no doubt the scrutiny on the Japanese reactors led to this information coming to the forefront. Among other issues, there are people here with some explaining to do. It seems it took 3 years for information about elevated levels to come out. A few are soft-pedaling the data, saying that it was not a prolonged exposure. But who really knows? And alerts should have gone out so the source could be ascertained. There also may have been undetected spikes.

My immediate thought was: what is the source of this water? It turns out it is the Schuylkill River and

More than 70 wastewater-treatment plants discharge water into the Schuylkill above Philadelphia

One source, or sources, could be these treatment plants, or discharges to these plants. Dischargers to wastewater treatment plants have what are called “pretreatment permits.” So, there’s a need to investigate all these discharges to look for the I-131. But there are also a lot of hazardous waste sites upstream,  and no doubt also many industrial dischargers permitted under the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits.

As with the formaldehyde issue I wrote about in a previous post, this Philadelphia matter probably would not have come to light had not another incident occurred.

Fishermen will be paid to catch plastic, rather than fish, under bold new plans from the EU’s fisheries chief, aimed at providing fleets with an alternative source of income to reduce pressure on dwindling fish stocks.

Read more about efforts to clean up the Mediterranean at the blog of the Commissioner in charge of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, Maria Damanaki. Good stuff.

North Carolina’s Source Water Assessment Program (SWAP) provides assessments of each public drinking water intake in North Carolina. These assessments provide a relative susceptibility rating calculated using state-wide data.

Source Water Assessment Reports for water systems in North Carolina are here. (The full page takes a while to download, but a bit of patience will result in a whole lot of reports becoming available. If one were interested in a particular source, for example, one could choose a city obtaining drinking water from that source; or simply look for the owner of a water system in which one has interest).

Brought to you by the American Water Works Association.

A sort of disconnect has arisen in recent years in terms of whether or not this legislation applies to waterways that do not directly connect to other bodies of water. I’d call this a kind of loophole, which the Supreme Court has ruled on, apparently, but which is still in play. Now, it seems that, as the WaPo reported the other day, the

Obama administration announced … that it will impose stricter pollution controls on millions of acres of wetlands and tens of thousands of miles of streams.

The new guidelines from the Environmental Protection Agency, which will be codified in a federal regulation later this year, could prevent the dumping of mining waste and the discharge of industrial pollutants to waters that feed swimming holes and drinking water supplies. The specific restriction will depend on the waterway.

Sounds like a plan.

Now, EPA has formulated new nutrient levels for Florida waters, and cattlemen are not pleased:

In a suit in U.S. district court, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the Florida Cattlemen’s Association said the EPA usurped state authority by imposing the nutrient limits and did not show the limits will be beneficial.

Steve Strickland, president of the Florida cattle group, said EPA could use the numerical limits “as a template for the rest of the country,” including the upper Mississippi River basin, the heart of U.S. crop and livestock production.

and

Early this year, the American Farm Bureau Federation and its Pennsylvania affiliate filed suit against EPA’s “pollution diet” to reduce nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment runoff in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. …

Some things are going to have to give to clean up the environment. Perhaps one of them is these food subsidies, which exist in the form of environmental breaks for agriculture.

Suppose you help manage facilities at a large institution. So large, in fact, that your institution is the largest consumer of potable water in town. You’ve done a lot to cut down on water use. You’ve put in low-flush toilets and automatic shut-offs on bathroom sinks. Means are in place for harvesting and reusing stormwater on fields and other areas. The wastewater treatment plant produces reclaimed water tailored to feed a large chiller plant, and is slated to feed one or two more in the future.

You’ve worked hard, but there’s more to do! No rest for the weary, I know. But this is an exciting time! Now it’s time to take it to the next level: ensuring that all new buildings have dual plumbing so that all toilets, irrigation, fire-fighting equipment and other non-potable uses can be met with reclaimed water supplied with small wastewater mining systems.

How to do this? Well, it’s quite standard in the US and other countries to implement what one might call “building-level” blackwater systems. Basically, one installs a sewage treatment system in the basement, or nearby to serve a cluster of buildings. The system produces sludge, the bane of many a wastewater system, but not here. The sludge, conveniently, goes down the drain, down to the sewage plant, which handles it quite readily.  The disinfected wastewater flushes toilets, fills fire-fighting storage, irrigates, and meets other demands.

Here’s an example, of a building in Australia called CH2, with a system that

processes more than 26,000 gallons of wastewater per day, and the effluent provides recycled wastewater for toilet flushing, a roof garden and other uses. The sewage treatment plant, coupled with a 5,280-gallon rainwater and fire-sprinkler-test water collection and storage tank onsite, supply 100 percent of CH2’s non-potable water.

Who would run this system. The institution or the local water and wastewater utility? It doesn’t matter. Just get ‘er done! This approach just might start a trend.

And what about lost revenues to the water utility? Well, some of that can be made up by charging a bit extra to treat that sludge, which is stronger than regular domestic wastewater! And, later, the water utility might not need to expand it’s water treatment plant as soon, so there’s a big savings. This is starting to sound pretty good!