3 Sustainable Water Projects
Sami Maalouf
Let’s start with a global view of water and then bring the story down to an individual level because it is at the individual level is what matters in terms of our consumption of water, where we move it from and how we consume it.
This is critical given that the Earth’s human population has seen a massive increase over the last century. As an example, during Frank Brown’s years manipulating water supplies in Redlands in the late nineteenth century, the global population was relatively very small compared to the population today. At the turn of the twentieth century, there were roughly two billion people; in 2021, we are approaching about 8 billion. We are not the only species that needs access to water. It is, of course, essential for all species. Such need makes the distribution of water so critical.
Its distribution is especially significant because most of us prefer to live around coastal plains and coastal zones. About 70% of people live roughly 70 kilometers away from the coast, if not on the coast itself.
It is in this zone that you find a number of mega cities. On the West Coast of North America, for example, Vancouver, Seattle and Portland to the north, and San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego to the south. This is a global phenomenon (places like Mumbai, Lagos, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, to name a few) that requires us to adjust how and why we import water into these metropolitan centers, much as we must do in Southern California.
To sharpen my students’ understanding of this issue, whenever I teach Engineering Hydrology, I ask them to monitor their water consumption for one week. These are two samples from a survey conducted in the class (all units in US gallons).
Even I was surprised how much water my students consume. The first breakdown from the two samples above shows a total of 1268 US gallons per week (an average of approximately 181 US gallons per day). The second breakdown shows an average of approximately 123 US gallons per day. The latter sample’s household is equipped with a low flush toilet. Keep in mind that these are personal consumptions and they ignore watering lawns, irrigating plants or washing vehicles. The survey also ignores personal consumption of drinking water and cooking.
The first step in evaluating the survey was to convert US gallons to Liters. For example, the 181 US gallons per day above became about 685 Liters per day and the 123 US gallons per day above became approximately 486 Liters per day. The second step was to show my students a visual variation between the size of one US gallon container and that of a one Liter bottle. As it turned out, once you shrink the size here and you change the unit there, some folks started thinking, “wow I consume so much…685 Liters per day!”
I later compared my students’ personal consumption with that of an average individual in Frankfurt, Germany. The average consumption in Frankfurt is about 122 Liters per day; a stark contras