For all intents and purposes, the city of Chennai, India has run out of water. As scarcity hits India’s sixth largest city with its population of about 4.5 million, residents no longer have access to piped municipal water and now queue up to receive drinking water from tankers on which they rely. Sanitation, let alone […]
As school kids, we all learned about how the water cycle works – water falls from the sky as rain where it either runs into surface water bodies or infiltrates into groundwater. Wash rinse, repeat. New research has shown that the majority of water cycle diagrams are flawed, which is bad news for students, educators […]
Hydraulic fracturing (fracking) has delivered an oil and gas boom to parts of the United States with large shale plays. It’s now axiomatic that wherever fracking goes, an increase in water use and wastewater follow. The arid lands of New Mexico’s Permian Basin, for instance, has witnessed the exponential increase in water use and production […]
Pakistan is faced with increasingly limited access to water. The country is already categorized as “extremely highly-water-stressed country” by the Water Resources Institute because it withdraws nearly 80% of its available water supply each year. This unsustainable water use, coupled with predicted declines in water flows in the Indus river system, make for an uncertain […]
Two juniors at Ithaca College – Emma Zarabet and Samantha Marks – have turned their love of thrift store shopping into a temporary online business. The sartorial students took their favorite past time – they go thrifting every Thursday – and their lack of closet space to the online world and opened up a pop-up […]
A new tool maps the journey of food, energy an water resources in every region throughout the United States in an effort to help to make the systems that deliver these goods and services more accessible and resilient. The tool, called FEW-View, is part of the larger FEWSION nexus system research project based in Northern […]
The fashion industry has a high water footprint, especially denim manufacturers. Creating that nice distressed blue jeans look everybody wants is water intensive and poisonous. First, there is heavy water use to irrigate cotton, which is also one of the most pesticide-heavy crops. Then, to get that lived-in look, the fabric is put through several […]
Most beauty and personal care products come in plastic, are typically sealed in plastic and are often wrapped in plastic packaging. Much of that plastic is unrecyclable, which is significant because, globally, the personal care products is a $500 billion industry. In the US, it’s a whopping $90 billion behemoth that encourages us all to […]
A new study out of the Netherlands published in the journal Environmental Research Letters evaluated the risk of ecological damage from pharmaceutical residue in freshwater ecosystems. Concentrations of two pharmaceuticals — carbamazepine, an anti-seizure drug and ciprofloxacin, an antibiotic — were determined based on a series of models and evaluated for their aquatics risks. The risks were found to […]
