This week in class we learned about water, an interesting fact is that where 70% of the Earth's surface is covered in water only 1% is freshwater. This means it is extremely important that we use the water we have as many times as possible. At the Central Valley Water Reclamation Facility it is there job to clean water for a handful of cities, so yes they are technically the sewage filtration plant. It was really interesting to see the process that all waste water has to go through, a lot more goes into it than you might think. Below are questions prompted by my professor. 1) Look through your home and list all of the herbicides and pesticides that you use. Pick one of them and find an alternative for it that is less harmful to water resources. We own round up, miracle grow, and ortho max though I don't think we use these on a regular basis. I've decided to look up an alternative to miracle grow because I know that it's the most common brand to be found in the common household. The alternative I chose to compare it to is Pro-Gro-5-3-4, the things that make this a better products are 1) the amount of nitrogen, Miracle Grow has 11% with water insoluble nitrogen being 8.92%. Pro-Gro has 5% and 3.5% of it is insoluble. 2) Miracle Grow derives their ingredients from harsher sources, "Nitrate of Soda, Rock Phosphate, Potassium Chloride, and Copper Sulfate" just to name a few, you can look at all of the ingredients from their labels pdf here. Pro-Gro gets their ingredients from more sustainable sources, "Vegetable protein meals, animal protein meals, bone char, and pasteurized poultry litter" to name a few, the full ingredients list can be found here. I can see why the Pro-Gro-5-3-4 is better for our environment. 2) How much have you thought about your relationship with water in the past? How can you improve your relationship with water and make it more sustainable? The only time I really think about my relationship with water is when I take a shower and when I'm making dinner, the reason these two events provoke this thinking is because when I was in high school there was a scholarship opportunity that talked about how taking 5 minute showers can help conserve water. The scholarship gave me the task of making a shower playlist that is exactly 5 minutes long so when a specific song comes on you'll be able to track how long you've been taking. When I make dinner it drives me crazy to see people leave the tap on when they do dishes, or when they fill the entire sink instead of filling up the larges dish and making that your soapy water. It's just a huge waste of water. Even though I know that 5 minute showers are the best way to make showering sustainable, I have not been motivated to making that apart of my daily shower retinue. I know if I could make it to where my showers are only 5 min but I haven't been motivated to making the change. I can also change what I do with week old water, I often will just dump it because I don't think it's still good to drink (which isn't true) so I can either just drink it or use it on house plants or my yard. 3) Diagram the wastewater treatment plant and describe the process in your own words. I made a slide show that describes the water treatment process. 4) Describe your photo and why you chose to take and post that particular photo and what is it's connection to the topic of the week.
This week I chose to share the pictures of some of the chronological steps in purifying the water because I think it's important to bring awareness to people about how much work it takes to clean our water. One of the pictures that I think is important is of the screening machine, this shows that people can't just throw away whatever they want to; it slows down the process. This relates to the topic of water quality problems, without all of these many steps when the water got released back it would cause numerous problems. The biggest being waterborne illnesses, 88% of all diseases are caused by unsafe drinking water. Another big problem would be the result all of the nutrients would have on the water, increased nitrogen levels are detrimental to ecosystems they are the leading cause of dead zones and death of aquatic life. 5) What was one thing that you found particularly interesting this week? I was astonished to find out that poor drinking water is such a horrific problem, it's easy to forget about stuff like that when you live in America where we don't have to worry about clean water. The fact that half of the world's hospital beds are occupied by patients suffering from a waterborne disease shocks me! I don't even feel like the United States can get away from this, in the video we had to watch they showed that old filtering plants don't have the technology to filter out new threats to human health. I am most interested to see what happens and if America's water can stay on the healthy side so we don't see a rise of waterborne illnesses here.
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