Water Supply Conservation Research Articles

The Observation of Rainwater Harvesting Potential in Mahasarakham University (Khamriang Campus)

Rainwater harvesting from roof is considered as valuable water resources. Material Flow Analysis (MFA) of water in Mahasarakham University (Khamriang Campus) shows that rainwater harvesting from roof can reduce water supply production by 7% and save more than 200,000 Bt/year for water treatment cost. The sensitivity analysis suggests that by 5% water supply conservation and 20% additional rainwater harvesting, MSU could have enough water resources. The rainwater is suitable to be substituted water for gardening due to the convenience to assemble an above ground storage tank or a pond to store harvested rainwater from roof. The current practice of rainwater is collected and discharged into drainage system and treated in wastewater treatment plant. Utilisation of rainwater harvested could reduce wastewater amount that must be treated by 9%. Rainwater harvesting and reuse should be promoted in campus in order to encourage sustainable living and water conservation policy.

Designing for sustainable water and nutrient outcomes in urban developments in Melbourne

What is the best way to manage water and nutrients when providing water services for urban developments in Melbourne? Melbourne, as with most other major cities in Australia, is facing stresses on its water supply and degradation of receiving water bodies due to stormwater and wastewater discharges. Urban developments need to address these concerns, however there is still much debate regarding which service provision combinations are preferable. This paper seeks to clarify urban water servicing design principles for conservation of water supplies and prevention of eutrophication. Two developments have been studied: (i) Kalkallo, a representative greenfield site, and (ii) Box Hill, a representative multi-storey brownfield site. Various water and sewerage servicing options, with varying levels of end use management, have been assessed by undertaking water and contaminant balances. Results have demonstrated a self-sufficient residential supply without connection to water mains sacrifices reliability. Reclaimed water stores require significantly less land than stormwater stores placed under the same demand, however stormwater stores more effectively reduce eutrophication risks in Port Philip Bay, the bay Melbourne surrounds. On-site reclaimed water systems are ideally suited to apartment towers because of minimal storage size requirements. End use efficiency should always be a priority for conserving water

The role of the mineral reserve estimator in promoting sustainable development in the mining industry

During the development of national and international codes for reporting mineral reserves, more attention has tended to be paid to the geological aspects of resource estimation than to the requirements for conversion of mineral resources into mineral reserves. Implicit in this conversion, as expressed in all the major reporting codes, is consideration of mining, metallurgical, economic, marketing, legal, environmental, social and governmental factors, commonly described as the 'modifying factors'. The relevance of the modifying factors is becoming vastly greater as the mining industry begins to take active steps to demonstrate that it can operate in a sustainable manner. Factors such as environmental and social, which tended in the past to be seen as potential impediments to mining and considered largely an economic burden, are now key components of developing a mineral deposit from initial exploration through development, operation, closure and beyond. The impact on communities and society in general starts from day one of exploration and continues well beyond the closure of a mine. Positive benefits such as an assured supply of commodities, industrial prosperity, employment and renewed infrastructure need to be weighed against short-term effects on social life and land use and the longer term needs for remediation, wildlife protection and conservation of water supplies. Modern reserve estimators need to consider the full ramifications of mining, processing and selling their commodities, and even re-cycling end-products, not just on the mining company but on all stakeholders in the project. There have been considerable recent moves towards developing sustainable development policies for the mining industry and these are briefly discussed. However, these are largely top-down processes, with general aims and aspirations. If sustainable development is truly to work in the mining industry, impetus must also come from the bottom up. It is in this context that the reserve estimation process, which is a core component of any mining business, needs to be examined for opportunities to contribute to sustainable development. This paper reviews the modifying factors and how these might be used as the basis for decision-making on sustainable development opportunities.

In memoriam: On the death of the ‘market mechanism’

The concept of the market mechanism emerged in the 1940s as a central feature in the thinking of the economics profession in the United States. With improved knowledge of the scientific laws of the market, economists argued that society could use the instrument of the market to achieve a wide range of social goals with maximal efficiency and effectiveness. For example, many economists have argued that the reduction of poverty is best accomplished by manipulating the labor market through the 'negative income tax' or other technical devices. Health care, other economists have more recently argued, should be provided through various forms of 'managed competition', based on market incentives. The concept of the market mechanism has also been applied widely to ecological matters. Economists have proposed that, if a given reduction in pollution emissions is the goal, this reduction is efficiently achieved by allocating rights to pollute and then allowing market trading in these rights (Dales, 1968; Pearce et al., 1989). A carbon tax is often advocated as an effective way of using market forces to achieve a desired reduction in carbon dioxide emissions for global warming purposes (OECD, 1992). Other economists have argued that conservation of water supplies and thus avoidance of the need to build environmentally harmful dams and other water facilities is efficiently achieved by creating a system of water rights and then allowing market trading in these rights (Anderson, 1983). Many other types of environmental objectives could in principle be achieved by setting a target and then using the market mechanism to realize this goal (Tietenberg, 1993; Zylicz, 1991 ). Economists have typically also argued that the market mechanism, like other tools of professional economics, is a value-neutral device. Its efficiency and effectiveness rest on technical grounds alone, economists assert, that are independent of any particular cultural or broader value circumstances. However, as this paper will argue, the economic case for the market mechanism is actually grounded in the existence of a particular set of social values. If these values were, in fact, commonly rejected in society, markets would lose the efficiency advantages that mainstream economics claims for them. To be sure, the values on which market efficiency depends have, in fact, been broadly accepted in American life. That is why the market mechanism has been as widely proposed and in a number of cases sometimes involving the environment used successfully. To be specific, the particular value-system that has supported the functioning of the market mechanism in the United States has been the belief in economic progress. The market is an engine of great social dislocation as well as economic advance. American society has been willing to tolerate the major dislocations because it has believed that they

