8 ms·
Besides for reverse osmosis, what are you using to improve water quality?
by spindo 6y ago
Besides for reverse osmosis, what are you using to improve water quality?
- wppick 6y agoReverse osmosis is the next goldmine opportunity. Every home will likely need one, or maybe there will be neighbourhood nodes. It's even good for getting clean drinking water from salt water.
- fnord77 6y agocapitalism, fixing the problems created by capitalism. it's the circle of life!
- shrewduser 6y agopeople can benefit from doing the wrong thing in any economic system, and therefore will. This is a problem of law and enforcement.
- Railsify 6y agoGo ahead, quit your job, move to the woods and live off the land. What is your point?
- WarChortle 6y agoNot OP but, Capitalism deems profit above everything else. Maybe profit shouldn't come before our own safety. Almost all safety regulations are paid for in blood sometimes its because we just didn't know. Most of the time its because companies refuse to implement it unless they have to by law. We are sacrificing our own health for what? Money? No one is saying we shouldn't have jobs don't be dense. Maybe we shouldn't value money over literally everything else.
- Camillo 6y agohttps://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-crime-of-the-20th-century-russia-whaling-67774 https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-c...
- WarChortle 6y agoYou need to do more then just link an article about a Communist country doing something shitty. I never advocated for a particular style of government. So linking some horrible thing the USSR did doesn't further the conversation in anyway. And if your only response to Capitalism is bad is to show worse form of government then you really don't have an argument to defend Capitalism.
- vixen99 6y agoCapitalism doesn't 'deem' anything. Let's remain literal. It's a word denoting the concept of freedom for individuals to extract and use value from their activities to secure an economic base for themselves. Groups of the rest of us can then form independent judgements on those activities and regulate them by law. In this way, all-powerful sanctions are available for governments and regulators to haul in those activities which pollute our world. Separation of function is key to this process and is absent in communist societies hence the appalling pollution created by the USSR in its heyday. Sadly, governments and their regulators do, in the main, a woeful job in performing their regulatory duties.
- WarChortle 6y agoWhy can't I have a conversation about Capitalism without people putting out how much worse the USSR is/was? I'm not saying your wrong but we can talk about the failings of our country without whataboutism to "defend it". Capitalism is too broad a concept to boil it down to a short description. My argument is about what Capitalism lead to the greed and moral failings of our country. Capitalism is so en-grained in the American way of life its hard to separate the two. Our style of government lead to more and more greedy people doing more and more underhanded things to make a profit and thus in turn maintaining that profit. America is pointed out as the shining example of how successful Capitalism is as a form of government and its not. You point to the failings of the USSR to protect its environment and ignore our own. Yes we have an EPA which is a good step, but our form of government enabled private citizens and corporations to essentially purchase the ability to pollute. To put chemicals in our food and water that was cheap, but necessarily safe. Our country is failing just as poorly at protecting its citizens health and environment as the USSR. We just have the ability to point to the EPA and say we are trying harder so that's good enough. Its not, The EPA has refused to add a single chemical to its watch list for public water since the clean water act of 1972. Our water standards are based on science that is almost 50 years old. If you think its because in those 50 years we haven't learned anymore about health, then i have a bridge to sell you. Its because updating those standards would cost money and not have any direct monetary benefit in return, because we live in a country/exist in a form of government that prioritizes profit over the health of its own citizens.
- fuzzfactor 6y ago>Capitalism deems profit above everything else. Didn't downvote but I don't agree. Capitalism can thrive and everybody can win in a more sustainable progressive way than we have now with simply a respectable return on investments, and as an extreme example foregoing all other available profits. When free enterprise is available it might be a way to adjust your stance across this spectrum, but free enterprise, capitalism, and greed are three common things that have no real requirement to appear together although individuals or corporations are often seen who do nothing but combine all three and push it beyond any reasonable limit. Some kids just don't know any better. This is why we can't have good things.
- adrianN 6y agoProfit first capitalism and subsistence farming are not the only two options, you know.
- fnord77 6y agothey are when reductionism is the only tool in your toolbox!
- bartwe 6y agoNo woods left
- o_p 6y agoWithout problems there are no jobs!
- pmiller2 6y agoThat explains why capitalism creates so many problems. Why do people think doing more capitalism is the way to fix those problems, though?
- austhrow743 6y agoBecause without capitalism there would be no water infrastructure? Is that it? What?
- hanniabu 6y agoAren't they public utilities?
- austhrow743 6y agoYep. Completely unrelated to capitalism.
- refurb 6y agoSome of the most polluted places on earth are in the former Soviet Union. Are you saying they were capitalist?
- fuzzfactor 6y agoGreed doesn't require capitalism to make it so everyone loses. Most especially the greediest of them all lose the most compared to what they could have had instead. With so much pride in getting ahead of the pack, much more sigificant gains always lie in a different sometimes opposite direction that can not be visualized at all by such a mind. Edit: not my downvote
- siruva07 6y agoReverse osmosis is wasteful. The next goldmine is atmospheric water generation. The atmosphere is the largest untapped reservoir of clean water on Earth, and mother nature has already desalinated the water through evaporation. Far less energy intensive and wasteful to condense the atmosphere than clean water by R.O.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- reilly3000 6y agoIf you want clean water, you need to do more than evaporate it. Thanks to nasty stuff like Atrazine and PFAS, our rainwater brings chemicals that can alter reproductive organs, endocrine function, and are linked to cancer. I don't know if reverse osmosis removes these chemicals, but it would be worth removing at the source. An ounce of prevention can save a pound of downstream medical and societal costs. https://www.panna.org/resources/atrazine#2 https://www.panna.org/resources/atrazine#2 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/17/rainwater-pfas-us-potentially-toxic-levels-study https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/17/rainwate... https://www.ewg.org/research/ewg-proposes-pfas-standards-fully-protect-children-s-health https://www.ewg.org/research/ewg-proposes-pfas-standards-ful...
