Foxconn Will Drain 7 Million Gallons of Water Per Day From Lake Michigan to Make LCD Screens (gizmodo.com) 210
Earlier this week, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources granted permission to Taiwanese tech manufacturer Foxconn, best known for assembling Apple's iPhones, to siphon off seven million gallons of water per day from Lake Michigan, despite protests from conservation groups. From a report: The massive diversion of water from the lake will be used to produce LCD screens at the company's planned $10 billion, 20 million square foot manufacturing plant set to be built in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin. Nearly 2.7 million gallons of the water -- about 39 percent of the daily intake from the factory -- will be lost in the process, primarily from evaporation. The remaining water will be treated and returned to the lake basin.
Wisconsin's DNR noted in a statement that the requested withdrawal will "only amount to a 0.07 percent increase in the total surface water withdrawals from Lake Michigan." For environmentalists in the region, the issue is not so much the diversion for the Foxconn factory itself but rather the precedent it will set for how the lake water can be used. "If we allow this to happen, it's going to happen all over the basin, with other states and then it's going to be the thirsty states and nations to come," Jennifer Giegerich, the government affairs director for the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters, warned during a public hearing about the diversion, according to the Wisconsin Gazette.
Wisconsin's DNR noted in a statement that the requested withdrawal will "only amount to a 0.07 percent increase in the total surface water withdrawals from Lake Michigan." For environmentalists in the region, the issue is not so much the diversion for the Foxconn factory itself but rather the precedent it will set for how the lake water can be used. "If we allow this to happen, it's going to happen all over the basin, with other states and then it's going to be the thirsty states and nations to come," Jennifer Giegerich, the government affairs director for the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters, warned during a public hearing about the diversion, according to the Wisconsin Gazette.
Manufacturing (Score:5, Informative)
If you want manufacturing jobs - then you have to let them do manufacturing here. Manufacturing takes water and power... no way around it.
I'm sure that the water is not so much "used" (as in it disappears)... I'm sure they have a method for returning most of it. I would be more interested in what their controls are for the re-release of that water.
Re:Manufacturing (Score:5, Insightful)
Just looked through the article - they estimate that ~40% of the water will be evaporated - with 60% going back. So that means this is only going to "drain" 2.8M Gallons per Day... and how much of that evaporated water will fall back into the lake as rain too?
We simply can't have it both ways: we have to find some middle ground with manufacturing if we want the jobs. As long as they are using the natural resources responsibly and not polluting them or making a long-term impact... we need to allow them to do their thing.
Re:Manufacturing (Score:5, Insightful)
Just looked through the article - they estimate that ~40% of the water will be evaporated - with 60% going back. So that means this is only going to "drain" 2.8M Gallons per Day... and how much of that evaporated water will fall back into the lake as rain too?
We simply can't have it both ways: we have to find some middle ground with manufacturing if we want the jobs. As long as they are using the natural resources responsibly and not polluting them or making a long-term impact... we need to allow them to do their thing.
No industrial process is going to the 100% clean
So the big question is what else goes back with the water?
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Agreed - so instead of talking about the "7M Gallons, the horror!"... let's talk about the environmental protection controls and oversight that are going to ensure that this operation is safe.
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Agreed - so instead of talking about the "7M Gallons, the horror!"... let's talk about the environmental protection controls and oversight that are going to ensure that this operation is safe.
Which brings us into the realm of the EPA - which these days is problematic to say the least.
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Which brings us into the realm of the EPA - which these days is problematic to say the least.
Yep, between what the Chinese know and care about pollution (not much), and our current EPA, Wisconsin is screwed.
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The Clean Water Act [epa.gov] would be a good place to start... Anything on the banned list is, well, banned. And it's often true that discharged wastewater is actually cleaner than the original intake water.
Ask the residents of Flint, Michigan how those EPA rules worked out, and how well they were enforced.
Re: Manufacturing (Score:2)
The contaminants in Flint were already in the pipe network the water was delivered through. The lead pipe network was sitting there, a ticking time-bomb. It was the introduction of slightly more corrosive water that dissolved the lead into the water supply that made the problem. If the pipe network had been ceramic, or pvc, or stainless steel, there would not be a problem.
