r/water

Villagers in Uttar Pradesh (India) reported water coming out of hand pumps that look like chemicals.

The doctors report that villagers are visiting frequently with contaminated water related complains.

The villagers say they have to visit to toilet frequently to relieve themselves.

The food cannot be properly cooked by the polluted water.

This level of pollution did not appear out of thin air in a couple of days. It is an accumulation of years of neglect in sufficient and timely enforcement of pollution regulation.

In this case, the pollutant is Chromium (VI) used in electroplating, wood preservation and leather strengthening. The Chromium compound used is manufactured in the area.

Is it state responsibility to monitor and enforce pollution regulation levels? Or is it failure on our part to pay the full price of consumption prompting the industries to find cheaper ways to dispose waste?

or perhaps the problem runs deeper that is why there should be so much consumption at all?

Where are we heading by having a relationship of consumption with the world around us?

Video credits- The Hindu.

Source - https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/uttar-pradesh/contaminated-groundwater-in-uttar-pradesh-poses-health-risks/article71322801.ece

Hey everyone, I work with a humanitarian NGO in Uganda and got the chance to lead a small pilot project in a pretty remote area. Budget is tight, so my plan is to make DIY water filters, we want to distribute around 30 to households and run some training at local schools so people can actually build these themselves going forward.

It needs to be cheap and easy enough that the community can reproduce it without us. First idea was something like image 1 for household level, and if that works well, maybe scale up to something like image 2 for a bigger group, plus a simple way to boil the water after as an extra safety step.

Images 3-5 show the kind of water sources people are currently using in the areas we're working in, just pulled these off google but they're a good match for what we're seeing.

Anyone have thoughts on the filter design, or know of something better? Has to be buildable/fixable by the community itself.

Edit: I know the second image is AI slop, I just couldn't find any real picture to use it, I just wanted to show because of the support and that it can accomodate more water than the first one, it was just to illustrate the post, for the communities we are going to design ourselves an flyer on how to make it on their local language.

My “neighbor” forgot to pay their water bill on time and she came home to find this lock on her meter. Of COURSE I’m not asking for assistance in doing anything potentially wrong but how would the water company remove this “lock” after my neighbor pays her bill??

(Edit: added more context and information)

There's a stretch of the Little Deschutes River in Oregon that's going dry because no water is being released from the Gilchrist mill pond dam. This section is roughly 7.5 miles long and stretches from the Gilchrist mill pond dam to Crescent Creek.

Some sections of the river are completely dry, but in others there are small pools where surviving fish, frogs, mussels, and crayfish are taking refuge.

As for why there's no release - This is an unprecedented event, and it seems there's no protocol to handle it. Here's what I've heard - There was an official ask earlier this year to remove no water from the mill pond. I'm not sure who this ask came from or what the exact wording was; I'll assume OWRD (please comment if you know). I also assume that request was regarding water removal for irrigation or fire prevention, not for continued flow downstream. Regardless, it seems the dam owners are concerned they might be in violation of that request if they release water from the dam. Additionally, I've heard from OWRD that the dam operator has no legal requirement to release water from the dam. But - OWRD also expects that anything that flows into the mill pond will flow out. That's definitely not the case; there is 14.1CFS coming in, and nothing coming out.

It's pretty obvious to me what the right thing to do here is - release enough water to at least keep the river on life support for the time being. If that outflow lowers the mill pond to the extent wildlife is dying there too (which is unlikely), then we can re-evalulate. Worst case, the dam is blocked again and the mill pond will refill to it's existing levels within a week or so.

The more attention this gets, the sooner we'll get a decision. Comment, upvote, share, call OWRD and other government agencies (I have), or sign the petition below - any of those will show your support.

Petition: https://c.org/2vrXpM9Fpc

Thanks.

No longer a green and pleasant land. Source: https://eu-space.europa.eu/components/earth-observation-copernicus/image-of-the-day/severe-drought-across-southern-britain

Edit: i couldn’t just say no because my manager wanted us to serve them for whatever reason. I couldn’t just not do my job or I’d probably get in trouble.

Sources (so you don't have to take my word for it):

• Crop/cereal water footprints — Mekonnen & Hoekstra (2011), The green, blue and grey water footprint of crops, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci. 15: 1577–1600. https://www.waterfootprint.org/resources/Mekonnen-Hoekstra-2011-WaterFootprintCrops.pdf
• Meat/dairy/egg water footprints — Mekonnen & Hoekstra (2012), A Global Assessment of the Water Footprint of Farm Animal Products, Ecosystems 15(3): 401–415. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10021-011-9517-8
• Recent corroboration — Poore & Nemecek (2018), Science 360: 987–992, and Our World in Data's "Environmental impacts of food" (actively updated).
• Production volumes — FAOSTAT / USDA. Annual totals are my calculation (per-kg footprint × production). AI water figures are unofficial estimates (no official per-query number exists).

