Another spring is here, a time of change and wonderment. The landscape changes, the types of birds one sees and the songs they sing change. Everything seems to burst with renewed life, including some water supplies!

For well water users and some municipally supplied water users, a change in weather can create a change in water. And friends, change is not always good. Well water may change with a rainy season, which can introduce materials to the aquifer that had not previously been there. Some municipalities change the source of their water supply with the changing seasons and weather conditions. Often times, the supply is from a well, and a different well means different water. Even two wells on the same property can produce two entirely different types of water.

In the spring and the fall, we can count on receiving calls from customers about this very thing. Common unwanted changes to the water include new colors, odors and tastes, which are produced by a variety of causes.

Irons’ reddish brown stains are probably the most familiar to us all. However, tannins—the result of rotting vegetation—cause staining very similar to iron. Shale, organics and manganese can result in black staining. These are just a few causes of color in water. If you find that you have any of these in your water supply, don’t despair; they can be treated.

Odor is another issue that can arise from the changing of seasons or weather. A concern we hear frequently is rotten egg smell resulting from sulfur. This can leave one wondering if an egg was missed in the Easter Egg Hunt. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple and we have to admit it is the water. 

Anything that alters the color of water can alter the taste. As an example, iron may produce a metallic taste. We frequently hear from people that grew up on well water and not only expect but enjoy the mineral or metallic taste. If it wasn’t present in your water before, though, it might come as quite a shock.

We even get calls from people with water softeners. Now, you may be asking yourself why your water softener is allowing these changes to come through. A water softener is designed to remove calcium and magnesium. These are the hardness minerals that create scale in pipes, appliances, sinks and tubs. Often times, however, staining and odor require a different type of treatment.

Color, taste and odor can become a permanent part of your water supply or they may be passing with the seasons. Rest assured; with proper testing and treatment, your water can be brought back to normal in no time. Your local water treatment professional can advise you based on their experience as to whether it may be passing or permanent and provide the perfect solution for you.

Contact Diana M.

Learning to SCUBA dive at an early age in the chilly Gulf of Maine gave me exciting views of an incredible hidden world. This led to other adventures exploring the salty world beneath the waves, researching whales, coral reefs and fisheries. On one of these occasions I spent about six months on a tall ship, where our drinking water was taken from the ocean and filtered by a specialized, high pressure, reverse osmosis (RO) membrane. The RO takes in sea water and rejects the salts, leaving fairly pure, fresh water. People can’t drink sea water directly because it puts the body’s natural balance of salts out of whack—there’s so much salt in sea water that it actually drives the water out of our bodies. Not so good when you’re thirsty. I’m reminded of a line from an old poem, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, where a sailor and his boat were trapped far from land: “Water, water every where Nor any drop to drink.”

It’s incredible that the oceans hold over 97% of all the water on our planet. The remaining is fresh water, most of which is locked up in the polar ice caps and permanent ice on mountains; less than 1% of the Earth’s water is potentially available for drinking. If you filled a five gallon bucket and said that it represents all the water on our planet, nearly all of it would be too salty to drink. In fact, roughly ½ a cup from that whole bucket would represent all that we have in the ground, our lakes, rivers, and ponds. Consider that even less than that is easy to make safe for drinking—not so muddy, brackish or polluted that extra measures are needed. Unfortunately, there are many places where people can’t afford to treat the water and end up drinking it as-is, contaminants and all. The worse the water quality is, the harder we have to work to make our tiny existing fresh water supplies drinkable.

This means, for those who can afford treatment, we put in energy, equipment, disinfection chemicals, time and effort to make it potable. Is all that water in our oceans unavailable to us, like it was for the Ancient Mariner? Like on my ship, when it comes to salts, high pressure RO membranes are now used for many communities around the world (including here in the United States) to make drinkable water from the oceans. Another common way to do this is distillation. These are important technologies for areas with access to salty water but not enough fresh and as you may have guessed they do require significant energy inputs. 

Image courtesy of DewPoint Systems.

Another interesting technology, DewPoint Systems' RainDome,uses naturally cool sea water to draw moisture from the air without electricity or moving parts. In coastal areas where the conditions are right, the fresh water it makes can be used for drinking and even to irrigate crops.Using the oceans to produce drinking water is not only possible, increasingly, it’s a reality for a thirsty world.
 

Want to learn more? Check out the following resources.

Desalination by Reverse Osmosis:

• Reverse Osmosis on How Stuff Works
  
• Desalination by Reverse Osmosis in the UNEP Source Book

Contact Mark B.