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"If the pipe network had been ceramic, or pvc, or stainless steel, there would not be a problem."
In a country that still nails power lines to wooden posts as it did when Edison still was alive?
You must be kidding.
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What's your problem with wood, exactly? It's one of the best construction materials in the world for many applications. It's strong, flexible, easy to work with, cheap, and not bad for the environment (unless you're making your wooden posts out of old-growth redwood or something). It actually can be carbon negative, since wood forms a natural carbon store. Just because it's old doesn't make it bad.
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Cons: the preservatives put in the wood; heavy and bulky compared to composite poles; 30-year nominal life
Pros: readily available; no spalling issues of concrete; “prettier”; less likely to kill passengers in a collision.
Trade offs like everything, but generally only the composite poles seem to offer significant improvements.
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Fracking isn't drilling through a sponge. It involves drilling through an impervious layer of rock. If fracking is done right (and that can be a pretty big "if"), the nasty stuff will stay under the rock layer.
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Curiously, though, that isn't necessarily a good thing when you're discharging into an ecosystem. If the water has been cleaned of nutrients, you can get a dead patch around the outlet pipes. Changes in the temperature of the water between intake and discharge can also have undesirable effects on the ecosystem.
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If you can't build the LCD screens in the US where the consumers are, then you are building them elsewhere and shipping them here, the process of which probably produces more pollutants than the factory itself.
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No industrial process is going to the 100% clean
So the big question is what else goes back with the water?
A higher standard of living for people in the community.
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No industrial process is going to the 100% clean
This is true most of the time, but in really polluted places with under-developed industry you sometimes see some pretty crazy stuff happen when western company comes in and sets up a factory following the standards of their home country.
When Finnish paper giant UPM set up it's paper mill in Uruguay the factory was set up with the exact same anti-pollution measures that they use in their factories over in Finland, which are way more thorough than what local companies who also drain and dump their waste w
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> how much of that evaporated water will
> fall back into the lake as rain too?
Either directly or indirectly, most of it. It's going to evaporate in Wisconsin. Prevailing wind direction in the area is west-to-east. If you start in Wisconsin and go east, you pass over the drainage basin of the upper great lakes. What doesn't fall in Lake Michigan, or a river or lake that drains into it, will fall over Lakes Huron, or a river or lake that drains into it. Which is technically the same lake. (The str
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Environmentalists aren't the only NIMBYs. In my area, ordinary people block development, even things environmentalists want such as density and transit.
It's amazing how quickly you can turn people who claim to value property rights into raging socialists simply by suggesting change. (Even though the only thing constant is change, as they say.)
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I think you need to learn what socialist means. Hint, it does not mean nimby or environmentalist.
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Hm, you may be right. Socialism is public ownership of the means of production, while private ownership but government control of the means of production is actually dirigism which is closely associated with fascism. Thanks for the correction!
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Socialism can also be the people or workers owning the means of production and socialism seems most successful without government involvement or at least minimal involvement. Most systems need an arbitrator of contracts and such.
Personally I like co-ops when it comes to socialism.
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Yup, just like capitalists who want to replace people with robots and AIs.
If the robots pay taxes like Bill Gates was suggesting, guess what that means? Guaranteed Universal Income. I'd take that...
Re: Manufacturing (Score:2)
Re: Manufacturing (Score:2)
Re: Manufacturing (Score:2)
So why don't they put in for that? Instead of treating it and putting it into the lake, why not re-use the treated water? Instead of evaporating it, why not recondense it and put it back into the process.
Because they're using it for cooling and your proposal would be far, far more expensive. The returned water, while no longer "hot" will still be significantly above the temperature of the intake water. In order to get the temperature down to the same level you would either require much larger cooling towe
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I agree - where will the water go, and what will it be used for?
If it's just for cooling then it will most likely end up back in the lake.
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What I find curious is that they intend to take in 7 million gallons and then discharge 4.3 million gallons of treated wastewater. Why not recycle that 4.3 million gallons and take in only the 2.7 million gallons lost to evaporation?