Wastewater Reclamation Technologies and Monitoring Techniques

The paper deals with technologies for the direct reuse of treated municipal wastewater. The choice of reclamation technologies is determined by the quality of the wastewater, quality criteria for the reuse applications, reliability, operational considerations and the extent of control over the total treatment sequence. Catchment quality control as well as flow and quality equalisation should be regarded as first steps and an integral part of reclamation technology. Biological treatment is of primary importance, and special attention is given to the benefits for reclamation of activated sludge processes with high sludge retention times, and to biological nitrogen and phosphorus removal. Further unit processes discussed are chemical coagulation and flocculation, solids separation, disinfection, activated carbon, reverse osmosis, stabilisation and sludge management. In discussing monitoring techniques, attention is given to instrumentation, analogue and digital transmission, flow measurement, continuous measurement of selected parameters, sampling, maintenance, visual observation, and biomonitoring. In the conclusion, examples are given of various applications of using secondary effluent with little or no tertiary treatment, and the point made that considerable impact on the conservation of water supplies can be made without resorting to complicated and expensive technology.

Water Rights Law and Water Shortages in Western Canada

The author describes in outline the law that has governed the distribution of rights to consume water in Western Canada from the time of agricultural settlement to the present day and examines its major defects. He concludes that the law provided a good method of initially allocating water rights but that it is too rigid, except to some extent in British Columbia, to accommodate new uses of water in basins that are fully allocated and that it discourages the conservation of water supplies. Saskatchewan’s response to these defects in the form of the Saskatchewan Water Corporation Act is considered and criticized. The author then suggests a solution to the problems of the existing legislation which would allow the transfer of water rights subject to a number of safeguards.

Data Automation for Water Supply Management

The available daily water supply of a multi‐reservoir river system, the Upper Snake River in Idaho, is managed more efficiently using an automated system of data collection, transmission, and processing. Streamflow, reservoir, and canal data are transmitted daily from remote gage sites and regional terminals to a central computer where a FORTRAN program computes natural (unregulated) flow and accounts for storage water supplies. Natural flow is distributed among various uses (primarily irrigation) and users based on established water rights. Storage allocations are monitored daily to better manage remaining supplies. Daily uses and resulting supplies are projected ahead by as much as one week to reduce river operation response times. The improved management correctly accounts for water distribution by rights and for storage allocations while promoting conservation of water supplies.

THE EFFECT OF PRICE ON LONG RUN WATER SUPPLY BENEFITS AND COSTS1

ABSTRACT The long‐term effects of presently used and alternatively proposed water pricing policies were studied using some tools of operations research and economics. A discrete deterministic dynamic programming model was structured and operated to determine the optimal water supply capacity expansion paths for a hypothetical residential community with a given water pricing policy. The objective of the model was the maximization of future discounted consumers'surpluses plus producer's revenues net of the long‐run cost of supply. State variables were the size of system capacity in MGD and stage variables were the times of feasible capacity increase in years. Demand curves, population sizes, and growth rates for various economic sectors of the community were assumed known, as well as short‐run production and capital construction costs. Several policies, including constant unit rates, decreasing or increasing block rates and summer differential rates were tested. It was concluded that price plays a major role in the short‐run allocation and long‐run planning and conservation of water supplies. Conservational pricing policies were advocated as means of lowering the long‐run cost of water, using the water price‐demand function as a planning tool. Further research in these areas was recommended.

Bacteriological aspects of sewage purification and river pollution.

The National Institute for Water Research of the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research has been engaged on extensive research into the conservation of water supplies and into the reclamation of industrial and sewage effluents. Within the framework of this programme, a comparative study of the efficiency in the reduction of bacterial numbers by existing conventional sewage treatment plants has been carried out. The numerical decreases in bacterial populations after primary sedimentation, biological filtration, the activated sludge process, secondary sedimentation (humus tank), and final sand filtration have been compared with the reduction in bacterial numbers attained by the treatment of sand-filter effluent, humus tank effluent, and primary biological filter effluent in units for further biological purification.Various types of units for this purpose have been investigated, and from available results it appears perfectly feasible to consider the suitability of effectively purified sewage effluents as sources for raw water supplies for industrial and domestic use. Sewage effluents after final further biological purification could be admitted for unrestricted discharge into rivers. The possibility of objections from the point of view of public health and future use is completely ruled out by the fact that the quality of the final effluent is as good as that of river water.A variety of experimental units for further biological purification of sewage effluents have been studied, and a comparison of the results obtained from grass-plots, artificial vleis (a natural vlei in South Africa is a marshy or swampy depression in the ground in which water collects and which supports a standing vegetation), algal beds, artificial model rivers, and maturation or oxidation ponds have shown that maturation ponds, possibly a number of ponds in series, with an established microflora and microfauna of their own, may provide the final solution of the problem. Further biological purification will play an important role in the conservation of water supplies and will contribute to the raw water sources available for industrial and domestic use.In parallel with these studies, the effect of the discharge of sewage effluents from conventional treatment plants into a river system has been investigated together with the fate of the sewage bacteria after admission to a natural environment. The manifestations of self-purification have been recorded, and the additional or superimposed effect of run-off and drainage from populated and unpopulated areas, as well as the admission of storm-water, have been considered together with the effects of seasonal variations due to climatic conditions.The author wishes to express his gratitude to his assistants who bravely bore the burden of the routine work involved, and wishes to thank the S.A. Council for Scientific and Industrial Research for permission to publish this paper.