New Video Series: Water You Doing?
Here at Droplet Water Project, we’re excited to announce the launch of our rapid fire series titled, ‘Water You Doing?’. The purpose of our new video series is to educate people about various topics related to the water crisis, water purification, and overall environmental sustainability through interviewing experts in their respective fields. We’re ecstatic to share with you our first episode with expert Glenn Reynolds- CEO of Water Solutions Inc.
Watch the first episode:
Please see below for the transcript:
Charlotte: It would be great if you could introduce yourself briefly and sort of give a bit about your background and what you do.
Glenn: I’m Glenn Reynolds. I’ve been in the water industry since 1984, and I’ve worked in multiple continents, third world water systems, first world water systems, industrial water, potable water. I have been on the board of two water districts, a large one and a medium sized one. I’m currently president of the medium sized water district. I’m active on the state and federal committees for drinking water through the American Water Works Association. I’m trained in cross connection, backflow treatment, operator certification, membrane surface water treatment, and licensed in most of those.
Charlotte: What are some of the differences you’ve observed and worked through between U.S. water infrastructure and systems and systems in different countries?
Glenn: It depends on your level of government and socioeconomic status in the country. If you’re working in a really poor community that has no government safety net or oversight, you’re trying to get the rocks and the fish and the big pathogens out of the water. If you’re working in the United States, you’re down to parts per trillion of contaminants and really unusual and exotic chemicals that the U.S. has the ability to test for and monitor and track. So those are big differences, but in the big picture there isn’t that much difference because both communities need water, both are looking at it from a value point of view, what can they afford, what’s the treatment that they’re willing to put money into to give a quality of water. One of the beauties of North America is that the data’s very well prepared with college students cheerfully pouring through the statistics and crunching and publishing, and it’s not hard to take that information and figure out a plan for it.
So if you look at Flint, Michigan, if the cost to fix the service connections to each household was averaging around $10,000 and many neighborhoods that were heavily impacted in Flint, Michigan were in the $25-30,000 a year income category, you can see almost instantly the citizens were broke, the city was broke, and they couldn’t afford the water infrastructure that they had. So if you back up for a minute and you look at the rules and the standards to which we are holding that water system, are first world standards, but that community is saddled with the finances of a low income community, you’ve got a recipe for disaster. There you can say, okay, we needed a better financial model to try and prevent this disaster.
Then you look at Walkerton, Canada which is another sort of landmark case that’s just brilliant and theirs was less financial. Dollars were involved, but it was much more of an education issue. 50 percent of the folks got a waterborne disease and that’s really significant because the cause that the industry has really pinned that one on was lack of education. The operator did not fully grasp the implications of having water that didn’t meet water quality standards and took it very casually. The way I see that is that individual, and I’ve read his court testimony, is that he characterized this as a bureaucratic requirement rather than a public health and safety need. So he saw it as something where the government wanted him to check a box and do a certain thing but that was merely to keep a regulator happy, not to keep his fellow neighbors alive, and that was a failing in the water industry of education.
One of the classic things is, I call it the Fiji Water incident. Fiji Water took out an ad, I believe it was in Chicago, it was a full page ad, and it showed a picture of Fiji Water, it said ‘bottled in Fiji, where do you want to get your water from, Chicago or Fiji’. The implication was obvious that, you know, beautiful tropical island or urban North American industry-built city. So the next day, the general manager of the Chicago water took out a full page ad, and it had a list of the contaminants in Fiji Water and a list of how much testing the Chicago water got and how little testing the Fiji Water got. In other words, it was an unregulated supply. In the water industry, a bunch of us, myself as a spearhead, thought this was a really really bold step in educating North America about the qualities and what to look for in water.
An awful lot of the bottled water industry is built on people believing that because it comes out of a plastic bottle it must be better, whereas in fact, that’s, in many many cases, not the case. But if the water industry is saying nothing and the bottled water industry is saying that their water is better, you naturally drive a perception, a media image, that municipal water isn’t good. In my opinion that’s because the American water industry doesn’t do a good enough job about promoting its strengths and monitoring and quality. We aren’t engaging citizens of the world enough in water sanitation and the water cycle. We don’t teach this to the community, we don’t teach this to very many people.
Trash has a cost to be disposed of, you know, the cheap method is to throw it out the back door, the more expensive way is to put it in a landfill, and it would seem that the current state of the art is the most expensive thing, is to recycle it. But in the long term, I think many of us could argue that the recycling’s probably a good idea because we don’t need to go cut more trees if we can take the paper and we can turn that back into usable paper again, if we can take a tin can and turn it back into another piece of metal. So shouldn’t we be doing the exact same thing in water? Well of course we should. So that changes at a very profound change in the volume, quality, and quantity of water on planet earth, if you’re now a water recycler instead of a water consumer who merely throws it away when you’re done and says, hey, I need more fresh water.
Charlotte: It does seem like it’s easier for someone like me to conserve what I use and just better allocate it and be like, I’m not going to take as long of a shower or something, but with recycling on an individual level, for an everyday person, what’s maybe a good, at least short term effort they can make for that recycling of water?
