Time of Waste - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 88

CHAPTER 10
Time of Waste
When you put your hand in a flowing stream, you touch the last that has gone
before and the first of what is still to come.
—Leonardo da Vinci
WASTE NOT, WANT NOT
In the twenty-first century, the nation is faced with a set of new conditions: the popu-
lation continues to grow, the climate is warming, and demand for freshwater is surging,
yet supplies are generally static or are dropping. Many experts fear that this century will
prove to be an age of scarcity. We have responded by searching for new sources of water,
which has led to innovations and forced the issues of water quality and quantity to con-
verge more tightly than ever.
One effect of this new sensitivity to quantity has been a surge of research and invest-
ment in recycling. Just as severe water pollution in the Berkeley Pit led people in Butte,
Montana, to create new remediation technologies, so has water scarcity led to technic-
al invention. By 2010, more than a billion people worldwide lacked safe drinking wa-
ter, and the demand for efficient water treatment systems was rapidly expanding: Global
WaterIntelligencemagazine estimated the water treatment market will grow 18 percent
between 2010 and 2016.
Perhaps no water treatment initiative is more counterintuitive, or divisive, than turn-
ing sewage—one of man's most ancient and intractable water pollution problems—into
a solution. Wastewater, of all things, is being hailed as a potentially significant source of
“new” freshwater.
• • •
Victorian London was the first place in which as many as 2.4 million humans were
densely packed into a thirty-square-mile urban zone. In the last week of August 1854,
many residents of Golden Square , a dank slum, suddenly became ill, and some of them
died writhing in pain. Their symptoms included stomachaches, cramps, diarrhea, a ter-
rible thirst, and vomiting. Seventy deaths occurred in twenty-four hours, most within