Taking the Waste out of Wastewater

A recent study shows that in cities across the globe wastewater is being used in urban agriculture.

This is hardly surprising. The bigger question is why do we so often let wastewater simply go to waste? It seems we ought to be able to find ways to safely utilize it without having to simply separate out the "waste" and send it to landfills.

Excerpt from article about the report below:

The practice was being used on 20 million hectares (almost 50 million acres) of land, especially in Asian countries like China, India and Vietnam, but also "nearly every city of sub-Saharan Africa and in many Latin American cities as well," the statement said.

In Ghana's capital Accra, for example, which has almost two million inhabitants, some 200,000 city residents purchase vegetables each day produced on just 100 hectares of urban agricultural land irrigated with wastewater, the report said.

The report did not call for a ban on the use of wastewater, saying such a move could "adversely affect urban consumers, farmers and others who depend on urban agriculture."

Instead, it urged local authorities to develop policies for safer wastewater use, and advocated low-cost measures such as the use of drip irrigation, correct washing of produce, and wastewater storage ponds to allow suspended solids to settle out.

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Something Old, Something New and Something Blue

Something Old: In 1969 City Visionary Jane Jacobs was apparently a regular commentator on the CBC evening news. Check out this great clip of her explaining what she thought Toronto was doing right and wrong.

Something New: Sometimes all you have to do is ask. Downtown Seattle managed to cut energy use by 3 megawatts after a minor mishap caused the power supply to be reduced. Of course, that's nothing compared to the major mishap that caused Juneau to drastically reduce energy use. Seattle, I suspect, also isn't likely to preserve those more minor energy savings like Juneau has to a phenomenal degree.

Something Blue: Jonathan Mitchell's "City X" is a perfectly depressing (i.e. blue) audio piece on the destruction malls can wreck on a traditional city, Downtown and community. The sound of the piece is as haunting as the effects of sprawl on our landscapes.

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Living (and Dying) Green

By now we've all heard of the importance of living "green," but what about after we head up into the big green soybean field in the sky?

The City of Colorado Springs, in an attempt to increase cemetery revenue, is working towards offering green burials.

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Zero-Impact Government

I'm in the middle of reading William McDonough's and Michael Braungart's "Cradle to Cradle," a brilliant and unusual criticism of both the environmental movement and the Industrial Revolution. More on that later - perhaps after I've actually finished the book.

What it got me thinking about is the role Government, particularly Local Government, often play in polluting the environment.

In the Idaho Republican Platform (a party I'm proudly a member of, by-the-bye) we added the following statement at our State Convention earlier this year:

We recognize that it is ultimately the individual’s responsibility to act as a steward of their environment and that government involvement should be limited at best. We discourage international regulations on industry which attempt to halt the production of certain industrial byproducts. Instead we encourage citizens to adopt buying habits that promote a clean earth.

I generally agree with the above statement and certainly agree with its intent. Industry will change as it realizes the economic advantages of change - and if we want to have a healthy economy as well as a healthy planet it's important that profit remain at least one of industry's core motives.

However, in the case of Government, profit (clearly) isn't a motivating factor, nor should it be. But it seems reasonable to me that as citizens we ought to expect that in serving us Government would at the very least not put more toxic substances out into the environment.

This seems like a particularly reasonable goal for, say, a Parks Department - and yet most Parks Departments aren't even reaching for the goal of zero-impact or (ideally) having a positive impact on the environment.

Likewise, a City's City Hall (the very symbol of City Government) should not have a negative impact on the environment. This seems to me to be a reasonable standard to hold our Government to, if not our Industry.

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