Losing the water we have is unacceptable in a time of water scarcity
You’re at home cooking yourself some dinner. You fill your plate but before you sit down to eat you walk over to the garbage can and dump a quarter of your meal.
Insane? Well, that’s exactly what we’re doing with our drinking water.
In Ontario, some new numbers were released today and they’re staggering. A study by professors in the University of Toronto’s civil engineering department found that municipal water systems across Ontario have leakage rates of treated water ranging from 10 to 50 per cent, with the average conservatively estimated at 25 per cent. This, they estimate, translates into $700 million annually that taxpayers are paying for water that never reaches their taps.
“That’s some 327 million cubic meters of water lost each year — enough to fill about 131,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools,” according to the study, which was done in partnership with the Residential and Civil Construction Alliance of Ontario. Then there’s all the energy that’s used to treat and pump that lost water and the environmental consequences of having it leak into the ground, where sinkholes can form and basement can flood.
This isn’t the kind of thing consumers like to hear when they’re being asked to conserve water, install low-flush toilets, use rain barrels, and let their lawns and flowers go brown.
The study calls for large and immediate investments in rehabilitating water pipes. Problems tackled today in a significant manner will lead to more savings down the road. For example, the study calculates what Ontario could have saved had it made the necessary investments 10 years ago, rather than deferring maintenance. “The cumulative wasted energy due to deferring maintenance amounts to $161 million over the last 10 years. That is, had Ontario spent the same amount of money on maintenance of leaky pipes at one point (ten years ago) instead of distributing the same amount of money over 10 years, the savings in energy alone could have reached over $160 million.”
The pressing need to invest bodes well for companies such as Pressure Pipe Inspection Company in Mississauga, Ontario, which has developed better ways to detect underground leaks in municipal water infrastructure.
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
June 11th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
wow was there money set aside in the new Green Energy Act for this. It provides another example of bad policy. Obviously what should be going on is when policy is being made you should be looking at every study being done that connects with energy. past or in process. Even with an incomplete study one would have been able to gather that we are wasting massive amounts of water in some municipal water treatment plants. The GEA is bad policy through and through. we need to reconsider the amount of power we have placed in the hands of the provincial government through this legislation. go and sign the petition here.
June 17th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
If Ontario’s got leakage rates this bad, I wonder what Ohio’s (where I’m from) are, considering that our state budget isn’t in great shape atm. At least you guys up in Canada don’t have the two-party separation as badly as we do here in the US, and you don’t have a bunch of conservatives that think consuming more of everything is going to fix the economy.
June 18th, 2009 at 2:37 am
Great catch Tyler – you’re exactly right on this issue. It’s another sleeper issue, like separate capital vs operating budgets at municipalities or federal properties unneccessarily holding back energy efficiency.
June 22nd, 2009 at 11:09 am
Wow, those are some staggering numbers.
The problem is that in older cities, many of the water pipes are more than a century old, and some of the sewers are as old as the cities themselves (300-350 years old in the downtown cores, and usually more than 150 years in the younger, but still old, parts of these cities). These infrastructure systems have needed repair and replacement for a long time, but the political, corporate, and public will simply wasn’t there.
I live in Saskatoon, a city that just celebrated the 100 year anniversary of the it’s incorporation (and not much more than 100 years since the first building was built). Even in a very young city like this there are leaky lead (lead!) pipes all over the place.
Remember: the longer we wait to fix these infrastructure problems, the more it will cost.
June 22nd, 2009 at 4:40 pm
A typical car wash lasting 10 minutes uses approximately 100 gallons of water. What if we could conserve hundreds of gallons of water in one week. Go to a local car wash that uses recycled water or use an eco-friendly waterless car wash.
It takes only 15 minutes, is effective and uses no water
July 30th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
Tyler, you are correct that the Pressure Pipe Inspection Company (PPIC) does supply services for detecting leaks in large diameter water transmission infrastructure.
I just thought I would chime in here to say that PPIC also offers forward looking condition assessment technologies that can pinpoint exactly where leaks WILL happen BEFORE they do. The end result is the development of a proactive pipeline management program where we won’t need to waste a drop of water from leaky pipes.