Glenn: It’s a fascinating question. Not running the tap while you brush your teeth is an incredibly low hanging fruit, or it’s a really simple way for you to use less water while brushing your teeth. But we all agree you want to brush your teeth, we all agree that those of us who’ve made the mistake of trying to brush our teeth without water, it doesn’t go well. So what if we took a college group and said, okay, figure out how to recycle, reuse, or reduce water contamination as a result of tooth brushing. Well, this might mean that you switch to using pumice and mint for your toothpaste because pumice is a grit that will fall back out of the waste stream and the water’s very easy to clean, mint is a natural organic material, good for the mint farmers, and probably pretty easy to get out of the waste water stream. Five other students might say, hey wait a minute, we’ve developed a powder that tastes yummy and gives you the same sort of clean teeth effect. You’ve got another five students who are working with the dental association which are busy locking their doors and going, no, I don’t like pumice, it’s bad for teeth. So that would be an incredibly cool project, and it’s on a very individual level. Quite frankly, Crest toothpaste can’t do this until the research, the socioeconomics, the public acceptance, the Facebook, the Twitter, and whatever else you want, has perfected it and made it work.
You could take a college, pick a high use area, pick a college dorm and fit out six different composting or low water use toilets and see what works, what doesn’t work. So I think that those are the really cool steps that can be taken and get people thinking about water and the water cycle.
Charlotte: With these recycling water efforts, is that something that would be more of a financial burden on governments and such? Because I know a lot of people are kind of resistant to more environmentally friendly solutions for things.
Glenn: So I think that there is a cost to many things. Let’s go back to Fiji Water. Water bottled in Fiji is the same two hydrogens and one oxygen. It isn’t tested as frequently, it’s put in a petrochemical container. Depending on the chemical formula, that may be leaching chemicals into your water, and yet, people are buying it by the billions. They’re spending literally billions of dollars buying Fiji Water which has a carbon footprint that is atrocious. I would argue vehemently that having a local supply that you manage and fairly proportion the cost of what it costs to soil that water, manage that water, and bring that in is not more expensive than, well, we drink our water from Fiji and that’s okay because we like spending real money, big dollars, for that.
Why did Flint, Michigan have the water crisis other than financial? Well, it was financial and what happened was the governor told the mayor of the city who was an appointed mayor as an emergency acting mayor to reduce the city’s budget. The governor had fired three prior mayors. They’d each been in place one month or something like that, soft number, but they’d been fired because they hadn’t been able to reduce the budget because the prior guy had cut the budget as tight as he possibly could. The guy who got in trouble, he literally was replacing three other mayors who’d all been fired for not cutting the budget. He said, okay, bring me the budget, and he looked at it and the one item that hadn’t been cut was they were buying water from the city of Detroit. It was a whopping big bill. I don’t know what it was but I kind of think it was around $90,000 a month. He said, okay, why do we buy it, we have a river right here, we have a treatment plant right here in town, cancel our water purchase from Detroit, let’s filter our own. He made that decision, and it put several people in jail, it furthered the bankruptcy of the city, and put the entire city in financial chaos. So I would drive back and say, did this actually save any money? I’d think you could probably, I’m not an economist, but my guess is that this was a ten times higher expense from the money he saved, and over decades it may be a hundred times for expensive, that choice to “save money”. I think that’s a really brilliant example of saying this is where it costs you more money to not think these things through carefully.
I’m here to say I still don’t like finance, economics, and money, but first world countries have bigger problems with financial management for water than any other problem by a huge factor. What’s fascinating is finances are actually less of a problem in third world countries, and that sounds counterintuitive, and there’s an awful lot of charities and fundraising groups out there who spin it differently, but my argument is this, in a third world village when the children are dying from diarrheal diseases and people have to spend half their day walking to get water, it’s very straightforward to get the community to put their backs, arms, and legs into fixing the problem if you teach them how to do it. In North America, the problem is delegated to the government who spends money, they have money and not labor. It’s not a community involved project, it’s a financial project.
So, one of the things I love about this job, this career, is that the solution is community dependent. So what works in one community has to be the solution that that community is excited about and has looked at the alternatives or been educated to what their options are, and then picked the solution that matches. I met with a community, they had a well that had a, that the graph of their contaminant was probably a 40 degree upwards slope. So you could literally linearly map out how long until their water exceeded the drinking water standards and was no longer potable. What the state really wanted was them to run a pipeline five miles and connect to a bigger city, and we spent probably three hours talking about that option, and it made financial sense, it made administrative or bureaucratic sense, it was simpler because now the big water company of the bigger city, which had lawyers, and water quality people, and engineers, and admin people, and bureaucrats, could manage the state’s needs without much issue, right? The community almost to a person did not want that solution. They felt that because they were not inside the city limits, they would have no voting right, they would have no ability to say how their rates were being charged to them, and they would be at the mercy of an entity that they had no say in and no option and no choice. They chose to spend more money, drill their own well, and run their own water system with a new well, and they, to a person, voted for it, endorsed it, and had it happen in about four or five months. They couldn’t have even gotten the environmental impact report done to dig the pipeline to connect to the neighboring city in four months. So they got their water supply stable and safe and they chose a very different path than what the regulator wanted, but once they’d chosen that, they went at it with an enthusiasm and a vengeance and they did it. So I would argue the solution to drinking water problems is community education involvement and to explain the problem and the options so that those people can then move forward.
Charlotte: Thanks for watching! If you enjoyed this video, be sure to give it a big thumbs up and subscribe, follow us on social media, and stay on the lookout for more videos in the upcoming weeks.