In May, 2012, I returned to Nicaragua with Aqua Clara International and Fairmount Minerals. We worked with the slow sand filters that Aqua Clara and a group called AMOS have been installing throughout the country. Access to safe drinking water is a major health issue Nicaragua and in many other places around the world. Slow sand filtration is not new, nor is it unique to Aqua Clara or Nicaragua. The ones I’m talking about provide drinking water to a single household but they can also be bigger to serve a school or community. Household filters come in different shapes and sizes, depending on whose design it is and what materials are available. Basically, it is a container with a layer of coarse gravel at the bottom with smaller and small gravel on top of that, until finally the topmost layer is fine sand. Dirty water is poured in at the top and displaces filtered water so the good stuff just pours out the tap. The sand does more than simply strain out the bad stuff – it supports a biological environment that gives the harmless microbes the opportunity to eat or out-compete the ones that make people sick. It’s a simple but highly effective technology for the prevention of water-borne diseases.

Household slow sand filters are normally made by local people with locally available materials, which serve an overarching goal of helping people to help themselves. When parts and materials are not specially imported, a drinking water filter becomes more financially accessible to the end user and more serviceable. Another important benefit of this strategy is that the builders develop an intimate understanding of how these things are supposed to work – this enables them to also teach about and repair the units.

One of the interviews we had in May included a family that had been using the slow-sand filter for about six months. The father reported that he can now work every day because he no longer feels weak, and specific health issues were better than they had been in years. He felt this was because he was now drinking the filtered water. That made sense considering the consequences for an adult body to be constantly fighting off infections in the gut.

Simply put, slow sand filters can and do change and save lives every day. If you’re interested in exploring further, here are just a few links to some of the many resources available on the subject.

• World Health Organization, Water Sanitation and Health, "Slow Sand Filtration"
• Surfers Without Borders, "Slow Sand Filtration"
• National Environment Service Center, National Drinking Water Clearinghouse, "Slow Sand Filtration"
• Biosand Filter
• Centre for Affordable Water and Sanitation Technology (multiple resources on Biosand Filters)

An additional list of resources for slow sand filters can be found here.

Contact Mark B.

Aqua Clara provides point-of-use water filters to impoverished people in developing countries. Kinetico hosted an information session where employees from Kinetico and Fairmount Minerals learned how these slow-sand water filters are made and about the programs that train people in rural communities how to make and maintain them. 

Nicaragua is the second poorest nation in the western hemisphere: the average income is about three dollars a day. There are major health problems, especially in rural areas, caused by drinking contaminated water. As a result, people have to spend money on medicines to treat water-borne diseases. Because they are sick so often, they have less time for work or going to school. This reinforces a cycle of poverty and disease that can be difficult to break without outside resources.

The Aqua Clara program includes educating the end-users on why the slow-sand filters are important and how to build, use and maintain them. A key part of program success is regular follow-up visits for additional support. In November 2011, I went to Nicaragua to be part of a team that included folks from Fairmount Minerals, Aqua Clara and Nicaraguans. We went to remote villages to see whether existing slow-sand filters were being used properly and to find out how effective they actually were. Deep in the tropical volcanic hills, we were greeted by village leaders and taken to homes where filters had been installed. The water filters were frequently located in a hot, dark kitchen that was sometimes just 6’ x 7’, had a swept dirt floor, a tin roof, and walls made from whatever was available. Often chickens and other animals were present. 

The filters we examined ranged from months to years old. Our assessments included household interviews mostly with the matriarchs. In many places, it is not unusual for women and older girls to be responsible for making sure the home has enough water for their cooking and cleaning as well as for the family to drink. In many African villages this can mean a child has to walk for miles to bring the water back home, though where we were in Nicaragua water was drawn from nearby wells. Our site visits also included measuring turbidity and taking water samples from the raw source and the filter outlet so we could grow bacteria on special plates and find out just how bad the situation was.

As you can see from the photo, these filters dramatically reduced the amount of bacteria in the water. The blue spots are actually colonies of dangerous E. coli, and the red spots are coliform bacteria.

Once the bacteria plates had time to incubate and I saw the results, I took a moment to look around again. What I saw were toddlers exploring and children laughing, playing and going to school. I saw families who depend on being healthy enough to make whatever living they could from small plots of land way out in the hinterlands. As a former Peace Corps Volunteer, it not only brought back memories, but also reinforced why this kind of work continues to be so important. Health in rural communities like the ones we were in starts with clean water. It’s good to be part of a company that intimately knows the value of water and is committed to sharing our knowledge to help others gain access to safe and adequate supplies.