Caveat: water footprints use the Mekonnen & Hoekstra dataset (1996–2005 baseline) as standard. Absolute liters may be somewhat lower today with improved yields and irrigation, but the relative comparisons hold, which is the whole point. I'm using it because it's still the most-cited work for the green/blue/grey water-footprint split in the field. No one has since redone a comparably comprehensive global, crop-by-crop accounting with that three-way breakdown, so newer studies (e.g., Poore & Nemecek 2018) corroborate the ranking but don't replace it.

The most common criticisms of AI include emissions, humming noise near data centers, muddy water runoff, and critics’ favorite: water usage! This post takes a closer look at the nuances of water usage because it's the one that's gone most viral ("every ChatGPT query drinks a bottle of water!"), it's the one people repeat most confidently.

Look at the charts. All of ChatGPT for a year uses about 0.018 trillion liters of water. Now find it on the chart. You basically can't; it's the sliver you need a magnifying glass to see. This isn’t "food uses somewhat more." It's four to five orders of magnitude. This got me really, really curious about water, and here's my takeaway from two days of research on this topic.

Water is a more nuanced issue than a single chart can capture.

Nuance 1: Water isn't one big shared tank.

The most important caveat is also the one that's easiest to miss. When I say "food uses far more water than AI," that does not mean you could shut down a wheat field and pipe the savings to a data center. Water is local. Shutting down a data center in the US will not help restore Punjab's groundwater reserves.

Nuance 2: Not all water is equal

• Green water: rainwater that falls on a field and gets used by the crop. It's essentially free; it wasn't going anywhere else useful, and it can't be redirected.
• Blue water: irrigation drawn from rivers, lakes, and groundwater. This is the scarce kind — the water that drains aquifers, dries up rivers, and actually competes with drinking supplies.
• Grey water: the freshwater you'd need to dilute the pollution (fertilizer, runoff) a product creates back to safe levels.

Take millets like bajra or ragi. By total water, they look surprisingly thirsty, consuming ~4,500 liters per kilo, higher than rice! This might make them seem like a bad deal. But nearly all of that is green water: rain, rain that fell anyway. So when talking about water consumption statistics, you should look at blue water consumption instead; and when we look at blue water consumption, in the 2nd chart, AI still looks like a rounding error compared with food systems. AI doesn't use any green water, and there is no data on how much grey water it needs.

Nuance 3: Where the water is drawn from matters more than how much.

A liter isn't a liter. Pulling a liter from a stressed aquifer in a drought-prone region is a real loss; using a liter from a rain-fed, fast-replenishing watershed barely registers.  This is the one place where the AI critics have a real point. A single data center can draw heavily on one local municipal supply, all at once, sometimes in an already water-stressed area. But notice what this means for the fix: if a data center's water problem is fundamentally local, then siting it in a water-rich region largely dissolves the problem.

However, water-rich isn't a free pass on everything. We also need to focus on the seasonality of water availability. Also, when looking for a site for an AI data center, you also need to look at whether cheap and clean electricity is available.

Nuance 4: "Per kilo" and "in total" tell opposite stories, and both are true.

If you looked at the per-serving chart, you saw meat sitting way out at the top; beef and mutton are far thirstier per kilo than any grain. But on the whole-industry chart, cereals use more total water than meat.

It's efficient and expected that staples dominate total water, because they should: they deliver most of the world's calories, and per calorie they're far more water-efficient than meat. So the big cereal total is largely "water well spent". It's feeding people. The problem isn't the total; it's which kind of water and which crop. This is where blue water matters again:

Rice and wheat are the biggest blue-water (irrigation/groundwater) draws on the planet (Wheat uses ~270 trillion L of blue water annually, and Rice uses ~240 trillion L of blue water annually). For example, in India, rice + wheat are the crops actually draining aquifers. So on the metric that matters for scarcity, cereals genuinely are a bigger problem than the per-100g numbers suggest, not because we eat too much cereal, but because we grow the thirstiest cereals (rice) in the most water-stressed places using the most wasteful method (flood irrigation). So here's the thing: fixing even a slice of that (shifting some rice to millets, drip irrigation instead of flooding, cutting food waste) would save more freshwater than switching off every data center on Earth, several times over!

None of this means AI gets a free pass, or that you can't criticize it. Criticize it on energy, on emissions, on labor. But when talking about water, focus on food systems rather than AI, because AI companies have an incentive to become cleaner, whereas we pay little attention to food systems!

Serious environmentalists should be ready for serious lifestyle changes. Using AI for making memes is irresponsible, but consuming meat and dairy is far more irresponsible, because when you look at GHG emissions per 1000 kcal, land use per 1000 kcal, and land use per 100 g protein in Poore & Nemecek 2018, you will realize that these foods truly do not belong on our plate.

Changing your lifestyle requires changing yourself, as AP says, “actor is the action”!

What changes have you made in your lifestyle after listening to AP?

What changes have you made because you were concerned for the environment?

What is one change you know you should make, but haven’t because it would mean giving up some comfort?

With the proper environment, water can become captivating 💙
1000–1500 FPS and a large subwoofer under the tray :)
Low frequency at high and the room is shaking.
** Lots of lights for this bad boy!