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How Much Of India’s Wastewater Is Left Untreated?

May 28, 2024

How Much Of India’s Wastewater Is Left Untreated?

As is the case with rapid population growth and urbanization in many so-called developing nations, waste management becomes a problem not only in rural areas but also in densely populated cities.

As Statista’s Florian Zandt details below, a textbook example of this growth outpacing infrastructural capacities is the situation in urban hotspots in India like Delhi, where a report by Euronews from May 2023 mentions neighborhoods with “open gutters […] filled with plastic and grey-colored water”. While the number of operational sewage treatment plants doubled between 2014 and 2020, the capacity for water treatment is still severely lacking.

Infographic: How Much of India's Wastewater Is Left Untreated? | Statista

You will find more infographics at Statista

According to the latest annual report by the Central Pollution Control Board, India generated 72.4 billion liters of wastewater per day across all provinces, with Maharashtra (9.1 billion), Uttar Pradesh (8.3 billion), Tamil Nadu (6.4 billion) and Gujarat (5.0 billion) being responsible for around 40 percent of wastewater.

The 1,093 sewage treatment plants only had operational capacities of 26.9 billion liters of wastewater per day, with around 400 plants either non-operational or under construction as of the latest available tally from 2020/2021. This translates to only 37 percent of sewage being treated, exacerbating the risks of communicable diseases and contaminated food and drinking water.

While India is seemingly hard-pressed to keep up with the amount of wastewater its population generates, measures to grant more people access to potable water and basic sanitation and hygiene were scaled up significantly in recent decades. For example, the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan campaign, translatable to Clean India, initiated in 2014 aims to eliminate open defecation by installing upwards of 100 million toilets in the country.

Nevertheless, in 2022, only 75 percent of rural Indian households had at least basic access to sanitation, while 30 percent of homes didn’t have their own washing facility with soap and water according to data from the WHO and Unicef’s Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene.

SLOPPY: CDC Shuts Down Military Lab Studying Ebola, Plague, etc. Amid Fears It’s GETTING OUT Through Wastewater

August 8, 2019

SLOPPY: CDC Shuts Down Military Lab Studying Ebola, Plague, etc. Amid Fears It’s GETTING OUT Through Wastewater

We may not have to wait for a traveler from the Democratic Republic of Congo to visit the United States for an Ebola outbreak. It just might be brought to us by our own military along with the plague and other horrifying germs.

The laboratory at Fort Detrick, the  U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, has been sent a cease-and-desist order by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention after a second inspection showed sloppy handling of deadly germs and viruses.

The CDC inspected the military research institute in June and inspectors found several areas of concern in standard operating procedures, which are in place to protect workers in biosafety level 3 and 4 laboratories, spokeswoman Caree Vander Linden confirmed in an email Friday.

The CDC sent a cease and desist order in July.

After USAMRIID received the order from the CDC, its registration with the Federal Select Agent Program, which oversees disease-causing material use and possession, was suspended. That suspension effectively halted all biological select agents and toxin research at USAMRIID, Vander Linden said in her email. (source)

At this time “no infectious pathogens, or disease-causing material, have been found outside authorized areas.” The New York Times reports that the CDC could not provide more specific details due to “national security reasons.”

What was USMRIID doing wrong?

The laboratory, which is located in Frederick, Maryland, studies different deadly bugs for biological warfare purposes. They have failed inspection specifically by the Federal Select Agent Program, which oversees the possession, use and transfer of biological select agents and toxins that could potentially pose a severe threat to public, animal or plant health.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Fracking Industry’s Water Nightmare

September 18, 2018

The Fracking Industry’s Water Nightmare

Sign reading "hot water"

The U.S. is setting new oil production records as horizontal drilling and fracking open up shale deposits in places like North Dakota and Texas.

Fracking is based on the “hydraulic” process of using pressurized liquid to shatter shale rock to let the oil and gas inside escape. And while that liquid is a mixture of many hazardous chemicals, it is mostly water. And acquiring that water and then properly disposing of the toxic wastewater produced by fracking is becoming a big and expensive problem for the industry.

Gabriel Collins is a fellow in energy and the environment at Rice University, and in August he gave a presentation at the Produced Water Society Permian Basin 2018 event in Midland, Texas. There, Collins presented a business case for starting a large water processing company to service the fracking industry.

One sign that the fracking industry is becoming concerned about water is that there are now societies and conferences dedicated to the topic of “produced water.” Produced water is the term for the toxic water that is “produced” over the life of a fracked oil or gas well.

In a story by Bloomberg News, Collins said he didn’t believe investors were aware of the risks that water poses to the fracking industry in the Permian Basin.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Beginning of the End of the World

July 8, 2018

THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF THE WORLD

A ‘Reckless’ Fracking Company, Poisoned Springs, and a Family Forced to Buy Water at Walmart

DRIVING WEST ALONG the Pennsylvania Turnpike from Harrisburg to rural Washington County, sign after sign pitted energy companies against environmentalists. An evil-looking clown leered down at passing drivers above the words: “I still believe in global warming. Do you?” Then there was another: “Wind dies. Sun sets. You need reliable, affordable, clean coal electricity.” Yet another featured a picture of Yoko Ono and the message “Would you take energy advice from the woman who broke up The Beatles?”