I have to conclude that the discharge water is too contaminated for the plant to use in its own processes. That might not be an environmental deal-breaker; dilution plus degradation of the contaminants may well result in negligible environmental impact. But that's certainly w
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The discharge water may not be contaminated from the industrial processes. It appears the primary need is ultra-pure water, for rinsing. The discharge water may simply be the discharge of the purification stage, where the 'contamination' is merely the concentration of existing impurities. Reverse osmosis, for example, doesn't really do much other than move impurities around.
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If you want manufacturing jobs...
The last thing liberals want is more jobs in the US. They need the stock market to crash and unemployment to go up in order to regain the power they've lost.
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Ask Obama. He was the one who was caught on mic https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] and told Romney that the 80s called https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] but now, because it's not their guy in office, the light has finally come on.
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"The water lost to evaporation isn't lost. It's still in the area. Expect a new microclimate."
So we will have Seattle-like rains?
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http://engineeredenvironment.t... [tumblr.com]
"Ultra-pure water (UPW), which is defined as water of utmost purity and lacking in microorganisms, minerals, or trace organic or nonorganic chemicals, is essential to several purification steps (GWI 2009, PNPPRC 2000). One of the more UPW intensive steps occurs after a chemical-mechanical polish. This process leaves a fine grit/slurry residue which needs to be washed off with ultrapure water. Once the wash water is evaporated, it is essential that there remains no mineral re
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"...it's diverting the water outside of the Lake Michigan watershed."
In what way is it leaving the Lake Michigan watershed? The only water that will leave the area is water that's evaporated and doesn't rain back into the Great Lakes.
Does it disappear? (Score:2)
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Although asbestos is a known human carcinogen by the inhalation route, available epidemiological studies do not support the hypothesis that an increased cancer risk is associated with the ingestion of asbestos in drinking-water. Moreover, in extensive feeding studies in animals, asbestos has not consistently increased the incidence of tumours of the gastrointestinal tract. There is therefore no consistent, convincing evidence that ingested asbestos is hazardous to health, and it is concluded that there is no need to establish a guideline for asbestos in drinking-water.
To reiterate the "money quote" from above: it is concluded that there is no need to establish a guideline for asbestos in drinking-water. So discharge of asbestos - a natural fiber - into Lake Michigan is a problem because - why?
You probably hate vaccinations and worry about cell-phone radiation too, don't you?
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There is therefore no consistent, convincing evidence that ingested asbestos is hazardous to health, and it is concluded that there is no need to establish a guideline for asbestos in drinking-water.
So discharge of asbestos - a natural fiber - into Lake Michigan is a problem because - why?
Just curious, what would happen if some of that asbestos washes on shore, where it dries and gets carried away by wind?
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Zebra mussels and quagga mussels have dramatically cleaned up the Great Lakes. It has come at some cost: http://www.chicagotribune.com/... [chicagotribune.com]
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Not that scary (Score:2)
I would be far more worried about the treated water they return not being treated well enough. Also, why not reuse your own treated water instead of pumping more out?
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Wow, that's a lot of water. (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, wait, it's not. Lake Michigan is somewhere around 4500 cubic km of water. And seven million gallons per day means that, even if all the water removed is pumped to Arizona for disposal, it'll be 500,000 years before the lake goes dry.
And the water taken out won't be pumped to Arizona. Eventually, it'll go right back into the lake....
Color me unimpressed with the Environmental Catastrophe In The Making....
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While I'm not really on the 'environmental disaster" bandwagon, your argument is stupid. Are you unfamiliar with what lakes are and how they work?
Lakes have topography. They're not cylinders. If you drain 10' of water from a lake, it gets a LOT smaller. Large amounts of any lake are less than 10' deep. That impacts the rivers that flow out of it, all of the people that live near it, all the boating and shipping that uses it, and the massive amount of wetlands around the lake. It also kills off a ton of shal
Re:Wow, that's a lot of water. (Score:5, Insightful)
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If Foxconn builds 1000 more flat screen factories, it might barely start to matter.
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Depending on the shape of the lake, you might have a point.
Or not. Note, for the record, that 7000000 gallons per day, given the size of Lake Michigan, translates to... 0.5 MICROMETERS drop in the lake daily. So, if this plant operates without returning the water to the lake for a year, the lake's depth will drop a whole 0.16 millimeters.