Photos courtesy of Dave Chew.

Contact Mark B.

When we think about fluoride we immediately associate it with dental products, “Oh yeah, that’s the stuff they put in toothpaste isn’t it?” While true, this is not the only source of the substance. Most natural drinking water and nearly all food have trace levels of fluoride in them. What’s more, in the U.S. approximately 50% of our population drinks water that has had fluoride intentionally added to it. The reason: proponents of fluoridation and the ADA (The American Dental Association) specifically, have shown that fluoride, when ingested or added to dental products in the right amount, reduces the incident of tooth decay. Notice that I said in the right amount. I’m not going to get into the debate of whether fluoridation is good or bad. Like many things in life, a little of something may be good, and a lot may be bad. Nuff said.

This whole subject has been controversial for more than 60 years. For an in-depth report on this subject I refer you to the August 1st 1988 C&E News Special Report “Fluoridation of Water” written by Bette Hileman. You may find the report through a web search or at your local library. While a little old, it contains a lot of very good information, both pro and con.

Fast forward to 2012. It seems that this topic is now coming back around. What we thought were proper levels back then, are now being re-assessed and it is generally believed the acceptable or beneficial amount of fluoride in drinking water should be lowered. Well, that’s not much of a problem for cities or towns that intentionally add it to their water; they will simply dial back the dose. But what about the estimated 15% of our population (43 million people) that get their water from private wells? How do they know if they have a safe level of fluoride?

Well, the answer lies with the agency in your particular state that is responsible for your drinking water. This is a great resource to find out about “What’s in your Water.” I didn’t say “wallet”, but it could be if your level is too high and you need to do something about it. An excellent example of the type of information that is available can be found at: www.epa.ohio.gov/ddagw/gwqcp pubs.aspx. You can just click on the fact sheet for the short version (about three pages) or the full report (10 pages). Your state may have a similar site. Or, if you are really concerned, have your water tested by an accredited lab, that way you will know exactly where you stand.

Contact Ed R.

Fasten Your Seat Belt...

How many functions do we perform each day in our lives, primarily based on a “just in case” philosophy. Our automobile seat belt is probably one of the most prevalent, and it is now required by law in most places.  Other functions that could be broadly lumped into this category might be: using hand sanitizers, carrying an umbrella, taking vitamins, changing the password frequently on our computer, locking our doors, etc. Maybe it’s “better safe than sorry”, rather than “just in case”, but whatever the term, it is a widely accepted force in our society today.

I recently read in Bloomberg Businessweek, and  in my local newspaper, that a top official of the CDC’s* National Center for Environmental Health, and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry is now getting involved in investigating the possible contaminants associated with fracking. Fracking is a process used in the extraction of natural gas and oil from shale. At this time, there is no proof that the chemicals used in or produced by that process might affect our health but they believe it needs to be studied. At the same time, the **EPA is looking at the subject to see if those chemicals affect our environment in any way including ending up in our drinking water.  So “just in case”, do we need to stop all fracking until more is known?  This is under serious debate in many states right now.

We already know that our water supplies contain trace quantities of Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products (PPCPs). Individuals add PPCPs to the environment through excretion and bathing, and through the disposal of unwanted medications to sewers and trash. According to the EPA, (http://www.epa.gov/ppcp/) PPCPs have probably been present in water and in the environment for as long as humans have been using them. Although we can now measure PPCP levels at low concentrations there are more people ingesting or applying products to alter their moods, change their looks, or somehow “fix” themselves than ever before. Just as an example, the Wall Street Journal in August 2011 reported that in 2010 there were 253 million prescriptions written for antidepressants! That in itself is depressing.

If you drink water that is coming from a surface water source, you don’t have to wait for an error in gas well fracking to possibly send mystery chemicals into your drinking water. Thanks to PPCPs, you probably already have a mixed cocktail of them (albeit in very low concentrations) heading into your home and making their way into your Kool-Aid or coffee. Yet, in my recently supplied 2011 Water Quality Report from the Cleveland Division of Water, PPCPs are not even mentioned, though the report is well organized and well written.  The report does briefly explain that “Reverse osmosis filters…..remove things like fluoride and many minerals found in hard water.  Replacement filters can be expensive and several gallons of water are wasted for every gallon filtered.” 

I, for one, believe that it makes sense to process my drinking and cooking water through a reverse osmosis membrane to significantly reduce PPCPs and many other possible contaminants and have been doing so for the last 25 years - that’s longer than I have been consistently clicking my seat belt… just in case.

* Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
**U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 

Contact Keith B.