- selimthegrim 6y agoOur greywater too (from oral contraceptives)
- adrianN 6y agoChanging state from gas to liquid sounds pretty energy intensive to me. Do you have numbers for your claim that it's less energy intensive than RO?
- chordalkeyboard 6y agoI’d like to see numbers too, but the gas is a higher energy state and so its not outlandish to imagine there might be a way to bring it down efficiently.
- calt 6y agoI am in Thailand where the tap water is considered undrinkable. Just this morning I went to the neighbourhood Reverse osmosis machine and paid a few cents to fill up my drinking water bottles. I think it's a great system.
- HotVector 6y agoIn India, we got water from groundwater, which was over polluted with minerals, so we bought an RO filter. It's basically a must there, and all the other houses I visited there had one. If we don't fix water pollution here, we will have a similar situation on our hands.
- briefcomment 6y agocharcoal
- tryptophan 6y agoSimple carbon filters to remove 90% of the junk, including volatiles. Distillation to remove the rest(metals), and end up with pure water. Need to treat it with minerals though, as the pure water will be acidic and strip your teeth of them otherwise. It is pretty overkill, but if you want pure water...
- vondur 6y agoPure water by definition is neither basic nor acidic.
- s0rce 6y agoDeionized water is often acidic as protons are introduced to replace the other ions. Co2 also dissolves immediately from the air forming carbonic acid. Regardless I don't think it's bad for your teeth it's not concentrated or buffered.
- jb775 6y agoI think you're wrong. I did extensive research on this prior to purchasing a home recently and the general consensus I found is that you need a pretty advanced water filtration system consisting of carbon + reverse osmosis filtration that requires yearly servicing. Some water companies do this, but most probably don't. You can also have a system installed in your house. Your standard Brita filter doesn't even come close to filtering these chemicals.
- cher88 6y agoIt’s the distillation that gets rid of everything else, not the filtering
- tryptophan 6y agoAFAIK, distillation will not remove volatile organics that have a lower boiling point than water(well, theoretically you could do some fractional distillation technique, but its easier to just run a carbon filter).
- jcranmer 6y agoThe entire water treatment process at the facility I worked at: Start with pH control to be slightly acidic (in the summertime, when all the algae is having fun copulating and making the raw water extremely basic, this means dumping lots and lots of sulfuric acid). Add in a nice charged coagulant, PACL in this case (and a nice uncharged polymer could be helpful for greasy bits). Mix vigorously, then less vigorously, and then let sit for a while to let the mud settle out of the water. After settling, bubble 7% ozone through the water. Then send the water through a prepared filter containing sand, gravel, and charcoal with a healthy biofilm on it (I don't remember the exact order, sorry). Be sure to clean the filters every day. Now dump in a load of hydroxide to make the pH slightly basic (also is less hell on your pipes, especially if there's any lead pipes in the system). Add fluoride for health, and dump in all the chlorine (nowadays as bleach; a chlorine gas pipe leak is no fun for anybody). Add some ammonium to get chloramines to help disinfect the water for longer, and some phosphate for pipe corrosion control. That's basically the same process that's going to get used for any large (think >100 million gallons/day, enough to supply ~300k suburban households), although ozone treatment is relatively rare. UV and reverse osmosis tend to be too expensive to really scale to the large treatment plants, and slow sand filters (not to be confused with the rapid sand filters that are used in most places) requires craptons of space to push enough water to handle a large municipality.
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoOzonating
- ta988 6y agoNot all toxics can be destroyed by ozonation, and you can form new toxic ones by degradation...
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoIt's something to do besides filtering to improve the taste of water.
- hanniabu 6y agoHow small of a micron filter do you need for this stuff?
- ta988 6y agoImpossible except with dialysis and osmosis membranes or by usong adsorbptipn and exchange (so not based on size), size of a water molecule is roughly 0.0003 micron some pollutants are just 5-10 times that... Of course things are a bit more complicated by the shape of the molecules.
- totalZero 6y agoThree-stage filter with polypropylene, ultra-filtration, and carbon block.
- jb775 6y agoI live near a closed naval airbase that used to spray tons of firefighting foam containing PFAS (the bad stuff) before they realized it was hazardous. Since we get our water from a well, I had a system installed with 2 large carbon tanks (~4 feet tall each), a UV light filter (more-so for non-PFAS bacteria concerns), and a sediment filter. Then to catch anything that might slip past, I have a reverse osmosis tank filter linked up under the kitchen sink (for drinking water). It costs about $1200 a year to have the tanks swapped out, but don't have a monthly water bill since it's a well. Public water companies claim to do the same type of filtering, but who knows what they're actually doing. It's a good feeling knowing for sure my water is clean.
- M5x7wI3CmbEem10 6y agoany advice for setting up a similar system for a typical apartment or home situation?
- jb775 6y agoThe carbon tank setup needs to be linked up where the water first comes into the property, so I wouldn't pay to have it installed unless you own the house. A setup like this isn't really feasible for an apartment. For an apartment or if you rent a house, you could call a local water filtration company and have a reverse osmosis filter tank installed under your sink. I think they also offer smaller carbon filters that sit under the sink. You could also just buy a small water cooler dispenser (for drinking water) and have 5 gallon tanks delivered as needed.
- WhompingWindows 6y agoWe live in the woods where only well water is available. We have a water softener using NaCL (removes Ca and Mg), an ozone machine to remove Sulfur, Iron, and Manganese, then we have a sediment filter into a UV light to disinfect, since there are some bacteria in the well. Finally, we run it through a carbon filter, then to our fridge and faucets.