So, in a century, the lake will drop the best part of an inch
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You can't just expect to remove a lot of water from a lake and nothing to happen. I don't think this particular factory is going to be a huge issue, but the point made in the summary is an important one: This is the first major exemption granted. If it sets the stage for more of them in other states, they could eventually add up to enough to be really significant.
If it's an issue, there's the Great Lakes Compact that all the bordering lakes and Canada have signed in to. Any member state can ask for a hearing where all the other states can decide that a diversion is OK or not.
In the grand scheme of things, even if there were dozens of these factories opening up, it would have a negligible impact on the amount of water in the entire great lakes region. The largest impact has been dredging the Detroit river for shipping, since they re-dredged a bit deeper about ten yea
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If you drain 10' of water
Reductio ad absurdum.
And if you drained 1000' from Lake Michigan, it would be gone. Why not use an argument that even remotely resembles the actual situation? Drawing off 3.3 million gallons of water will reduce the lake level by less than a wavelength of visible light. What is a legitimate argument is that there are rules and processes that have to be followed to make such a draw. And so far, it appears that Foxconn followed the proper procedures. And even if you extrapolate this precedent to some ridicul
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If you drain 10' of water
Reductio ad absurdum.
And if you drained 1000' from Lake Michigan, it would be gone. Why not use an argument that even remotely resembles the actual situation? Drawing off 3.3 million gallons of water will reduce the lake level by less than a wavelength of visible light. What is a legitimate argument is that there are rules and processes that have to be followed to make such a draw. And so far, it appears that Foxconn followed the proper procedures. And even if you extrapolate this precedent to some ridiculous level, it still isn't that big a deal.
Actually, that's the contention with the groups opposing this - that Wisconsin is violating a multi-state and international agreement not to draw off water from Lake Michigan, and in doing so, if it gets away with it, it opens the door to everyone else doing it. Add 50 other companies drawing off 7 million gallons per day, with typical efficiency and corner cutting - how many years until Lake Michigan is a contaminated swamp?
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Actually, reading TFA, it appears that Foxconn and the city of Racine (who made the request) are meeting the requirements of the water agreement. And if you search on-line for other Lake Michigan water requests, quite a few have been approved since the latest regulations have been put in place.
Arguments over the 'spirit' of the water compact are pretty meaningless when communities make permit applications for more swimming pools, golf courses and rich people's developments. And get no push back from the gr
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Large amounts of any lake are less than 10' deep.
And some amounts of lake Michigan are 1/4 of a km deep.
You can't just expect to remove a lot of water from a lake and nothing to happen.
Define "a lot". 7 million gallons per day is significantly less than the 2 billion gallons per day removed by the city of Chicago just by reversing the flow of the Chicago river, and that's before you take into account commercial, industrial and residential users of the lake.
Never before has the phrase: Metaphorical drop of piss in the ocean been more apt.
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The real story should be about the people complaining. It’s a very small amount of water. The effects will be zero. Yet people are still taking the time and effort to lodge complaints about it.
The Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters is risking their credibility. Credibility is useful if you want to be listened to on something that's a real concern in the future.
Re: Wow, that's a lot of water. (Score:2)
You are not familiar with the draining of Lake Baikal.
Nobody is draining lake Baikal. The lower than normal water levels are overwhelmingly due to much dryer weather which had reduced the normal inflow to between 50 and 67% of prior levels. This has, unsurprisingly, caused the lake to shrink.
Human utilisation of lake water isn't helping, of course, but it pales in comparison. If dryer weather persisted the lake would continue to shrink at the same rate, even absent any human activity.
You could argue that the dryer climate is itself due to human activity (ie
Not really a lot (Score:5, Insightful)
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The city of Chicago could also offset this by not drawing 2 billion gallons per day through the Chicago river reversal.
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Insignificant (Score:2, Insightful)
The water is not lost.
The water is either returned to the lake
or the water goes into the air and then returns to the environment as rain, snow, etc.
This is much hubaloo over nothing.
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A beautiful example of "thermal pollution" is at some of the nuclear power plants. The one near us outputs warm water which has resulted in far greater growth of plants and animals in the area. The "thermal pollution" was beneficial. One man's pollutant is another man's gold.
