| 
|
By Sam Masson
Constantly talking about water and water treatment has been making me thirsty. And while at the grocery store recently, in search of something to quench my thirst, I saw something that took away my appetite. As of Jan. 1, the United States Food and Drug Administration has been requiring that food and beverage manufacturers include information about trans fats on their “nutrition facts” labels. For years I’ve wincingly imagined that all my favorite foods are chocked full of trans fats, but now that I’m actually able to quantify the amounts that are actually present, my ostrich-with-head-in-sand technique no longer provides me with the false sense of security on which I’ve been relying all this time.
It’s an analogous situation to one we’re facing in the onsite water treatment industry. “Out of sight, out of mind” only gets you so far: Although we might know fully well that there are unacceptably high levels of one chemical or another in the effluent from one site or another, the possibility exists that we’re not testing for it. This isn’t to say that we’re being malicious or lackadaisical in such situations; more often, people do the best they can with the tools available to meet the given requirements. We can wait until superior technologies are developed and more stringent benchmarks are set for acceptable levels of this or that, but what we do today will continue to affect how we live tomorrow. Of course, hindsight is what it is, and it’s often hard to change something once it’s done. Man-made, hydrogenated vegetable oils have been with us for nearly a hundred years, and some of us have been carrying pounds of the stuff in our bodies nearly as long as that. Personally, I learned about the health risks imposed by trans-fats more than 10 years ago, and it wasn’t “new” news back then. However, as long as I didn’t actually have to read about it, as long as the facts weren’t printed in boldface on the items I was putting in my shopping cart—the same items I would later be putting down my gullet—it seemed more “OK.” This isn’t to say I didn’t think about trans fats, nor to say that I didn’t worry about them, nor even to suggest that I didn’t have my strongly held suspicions that they might be in a lot of the foods I’d bought. Suspicions, thoughts, and worries don’t hit home as hard as facts, and it’s therefore a little bit easier to shake them off.
What’s all that have to do with Onsite Water Treatment? Like being able to detect trans fats in our diet, we’re constantly developing better detection systems for our water, and regulatory agencies are going to be ever more capable of determining what’s in our wastewater, and at what concentrations. Something that would’ve been a “non-detect” only a few years ago can now be quantified with a degree of precision previously unimaginable. As we become better able to test for chemicals in our water, we will need to become better stewards of that water before it leaves our factories, farms and homes, and also before it reaches a centralized treatment plant or natural receiving body. News articles arrive on my desk daily that discuss discharge levels of one chemical or another, concerns about those discharges, and what measures are being taken by commercial industries to better treat their effluent in order to comply with standards. In the future, water quality regulations are going to evolve as our abilities to detect and analyze continue to improve. And, as a result, onsite water treatment is going to become an increasingly important financial reality for commercial industry.
The impact of discharged cleaning products and pharmaceuticals on our water supply continues to be an increasing concern. Over the past month, I’ve read a half dozen articles citing detectable levels of various compounds and chemicals—including antidepressants, caffeine, and ibuprofen—in household effluent. These substances may be detected only in trace amounts without enough coming from any one site to do a great deal of damage, but nonetheless... we know it’s there now, and, although we weren’t throwing fewer analgesics, stimulants, and pipe-uncloggers down our drains 10 years ago, we also weren’t thinking about it as much—or it wasn’t in the news to the degree it is now. This reminded me of talking to my grandparents about how, back in the day, people suspected that cigarettes probably posed some kind of a health risk, and how they sort of guessed that “secondhand smoke” (before that term was coined) wasn’t very good for you, either. However, the data to back that suspicion up simply didn’t exist then, and even once scientists had identified smoking’s carcinogenic risks, it didn’t become a matter of national consciousness for at least another decade after that. Even today, having learned as much as we have, and knowing as much as we do, people still smoke, although they’re much more heavily taxed and regulated than they were in my grandparents’ day.
I imagine that we’ll look back at our own naiveté in much the same way as my grandparents did, that I’ll explain to amazed youngsters about how I grew up on a steady diet of hydrogenated oils and how we thought nothing of leaving a faucet running or what happened to the trisodium phosphate after it got washed down the drain. I also imagine that with the bevy of new chemical compounds created every year, and the unknown results of what happens when they mix in the water supply, regulatory agencies are going to have a whole lot more to look for, and industries will need to be even more careful about their wastewater.
What I’m discussing doesn’t have much to do with aeration ponds or leach fields. However, it does have to do with safety, with our water supply on a broader scale, and how our behaviors and treatment are going to have an increasingly important effect on centralized water treatment plants, municipal water supplies, and our overall water quality. Decentralized treatment strategies in all manner of industrial and agricultural businesses will become increasingly important in the future, as will onsite wastewater systems for residential applications. We will be taking a careful look at all of these in upcoming issues of Onsite Water Treatment, and as we do, I welcome your input and suggestions. Send an email to sam@forester.net, give me a call (805-679-7613), or stop by our offices if you’re in southern California. I welcome your perspective and invite you to add your voice to the important dialogue about the future of onsite treatment and the future of the world’s water.
OW
- March/April 2006
|