The billboards were the handiwork of a corporate lobbyist named Rick Berman. His campaign depicted anti-fracking activists, who often called themselves fractivists, as a bunch of rich outsiders. In his world, hypocrites like Robert Redford, who flew private, and kooks like Yoko Ono didn’t understand the give-and-take long established in Appalachia between extractive industries and the communities that relied on them for their livelihoods.

If you followed the highway far enough, turned off the exit for Lone Pine/ Amity, then took a right past the truck stop, you’d wend your way into a steep, unnamed valley. Loren “Buzz” Kiskadden lived at the base of that valley, in a spot known locally as the Bottoms, or Dogpatch. On its 26 acres, the Kiskadden family had run a junkyard from the mid-60s until 2006. An ex-car-thief and recovering heroin addict, Buzz had been the neighborhood bad boy, “always driving around on something,” he told me later.

Buzz was clean now, but chain-smoking cigarettes. He and his brothers were known to drive their junkyard’s tow trucks around the town of Washington, the county seat, removing any breakdowns left on the roadside. Instead of repairing them, they stripped them for parts.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Lawsuit Filed Over Oklahoma’s ‘Fracking’ Earthquakes as Its Third Largest Quake Is Felt in 7 Other States

February 20, 2016

Lawsuit Filed Over Oklahoma’s ‘Fracking’ Earthquakes as Its Third Largest Quake Is Felt in 7 Other States

The Sierra Club and the public interest law firm Public Justice have filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against three energy companies engaged in hydraulic fracturing, aka fracking, in Oklahoma.

The suit against New Dominion, Chesapeake Operating and Devon Energy Production Company alleges that wastewater from fracking and oil production have contributed to the state’s alarming spike in earthquake activity.

okearthquakesinjectionwells
Map of Oklahoma. The orange dots represent the number of earthquakes with a magnitude of 3.0 and higher from 2010 to date. The blue dots represent the state’s wastewater disposal wells. Photo credit: Earthquakes in Oklahoma

The lawsuit demands the companies, as a first step, to “reduce, immediately and substantially, the amounts of production waste they are injecting into the ground.”

The lawsuit was filed the same day that the Oklahoma Corporation Commission made their largest push yet to curb the state’s seismic activity. According to the Associated Press, the state’s oil and gas regulator ordered operators of nearly 250 injection wells to reduce the amount of wastewater they inject underground.

The commission released a plan that covers more than 5,200 square miles in northwest Oklahoma and called for a reduction of more than 500,000 barrels of wastewater daily, or about 40 percent less than previous levels, the AP reported.

The commission’s measure comes three days after a 5.1 magnitude earthquake shook northwest Oklahoma. Not only was the quake felt in seven other states, it’s the third-strongest temblor ever recorded in the state, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said.

“Without knowing more specifics about the wastewater injection and oil and gas production in this area, the USGS cannot conclude whether or not this particular earthquake was caused by industrial-related, human activities,” the agency said. “However, we do know that many earthquakes in the area have been triggered by wastewater fluid injection.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Meet The Man Responsible For Oklahoma’s Earthquake Epidemic

May 26, 2015

Meet The Man Responsible For Oklahoma’s Earthquake Epidemic

As part of the US shale miracle, a far less pleasant, and talked about side-effect are the millions of gallons of wastewater: that key component of the new drilling technology that allows previously inaccessible deposits to be extracted. And, as increasingly more states are finding out, the problem isn’t pumping the water out, but finding a place to put it, no places more so than Oklahoma.

To be sure, Oklahoma benefited hugely from the shale revolution: the state’s oil production has doubled in the past five years. And now, as the Piper has finally come to collect his due, the ground is literally shaking under the feet of Oklahoma’s residents as the aftermath of the fracking “boom” has unleashed an unprecedented series of earthquakes.

The reason: instead of disposing wastewater in some regulated manner, in Oklahoma it gets injected back underground. And as wastewater disposal rates have doubled, seismic activity has exploded across Oklahoma. After averaging 1.6 earthquakes per year of magnitude 3.0 or higher, the state experienced 64 in 2011, including its largest in recorded history—a 5.7-magnitude temblor on Nov. 6, 2011, centered in Prague, 50 miles east of Oklahoma City, that buckled a highway, destroyed 14 homes, and injured two people.