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That's all? That's a drop in the bucket! (Score:5, Informative)
I worked at the Linwood water filtration plant, one of two in the City of Milwaukee. There was a North and a South side section of the plant and the slowest rate the plant could handle was 30 million gallons per day. That doesn't count how much the Howard Avenue plant was pulling. Lake Michigan has one quadrillion gallons of water, that's 1,000,000,000,000,000 gallons. http://blog.livnfresh.com/how-... [livnfresh.com] If this group was truly concerned about Lake Michigan, they would be complaining about the untreated sewage that MMSD (Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewage District) discharges during heavy rainfalls. The city of Milwaukee has combined sewers (sanitary and storm) so that heavy rainfall overwhelms the treatment plants. The deep tunnel system can't always hold enough, thus the "diversions" The city of Milwaukee doesn't want to spent the money to separate their sewers like most everyone else has.
Would you rather not have LCD panels? (Score:2)
If you are opposed to this what would you want to happen instead?
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I thought Lake Michigan was in the US?
There are better places. (Score:2)
Got to love the Far lefties. (Score:2)
reposted for the fearmongering poster (Score:2)
7 million? really?
>> Nearly 2.7 million gallons of the waterâ"about 39 percent of the daily intake from the factoryâ"will be lost in the process, primarily from evaporation. The remaining water will be treated and returned to the lake basin.
>> Wisconsinâ(TM)s DNR noted in a statement that the requested withdrawal will âoeonly amount to a 0.07 percent increase in the total surface water withdrawals from Lake Michigan.â
0,07%! oh noes its the zombie apocalypse!
The impact to this is most likely near zero. (Score:4, Interesting)
The real issue is whether or not chemical pollutants are being released in the waste water.
Assuming the wate water is pretreated at the plant to remove manufacturing chemicals, either with clarification or ultrafiltration, there is no issue with significant water "usage".
Evaporation gives me a minor cause for concern, as I assume the evaporation occurs in curing or drying ovens, which allows for the potential of VOC/SVOC releases, but I assume they will have the customary protections used in modern Western plants, such as wet scrubbers and after burners, along with real time participate monitoring and emissions sampling. Generally, permits for any reasonable sized heating operation in Wisconsin requires an extended evaluation and environmental safety plan.
Yes, I'm in the environmental industry in Wisconsin.
So what? (Score:2)
Lake Michigan contains 1.5x10^15 gallons. 7 million gallons equals 1/2 of one millionth of 1 percent of that water.
61% will be returned back to the lake, the rest will evaporate into the atmosphere, contributing to precipition somewhere downwind, sooner or later.
What's the problem, other than the Left's hatred of Capitalism?
If we would stop buying things (Score:2)
So what? (Score:2)
Nearly 2.7 million gallons of the water -- about 39 percent of the daily intake from the factory -- will be lost in the process, primarily from evaporation. The remaining water will be treated and returned to the lake basin.
From what I remember from 6th grade Earth Science classes, water evaporating simply cycles back into the ecosystem, being redeposited on earth as rain, entering creeks and streams which feed int rivers that feed lakes like Lake Michigan...
The rest of the water is used and returned to the lake, so the issue is what, exactly?
I don't see the problem here (Score:2)
Water doesn't just disappear. I mean, they'll put it back when they're done with it, right?
Right?
Foxconn, best known for Apple's iPhones (Score:2)
And also manufacturer for Amazon, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Microsoft
Violation of International Great Lakes water pact (Score:2)
Both environmentalists and Paul Ryan's pro-Chinese corporate shills are missing the point. This isn't about the total amount of Lake Michigan water used or even the significant percentage of treated water used. As the article points out, Paul Ryan's pet project sets a precedent of diverting water out of the Great Lakes basin. Only a few kilometers and a few meters of elevation divide the Great Lakes water from the Mississippi river system. Where the plant is located, wastewater would flow away from the Grea
All of those "dry Lake Michigan" movie tropes (Score:2)
It looks like the "dry Lake Michigan" movie trope (I, Robot; Johnny Mnemonic, etc) is actually going to come true.
