91–94 of 94 posts
Most of these people are not cut off from the world. You will find a coca-cola bottle in the same village! The solution is to tell them why clean water matters , and provide them a cheap way of making dirty water pretty clean . Ie. a water filter. The cheapest water filters, costing perhaps $10 and able to filter a family drinking water supply for years, will still eliminate most concerning contamination in water. Th…
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It isnt thay simple. As i kid we had non-potable water in the pipes. (Middle east) It was recycled water heavy on chlorine, safe for washing but not drinkable. Pressure was never the issue. We drank from a "sweetwater" tap, which also fed the hot water tank and the dishwasher. Using safe potable water to flush toilets is silly. Splitting drinking from other uses is far more efficient.
> Splitting drinking from other uses is far more efficient. This isn't universally true. Pipework (laying+maintaining), collection and storage is generally the expensive bit of any water system. The actual purification is fairly cheap. That means having two sets of pipes to every house (one for drinking water, one for mid-grade water) usually costs more than just one set of pipes and having all water drinkable. Thats…
Could you not recycle clean water? e.g. a rough filter & chlorination of shower/dishwasher water to use for other things.
Some stages of a dishwasher without harsh chemicals might be used to water a lawn?
We also need to think about uses of water. Water is used for drinking (~2 liters/day)... Contamination here really matters. Waker is used for cooking (~20 liters per day). Contamination here matters somewhat, since some forms of pollutants will be rendered harmless by cooking. Water is used for washing (~200 liters per day). Contamination here matters a little too, because washing water can touch something which gets…
"far cheaper than providing large amounts" that doesn't factor in the cost of plumbing an entire town with 3 sets. remember photos of the tangle of wires when DC vs AC fought? It's more expensive especially for a suburb of single family homes to plumb in sewers and water mains (long distances for low flows), vs plumbing in duplexes and apartments. having a secondary water system (e.g., purple pipes / grey water), for…
This sounds like someone confused a picture of early telegraph poles with multiple circuits, before high density cables were developed.
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>Has anyone more than small scale feel good stories or "promising advancements". Do we have things that really improved at scale in the last ten or twenty years ? Yes, things are improving all the time. There are all sorts of organizations recording various metrics of quality of life kinds of things and the trends across the board are upwards, it's just very easy to live in a bubble and have no idea how things actual…
Thank you, that's a really good point: we hear about the dire stuff but seldom about the steady improvements. These numbers are to be taken with a spoon of salt though. Randomly taking the Republic of Congo as an example, it's currently in an acute crisis as a result of heavy conflicts, and water is trucked by health international organizations as part of the relief effort [0]. So thar 8.6 point improvement on saniti…
It is by no means acute, DRC has been chaotic with war for decades and has likewise been towards the bottom of these kinds of lists of quality of life, an improvement from 2014-2024 is entirely believable because it wouldn't take much.
The news there from 2014 sounds very much like the news there from 2024
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/country-chapters/democ...