{"id":42780,"date":"2019-01-15T06:32:36","date_gmt":"2019-01-15T11:32:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42780"},"modified":"2019-01-15T06:32:36","modified_gmt":"2019-01-15T11:32:36","slug":"salt-free-drinkable-water-comes-at-a-cost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42780","title":{"rendered":"Salt-free drinkable water comes at a cost"},"content":{"rendered":"

Salt-free drinkable water comes at a cost<\/a><\/h3>\n
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A desalination plant in Spain. Image: By Andr\u00e9s Nieto Porras from Palma de Mallorca, Spain, via Wikimedia Commons<\/em><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Two thirds of the world worries about water for at least a month annually. One successful source of salt-free drinkable water leaves a bitter aftertaste.<\/strong><\/p>\n

LONDON, 15 January, 2019<\/em> \u2013 Around the arid world, some 16,000 desalination plants are now purifying seawater and brackish aquifers, producing 95 million cubic metres of fresh, salt-free drinkable water daily. This is almost half the daily flow over Niagara Falls.<\/p>\n

But there is a potentially-polluting price to pay: for every litre of fresh water, the same desalination plants produce around 1.5 litres of toxic brine<\/a>. That adds up to enough in the course of a year to cover the whole of the US state of Florida to a depth of more than 30 cms.<\/p>\n

A new study urges nations to explore better solutions \u2013 and new ways to exploit the minerals in the wastewater and support efforts to advance the declared UN sustainable development goal<\/a> of reliable, safe water on tap for everybody in the world.<\/p>\n

A second study confirms that the sustainable development goal of clean water and sanitation for everybody by 2030 is likely to cost around $1 trillion a year \u2013 and up to 8% more if the advances are matched by efforts to contain climate change<\/a>and limit global warming to the agreed UN target of well below 2\u00b0C<\/a> above historic levels by 2100.<\/p>\n

\u201cReject brine has been used for aquaculture, with increases in fish biomass of 300%\u201d<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Four out of ten of the world\u2019s people face severe water scarcity. More than six out of ten experience at least one month a year in conditions of water scarcity. There are now desalination technologies at work in 177 countries: two thirds of them in nations with high incomes.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Salt-free drinkable water comes at a cost A desalination plant in Spain. Image: By Andr\u00e9s Nieto Porras from Palma de Mallorca, Spain, via Wikimedia Commons Two thirds of the world worries about water for at least a month annually. One successful source of salt-free drinkable water leaves a bitter aftertaste. LONDON, 15 January, 2019 \u2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[9245,23963,12569,23962,11565,866],"class_list":["post-42780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-survival-2","tag-climate-news-network","tag-desalination-plant","tag-potable-water","tag-salt-free-water","tag-tim-radford","tag-water"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42780"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42780\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42781,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42780\/revisions\/42781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}