Recently, Denver Water’s board approved its proposed “Lead Reduction Program Plan” to fully replace the estimated 75,000 lead service lines (LSLs) in their system within 15 years. The plan is an innovative solution that will remove the primary source of lead within Denver Water’s system, while avoiding the use of orthophosphate that can further exacerbate nutrient pollution problems in rivers, streams, and oceans.
Determining whether a region has sufficient water to satisfy the needs of people who live there is a complicated and imperfect process. Our research team has developed a new approach to measure water scarcity by using satellites hundreds of miles in space.
When a municipality or business wants to reuse their wastewater, some applications require more treatment than others due to the quality of the wastewater. Many standard wastewater treatment systems consist of pretreatment, primary treatment, and secondary treatment stages. By the end of the secondary stage, a majority of the pollutants, solids, organics, inorganics, and metals have been removed or reduced. This is where reverse osmosis wastewater treatment can be utilized in a third stage process.
Wildfire is a natural part of many ecosystems, but recently these fires have become more severe, burning more acres and causing destruction in the western parts of the United States. Recently, U.S. EPA researchers have begun to look at the impact of these fires on our water supply, the natural resource we depend on for drinking, irrigation, fishing, and recreation.
With memories of the wettest U.S. spring on record still fresh, it seems strange to hear that in many parts of the nation, groundwater supplies — the water stored underneath our feet, in rocks, and sediments — are lower than normal. This includes places with wet climates, such as southern Georgia, coastal Maryland, and Cleveland.
A Q&A with scientist Jeff Urban, who explains forward osmosis and how Berkeley Lab is pushing the frontiers of this emerging technology
Isn’t it ironic that our beautiful blue planet, covered 70 percent with water, is struggling to meet citizens’ water needs? Yes, and the reasons are obvious. Out of the Earth’s total water, less than 3 percent is available as freshwater, and a portion of it is actually accessible. Uneven distribution of fresh waterbodies and population across the globe further skew water supply and demand ratios. Also, climate change, deforestation, desertification, droughts, floods, and depletion of natural waterbodies resulting from anthropogenic and natural activities add to these miseries.
As we celebrate Smart Irrigation Month, it's a great time to highlight not only smart technologies, but the smart people and smart decisions behind them. One remarkably smart tool that ties all three of those elements together is the Irrigation Consumer Bill of Rights by Dr. Charles Burt of the Irrigation Training and Research Center (ITRC) at the California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) in San Luis Obispo.
There’s been talk lately about empathy, its components and its general decline. A decline in empathy concerns me as an assistant professor in the University of Saskatchewan’s School of Environment and Sustainability: I study how people cope with water problems or learn to share scarce resources, like water, gas, oil, and energy.
As Midwest states struggled with record spring flooding this year, the Southwest was wrestling with the opposite problem: not enough water. On May 20, 2019, federal officials and leaders from seven states signed the Colorado River Drought Contingency Plan, a sweeping new water management agreement for this arid region.
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