Troubled Water
Glanris’ CEO Bryan Eagle gives his opinion on the need to invest in the US’ water infrastructure after COVID-19, through the lens of Seth Siegel’s new book, Troubled Water.
IIn early 2018, as a new water investor with virtually no water industry experience, I was determined to read everything I could about the industry. One of the first books I read was Seth Siegel's book Let There Be Water about how Israel has gone from a desert to a net exporter of water to its neighbors. If ever there was a country that got water right, it's Israel. Most of the world lose 30%-40% of its water from the pumping station to the home. In Israel, it's below 10%. They conserved every way they could and focused on the big user, agriculture, to get the most significant reduction. The methods to irrigate, like center pivot irrigation, can waste a lot of water. In Isreal, they developed drip irrigation to get water only where and when it's needed. This improves yield while drastically reducing water. In the U.S., 70% of the freshwater pumped from the ground is used in agriculture. Twenty percent is used for industry, and less than 8% is used in households. So low-flush toilets are great, but a 10% reduction in an 8% category doesn't make much of a dent. A 15% to 20% reduction in agricultural use, however, can save more water than used in all households in the U.S.
In 2020, now as the CEO of a water tech start-up, Glanris, I was excited to dive into Seth's latest book, Troubled Water: What's Wrong With What We Drink. Once again, Seth has written an engaging story, but now he focused on the U.S. This time, it's not a tale of how we got it right, it's a compendium of all the ways we are getting it wrong.
In the U.S., our water infrastructure is in terrible shape. The issues that let 40% of our water leak out of the distribution system are also allowing contaminants to leak into our drinking water supply. The stats are not encouraging. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the U.S. a "D" grade for the quality of its drinking water. As many as 63 million people were exposed to potentially unsafe water more than once during the past decade. While many people have heard about the issues in Flint and Newark, 25% of Americans drink water from systems that don't meet current water safety regulations. Each year there are about 80,000 reported violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act. The list goes on.
Seth covers all these issues and gives us a timeline of how we got here. He covers the efforts that led up to the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act, how the EPA has struggled to keep up in regulating the thousands of new "emerging contaminants" that come on the market every year, how this has led to cancer-causing agents like PFAS not being regulated but studied to death.
Seth covers how the 50,000 (yep that's right, 50,000) water utilities in the U.S. are struggling to keep up with changing technologies and the emerging threats. Most of these are small and don't have the resources to maintain the required safety standards. Thus the 80,000 violations each year.
It is unlikely that the states or local municipalities will fund the $1 trillion estimated by the American Water Works Association required over the next 25 years to fix our country's water service. This means that the problem will continue to worsen.
But Seth also devotes half the book to solutions. Some of these solutions seem obvious, like getting the EPA to step up and do more, but in the highly polarized world we live in now, even simple issues like clean water have opponents. Why? Because there is a cost associated with these fixes. If PFAS are regulated, then the lawsuits will follow. Who will pay for these? Orange County is doing a great job of ensuring drinking water by cost-effectively recharging their aquifer. But, they are doing it by treating sewage to potable standards and pumping it back to the aquifer. Many people don't like this approach and opposed it with a not so appealingly named Toilet to Tap campaign. It seems that there are no easy solutions, and without strong leadership now, the problems will worsen.
I bring this up because Seth just wrote an Opinion piece for the Capitol Hill news website The Hill (Link here). He covers many of the issues he brought up his book and urges Congress to act now to provide the financial resources to our water utilities. He says, "The uninterrupted delivery of water facilitates the frequent hand-washing required to protect against even wider COVID-19 contamination and allows a homebound nation to prepare meals and keep dwellings clean." But the pandemic has stressed these utilities, forcing them to operate with minimal staff and dwindling financial resources. Many are now operating in the red. We need water, and we need it to be clean and safe to drink.
The bottom line is we are going to have to invest in our water supply system. Money needs to be allocated now. But even with this investment, to ensure the water supply and its security, water rates are going to rise to cover the ongoing maintenance and improvements needed.
We have to start paying the real cost of water or heed the remark attributed to Benjamin Franklin, "When the well is dry, we will know the worth of water."