Friday June 02, 2006

Leaking away - what a waste

I took this picture of a leak in a water main and then waited to see how long it took for it to be fixed. I have no idea how many gallons/litres of water was wasted by the time it got fixed but it must have been the equivalent of several hosepipe's worth. Of course this is a visible leak many others are leaking from on pipes buried underground out of sight. I heard that my water company Thames water had not met their water loss target but had not been fined. Either way when we are told to save water by not leaving taps running etc etc to pass this visible waste of water for two weeks before it is fixed does not impress me in the least. The other thing that really annoys me is that we have only recently had a letter from our water company which told us why we are in this situation, how much money they are spending on fixing the leaks (500K GBP per day) and so on... Our company is trying to have a desalination site sited in the Thames estuary and a new large reservoir in Oxfordshire to help resolve the water shortage problem - largely of their own making. Less profits more new pipes please!

As a footnote to this we have had the wettest month of May for years. To add insult to injury we are also told this rain is the wrong sort. It is running off the ground into rivers and then the sea. Well if any of the rain on my garden gets to the sea I will be surprised. A further observation was made by Chris this week. We all get worried and irritated by the spectre of standpipes if this drought gets worse. As he said there are people in this world who have to walk miles to get water which is usually infested with all sort of unpleasant things and carry it on their head back to their houses. Perhaps it would do us good to have this sort of restriction to make us realise what a valuable resource water is and how not to waste it.

Finally on the waste issue there is a lot of concern about old computers ending up being shipped to Asia where there are taken apart to recycle valuable parts like copper etc. This article explains more about this and the environmntal legacy this is leaving. It seems PC's now have a lifetime of two years and this is making this problem even worse. Another reason why our Sunray technology is a good thing as its lifetime is much longer than that and there is hardly any of it to be taken apart so when it does go into its technology graveyard its impact on the environment is much less.