Water

In Orange County, California, wastewater from people’s homes is not considered waste. Instead of treating it and sending it to the ocean, Orange County purifies its wastewater with an additional three-step process. Each day, the county treats about 130 million gallons until it’s safe enough to drink.

Mehul Patel is with the Orange County Water District. He says the aquifer is a key source of water for people who live in the area. Replenishing it this way helps buffer water supplies as climate change makes droughts more frequent and severe.

Orange County has now been recycling its wastewater for more than a decade. And Patel says the approach could help other drought-prone regions, too.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20595083

• The involvement of Munduruku people in illegal mining inside the Munduruku Indigenous Territory made Brazil’s efforts to stop it more complicated, federal officials said.
• Munduruku sources told Mongabay that deception, abandonment by the state and a lack of alternative income sources are what push some Munduruku people to mine.
• The recruitment of Indigenous peoples is an important mechanism used by miners to secure access to lands and gain support against government crackdowns, researchers said.
• Sources said the government should invest in public policies and alternative income projects to strengthen food security, improve health and the sustainable development of communities.

archived (Wayback Machine)

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20588797

archived (Wayback Machine)

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/20537638

In a drought-hit Mexican border region at the center of growing competition with the United States for water, conservationists are working to bring a once-dying river delta back to life.

peer-reviewed meta analysis: Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers by J. Poore, T. Nemecek et al.

no-paywall upload by Poore on his website

processed data visualized well on OurWorldInData

Source: Bon Bagay: Permaculture, Abundance and Autonomy (scroll to bottom)

Protesters fear than a plan to modernise agriculture could leave the lower riparian province of Sindh without water.

New studies show that climate change is fueling salt contamination in freshwater ecosystems.

Ecuador battled a spreading oil slick Tuesday that has reached several rivers after a spill left thousands without drinking water and triggered the declaration of an environmental emergency.

The future of freshwater is increasingly in jeopardy across Canada and around the world.

In the 1960s, the Swiss had some of the dirtiest water in Europe. Now, their cities boast pristine rivers and lakes – and other countries are looking to follow their lead

El Paso Water broke ground on the first U.S. facility that will treat wastewater for direct re-use in a city water supply, using a four-step process to transform wastewater into clean, potable drinking water.

Research in Chile could help to provide drinking water for some of the world's most arid places.

A French magistrate has opened a fraud inquiry into mineral water giants Nestlé and Sources Alma over suspicions of illegal processing of water, it was revealed on Friday.

A trove of lithium-rich brine exists underground in Bolivia. Researchers conducted the first comprehensive chemical analysis of wastewater associated with mining the resource.

Samples from the mine site included natural brine pumped from underground; brine from eight evaporation ponds; and wastewater from the lithium processing facility.

Link for the sturdy: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.estlett.4c01124

Nearly a third of people in the U.S. have been exposed to unregulated contaminants in their drinking water that could impact their health, according to a new analysis by scientists at Silent Spring Institute. What's more, Hispanic and Black residents are more likely than other groups to have unsafe levels of contaminants in their drinking water and are more likely to live near pollution sources.

Researchers at Rice University, in collaboration with Guangdong University of Technology, have uncovered an innovative approach to treating high-salinity organic wastewaters — streams containing both elevated salt and organic concentrations — by employing dialysis, a technology borrowed from the medical field.

In a new study published in Nature Water, the team found that mimicking this same method can separate salts from organic substances with minimal dilution of the wastewater, simultaneously addressing key limitations of conventional methods. This novel pathway has the potential to reduce environmental impacts, lower costs and enable the recovery of valuable resources across a range of industrial sectors.

The Klamath River is free of four huge dams for the first time in generations.

Researchers detected increased radioactivity in mussels downstream of oil and gas wastewater discharge points, raising concerns about effects up the food chain.

[...ffs!]

Researchers worry that the “forever chemicals” could disproportionately harm farmworkers and communities of color.