Nothing New (Score:2)
Re: And it will put it back (Score:2)
Lake Michigan, according to satellite measurements and formulas, holds One Quadrillion gallons of water.
http://blog.livnfresh.com/how-... [livnfresh.com]
Re: And it will put it back (Score:4, Informative)
13. Making two pounds of paper requires 793 gallons of water—so think before you print!
15. Making two pounds of beef requires 4068 gallons of water. Feed for the livestock accounts for 99 percent of that massive footprint.
Source [mentalfloss.com]
Pair of Jeans
.
.
.
It takes around 1,800 gallons of water to grow enough cotton to produce just one pair of regular ol' blue jeans. [2]
Cotton T-Shirt
Not as bad as jeans, it still takes a whopping 400 gallons of water to grow the cotton required for an ordinary cotton shirt.
Single Board of Lumber
5.4 gallons of water are used to grow enough wood for one lumber board. [3]
Barrel of Beer
In order to process a single barrel of beer (32 gallons of booze), 1,500 gallons of water are sucked down. [3]
To-Go Latte
It takes 53 gallons to make every latte, as I've noted before:
That sugar, doesn't that have to be grown as cane first? Hm. And then there's that plastic lid, which has to be created and distributed over hundreds of miles. And doesn't plastic require a pretty vast amount of water and oil to produce? Come to think of it, there's the sleeve and the cup itself too . .
Gallon of Paint
Takes 13 gallons of water to make.
Individual Bottled Water
This irony shouldn't be lost on anyone: it takes 1.85 gallons of water to manufacture the plastic for the bottle in the average commercial bottle of water.
One Ton of . .
Steel: 62,000 gallons of water
Cement: 1,360 gallons
One Pound of . .
Wool: 101 gallons of water
Cotton: 101 gallons
Plastic: 24 gallons
Synthetic Rubber: 55 gallons
Source [treehugger.com]
Re: And it will put it back (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that the 7 States and 2 Provinces have an agreement not to remove any water from the drainage basin.
7 million gallons (is that American or Canadian gallons?) here and 7 million gallons there, repeated enough times and we're up to some big numbers that might have an affect.
Re: And it will put it back (Score:2)
WTF is a "Canadian Gallon"?
Do you mean liters?
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4.54 litres, properly called the Imperial Gallon
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WTF is a "Canadian Gallon"?
Canada uses ("used" really, as most volume stuff is metric since at least the 80s) the "Imperial gallon" which is a touch more than 1.20 times the size of a US gallon (the US is about 83% of the Imperial).
I recall the advertised MPG ratings "back in the day" being a source of confusion depending if one was watching a US TV channel or a Canadian one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The US gallon is defined as 231 cubic inches (8 US liquid pints) or about 3.785 L
The Imperial gallon defined as 4.54609 litres (
Re: And it will put it back (Score:2)
At 7 million gallons a day, Lake Michigan will be empty in only 500,000 years!
TFA says they're putting back 61% of the water they take, so, really, you've got more like 1.28 million years.
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This has to be a troll post. Please tell me this is a troll post.. Slashdot? Hello?
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This is explicitly forbidden by the Great Lake Compact http://www.glslcompactcouncil.... [glslcompactcouncil.org]
Re: Prairie farmers are next. (Score:2)
People who say this is a small amount of water should take a look at the Caspian Sea, which was killed by all the industry around it.
The Caspian sea isn't dead, by any stretch of the imagination, and there's little evidence that "all the industry around it" has had any serious impact on it's level. The best data we have indicates that the sea is shrinking primarily because of increased evaporation due to warmer weather.
The amount of natural evaporation from such a massive body of water is mind boggling, and even a half degree increase in average temperature can cause a corresponding increase in evaporation which dwarfs all the water use
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A typical large tanker truck hauls about 11,000 gallons of liquid. So you are proposing they use ~640 tanker trucks EVERY DAY as the environmentally friendly replacement for a single pipe 16" pipe running at ~10 PSI? Seriously? Assuming a 20 mile round trip, you're looking at using about 4,500 gallons - minimum - of diesel consumption every day, or about the equivalent emissions of about 10,000 cars. Every day.
Or we could have a one-time cost of a 16" pipe, and one that is run under essentially zero p