Last year, Bloomberg reports, the number soared to 585 quakes, making Oklahoma the most seismically active state in the continental U.S.; it’s on pace for 900 quakes in 2015 a number one would expect from a place such as Japan, located on a continental fault line or even California (whose San Andreas faultline is about to make another B-grade movie appearance) and certainly not in America’s heartland. Swarms of quakes have rattled other states with oil and gas operations, including Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Ohio, and Texas.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

 

More California Oil Industry Wastewater Injection Wells Shut Down Over Fears Of Groundwater Contamination

March 7, 2015

More California Oil Industry Wastewater Injection Wells Shut Down Over Fears Of Groundwater Contamination

The latest in the ongoing investigation into California regulators’ failure to protect residents from toxic oil industry waste streams has led to the closure of 12 more underground injection wells. The 12 wells that were shut downthis week are all in the Central Valley region, ground zero for oil production in the state.

California has roughly 50,000 underground injection wells. State officials are investigating just over 2,500 of them to determine whether or not they are injecting toxic chemical-laden oil industry wastewater into aquifers containing usable water (or at least potentially usable water) that should have been protected under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

A coalition of environmental, health and public advocacy groups filed a legal petition with Governor Jerry Brown last week in an attempt to force an emergency moratorium on fracking after it was discovered that flowback, a fluid that rises to the top of a fracked well, contains alarmingly high levels of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals.

Fracking flowback is an increasingly prevalent component of the oil industry wastewater that is being injected into the state’s aquifers, as fracking is now used in up to half of all new wells drilled in California.

Prompted by an inquiry by the federal Environmental Protection Agency in 2011, state officials shut down 11 wastewater injection wells last year over similar concerns that they were polluting badly needed sources of water in a time of prolonged drought. It was later confirmed that 9 of those wells were in fact pumping wastewater into protected aquifers—some 3 billion gallons of wastewater, by one estimate.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

California Regulators Allowed Oil Industry To Drill Hundreds Of Wastewater Injection Wells Into Aquifers With Drinkable Water

February 4, 2015

California Regulators Allowed Oil Industry To Drill Hundreds Of Wastewater Injection Wells Into Aquifers With Drinkable Water

The fallout from the ongoing review of California’s deeply flawed Underground Injection Control program continues as new documents reveal that state regulators are investigating more than 500 injection wells for potentially dumping oil industry wastewater into aquifers protected under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act as well as state law.

Last July, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ordered anemergency shutdown of 11 wastewater injection wells in California. In October, nine of the wells were confirmed to have been illegally dumping wastewater into protected aquifers.

Now a letter from Steve Bohlen, the State Oil and Gas Supervisor for California’s Division of Oil, Gas & Geothermal Resources (DOGGR), sent to the EPA on August 18, 2014 but just revealed via a Freedom of Information Act request, shows that the problem is much more widespread than previously disclosed to the public.

A copy of the letter was shared with DeSmogBlog by the Center for Biological Diversity. “EPA has confirmed to us and to the San Francisco Chronicle that Steve Bohlen’s list shows 532 wells believed to be injecting into protected aquifers,” according to Patrick Sullivan, a spokesperson for the CBD.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Monster Wells: Hundreds Of Fracking Wells Using 10-25 Million Gallons of Water Each | DeSmogBlog

November 24, 2014

Monster Wells: Hundreds Of Fracking Wells Using 10-25 Million Gallons of Water Each | DeSmogBlog.

 

While the oil and gas industry likes to claim that fracking is not an especially water intensive process, a new report has found that there are more than 250 wells across the country that each require anywhere from 10 to 25 million gallons of water.

The American Petroleum Institutesuggests that the typical fracked well uses “the equivalent of the volume of three to six Olympic sized swimming pools,” which works out to 2-4 million gallons of water.

But using data reported by the industry itself and available on the FracFocus.org website,Environmental Working Group has determined that there are at least 261 wells in eight states that used an average of 12.7 million gallons of water, adding up to a total of 3.3 billion gallons, between 2010 and 2013. Fourteen wells used over 20 million gallons each in that time period (see chart below).

According to EWG, some two-thirds of these water-hogging wells are in drought-stricken areas. Many parts of Texas, for instance, are suffering through a severe and prolonged drought, yet the Lone Star State has by far the most of what EWGcalls “monster wells” with 149. And 137 of those were found to be in abnormally dry to exceptional drought areas.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How did palm oil become such a problem — and what can we do about it? | Ensia

November 10, 2014

How did palm oil become such a problem — and what can we do about it? | Ensia.

November 3, 2014 — Last August, from the window of a jet high over Sumatra, I counted nearly a dozen plumes of smoke rising from the vast jungles and plantations below. Some more than a half-mile wide, they looked like pillars holding up the sky. That week the Indonesian Disaster Mitigation Agency detected 143 new wildfires in Riau Province, the area beneath my flight. All of the fires were almost certainly related to deforestation for timber operations and agriculture — predominantly oil palm cultivation.

Palm oil — which appears in a dizzying amount of food and cosmetic products and is a feedstock for biofuel — poses many environmental problems. It’s the largest driver of Indonesian deforestation, which destroys habitat and contributes to climate change. And ponds of wastewater at palm oil refineries release immense amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas 34 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Solutions to the environmental problems posed by palm production are complicated, partly because palm oil’s ubiquity, but also because alternatives lack many of the benefits of the versatile oil. But they are out there.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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