NEW YORK-Ten years ago, Antonio Villaraigosa, then alderman, led the battle to stop a project as audacious as unpopular: recycling of waste water, making it potable again. Toilet to tap, water from the tap, according to the slogan coined by then, "contras", that sprang. But is he now, Mayor of Los Angeles, to propose this therapy for the shock-thirst of the second American city. The prolonged drought in the American West that led below the limits of guarding the water supply of Southern California has gone before Governor Schwarzenegger and Mayor Villaraigosa then to propose drastic measures. Based on the plan just presented, the inhabitants of Los Angeles in the coming years will have to change washers, water, 'Onions' in the shower, switching to models that deliver less water. It will have to change their habits. No more free water for watering the garden, wash your car, bathe the dog. It will be a revolution for the public works: large parking lots in which the asphalt will be replaced by steel grates, to allow the collection of rainwater, urinals clean and dry, for green spaces, annaffiatoi «intelligenti»: no spraying during the hottest hours of the day, when evaporation is greater, or if the barometer rain expected. But, mostly, just approved the plan aims to make drinking water every year 20 billion gallons of water that now flow into the sewer.
Water from the glass, just like the slogan: Villaraigosa has changed his mind and is ready to risk his political future on a project that continues to worry many, because it is convinced that the technologies available today allow you to sewage discharges and the purest distilled water and why the great thirst within a few years California will not leave a lot of escape routes: you can not penalize agriculture, which absorbs the 70 percent of water consumed, while the snowfall in the Sierra, the mountains that feed the California, continue to decline and the basins of the states north and west, used in the past to supply the cities on the Pacific, are also half-empty or blocked by the laws on protection of endangered animal species. The plan is not just an exercise in calligraphy of politicians who want to show active: purification technologies are now mature and a first pilot plant has just started operations in Orange County. It is an establishment where the water undergoes three different sewage treatment plant - micro filtration to remove solids and bacteria, reverse osmosis to remove other microorganisms, salt, Pharmaceutical and chemical residues and, finally, treatment with ultraviolet light and hydrogen peroxide to remove the last traces of contamination.
The water is pumped into underground aquifers regenerated where, After further filtering of the ground, artesian wells that feed ends up in the houses of California. A complex system and very high costs: Orange County is the system cost 500 million dollars, its annual management will require further 30 and is able to treat about 250 million liters of water a day: the 10 percent of the county's needs. The Los Angeles can seem a limiting case, but the reserves of water-population growth and climate change - begin to run out a little 'everywhere. The water will soon be free or almost a memory. We will have to change the habits of consumption and will very civic-minded. In many parts of America that revolution is a reality of the behavior: last year, when Georgia was hit by a severe drought, Governor Sonny Perdue asked the citizens to reduce consumption of 10 per cento. Within a month the water system of the state recorded a decline in demand as much as 15 per cento. And in San Antonio, nell’arido Texas, current water consumption are the same as ten years ago, even though the population has increased by 30 per centopercent
On investment in water savings made from the city and local businesses: water park Sea World has learned to save 80 million liters of water a year, mentre Frito-Lay, that needed 16 liters of water to produce a pound of fries, hours can do so with 8. Crippled by high energy costs and soaring prices for agricultural commodities, arrive exhausted at this latest emergency. "But it is precisely that of water-warns the president of Earth Policy Institute, Lester Brown - The decisive battle: each of us every day absorbs a gallon of water, whereas to produce the food we eat with which these are multiplied by four liters 500. It is clear that, unless we address the problem, the future in store for us not only problems of water supply but also a food crisis'. If you have already noticed in China, where the wheat harvest was down 15 percent in ten years because the lands of the North are increasingly arid.
Of “Corrieredellasera.it”
