Often included in the fundamentals of life are food, shelter, clothing, and water. However, as a result of rising global temperatures, the future for the latter seems rather bleak. Directly resulting from the average global temperature increases, more and more water is evaporated from lakes and oceans into the atmosphere where more water vapor is stored away than ever before due to the direct proportionality between temperature increases and vapor capacity of the air. Therefore, warmer regions, such as the southwest where rainfall is already relatively scarce, are expected to experience even more extreme droughts, and cooler regions such as the northeast, are expected to experience increased storm severity. This storm increase is due to excess water vapor shifting through atmospheric convection into cooler regions where it condenses and is deposited with increased frequency in the form of rainfall. As a whole, the weather is becoming more and more extreme as the temperature rises. For those living in regions where water will become more scarce, the question remains: how will these people begin to adapt to a growing water shortage in their communities? Two companies seem to propose an answer to help reduce the impacts of the problem from a consumer-based approach: Altered and Cirrus.
What’s the solution?
Fig. 1 Oddity Mall. Altered: Nozzle
Rather than tackling the largest or even the most prominent issue regarding household water consumption, Altered takes a slightly different approach to reduce water consumption. By redesigning the tap, Altered claims to have reduced water usage in cleaning and washing hands by as much as 98%. This number sounds rather astounding, and, with enough adoption can seriously begin to make a significant difference in the southwest United States and California. Currently, the company has two designs of faucets available to consumers: the Nozzle Dual Flow Pro and the Nozzle Dome. Both products employ the same technology that was developed that effectively produces a pressurized mist from the faucet nozzle rather than a steady stream of water as is employed by a conventional faucet. As a result, these more broken up beads of water become much more effective as a ratio of the amount used. Although Altered’s approach only targets one of the smaller sources of water consumption, just solving one problem alone is enough to alleviate the water crisis significantly.
To an even further extent, another company by the name of Cirrus has begun to apply a very similar technology to showers in the hopes of reducing water usage in one of the largest household sources of consumption. Like before, the shower heads are equipped with a specialized system to promote more emphasis on water droplets rather than streams in the case of typical showerheads. However, Cirrus goes beyond that in a way that makes the technology even more appealing to consumers to switch over; the Cirrus spa equips the showering system with the ability to filter water as it comes through to the showerhead, making the product an even healthier choice for a consumer.
With that said, domestic water consumption only accounts for approximately one percent of US water consumption according to the EPA whereas the two largest sources are Thermoelectric power production and Agriculture at 45% and 32% respectively. Perhaps the most significant improvements in water-saving technology in recent years have emerged in the agricultural sector, namely in the growing global interest in technologies such as drip irrigation.
Irrigation: One Drop at a Time
Fig. 2 Sunrise Project. Drip Irrigation
Traditionally, one of the largest and most widely spread forms of irrigation in the United States has been that of spray irrigation, a simple technology that effectively coats a large area in a mist of water that roughly resembles that of a residential sprinkler system on a much larger scale. As one may expect, by spraying a large amount of water into the air, only a fraction of it eventually makes its way back to the plant’s roots for use in growth and crop development. Therefore, a more personalized irrigation system that caters to each plant individually known as drip irrigation has been growing in popularity over the past several decades for its incredible reductions in the amount of water used as well as the increases in irrigation efficiency from 50-70% efficiency for spray irrigation systems to nearly 100% efficiency in modern drip irrigation systems. As a whole, the adoption of these technologies in the agricultural sector is becoming increasingly paramount to the long-term sustainability of largely agricultural regions such as the midwest where the Ogallala aquifer becomes increasingly drier and drier by the excess consumption and waste of the water source that supplies more than 10% of the United State’s irrigated crop supply.
The importance of water in modern society is often overlooked; the United States is a developed nation after all. However, the effects of droughts have become apparent in recent years as in the past decade, the state of California has experienced among the greatest droughts on record, lasting nearly five years, leading to stricter legislation regarding water use in order to mitigate the profound effects of the shortage. Even further than a shortage of water, the droughts have even sparked among the largest wildfires in the state’s history, costing the state billions of dollars in infrastructure repair and fire prevention services. As a whole, the issue of water shortage has become increasingly apparent in the past decade as global temperatures steadily rise, but fortunately, several solutions ranging from residential water conservation to low-waste irrigation solutions are being heavily pursued in order to mitigate the crisis to the best of society’s ability.