Chris Tobias recently wrote about waste to energy in Singapore, illustrating the city’s exemplary response to fly ash left over from the incineration process. I just read an interesting French book on water, and one of the most interesting parts of the book was about Singapore.

Written by Erik Orsenna, a member of the prestigious Académie française, L’Avenir de l’eau (Water’s future) enables us to travel all around the world (albeit reading) and gathers facts and figures on how water issues differ from country to country.

Perfectly located between East and West Asia, Singapore is an important local hub for 4,000 international companies. The city’s geostrategic importance led to an important population boom, with the number of inhabitants climbing from 1.5 million at the time of independence in 1965 to more than 4.5 million today.

Despite receiving a lot of rainwater (there are 2,415 mm of precipitations per year, compared to roughly 500 mm for San Francisco and 1,200 mm for New York City), the city lacks water.

The precious liquid comes from four main sources: rain, water treatment, desalination and imports from Malaysia. (more…)

Tonight, Imagine H2O will be hosting a Water Efficiency Ideation Workshop in Palo Alto, California. While this announcement might come at short notice to you, it’s worth considering participation.

When: Thursday August 20, 2009, 6:00-8:30pm
Where: Cooley Godward Kronish LLP, 3715 Hanover St., Palo Alto, CA 94304

Imagine H2O is a non-profit organization that spurs entrepreneurship and investment in the water sector by running business plan prize competitions with an incubator program for water entrepreneurs.  This year’s inaugural competition is a $50k prize for water efficiency businesses, and Imagine H2O is kicking this off with tonight’s event. The workshop offers entrepreneurs, innovators, and the public a chance to hear from customers of water efficiency products and services. You’ll be identifying water customers’ needs, brainstorming ideas and building teams.

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The NATO Science for Peace Program and the Middle East Desalination Research Center (MEDRC) recently awarded grants to researchers at Ben Gurion University of the Negev to continue working on a novel desalination method.  In a region where potable water sources are so scarce, these methods are crucial to water independence and reducing reliance upon imported water sources (which require a lot of fossil fuels).

The team, lead by Dr. Jack Gilron (Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research) and Professor Eli Korin (Department of Chemical Engineering), has developed a desalination method by reverse osmosis that exploits “the finite kinetics of membrane fouling processes by periodically changing the conditions leading to membrane fouling before it can occur.”

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Water technology, solar innovation, Israel’s electric cars: I’d originally written this story for ISRAEL21c a few months ago when we were planning on launching its new Environment channel. The new channel was finally up this week. Consider it a good starting point if you’d like to know more about Israeli technology and investment opportunities and what the future may hold:

When green evangelist Al Gore visited Israel last year (and Green Prophet was there) he gave a clear message. “The people of Israel can lead the way to renewable energy,” he told audiences. With its unique geographical position, and clean tech know how, he announced, Israel is a natural leader in the field.

It’s a view that is echoed by many. Ian Thomson, the Californian co-founder of CleanTechies, a web site launched for clean technology professionals, agrees.
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A pair of satellites that measures changes in the earth’s gravity has shown that the intense irrigation of a 1,200-mile swath of northern India is depleting groundwater at a rate of 1.5 to 4 inches per year.

The satellites, part of a joint U.S.-German mission known as GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment), show that the region — inhabited by 600 million people heavily dependent on irrigated agriculture — is withdrawing 13 cubic miles of water per year from underground aquifers.

Reporting in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, U.S. and Indian scientists analyzed satellite data from 2002 to 2008 and concluded that Indian farmers are pumping out groundwater 70 percent faster than estimated by the Central Ground Water Board of India in the 1990s.

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Supreme Court watchers are hitting the refresh button often as the term wraps up and decisions are released in bunches.

Monday saw a significant ruling for the clean-tech observer as the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to uphold an Army Corps of Engineers ruling that allowed an Alaskan mining company to dump slurry waste into a nearby lake as a permanent disposal method.

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A little two-man submarine in Lake Tahoe, California, is searching for jobs under the water.

What’s down there? A nonprofit called the Undersea Voyager Project is getting ready to launch a five-year mission in 2011 to look for ideas on how to restore endangered bodies of water around the world, USA Today reports.

The one problem with water issues is that it’s hard for people to be concerned about what they can’t see.

Only 1 percent of the water column and 3 percent of the ocean floor has been explored on Planet Earth, says the group, led by Scott Cassell.

Project leaders hopes the sub’s explorations will attract attention on pollution and overfishing.

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The Israel Export and International Cooperation Institute reports that water technology exports totaled $1.4 billion in 2008 – double the 2005 amount. The global water market is worth $400 billion annually and is expected to rise to $537 billion next year.

To mark World Water Day, the Export Institute published figures about the country’s water technologies industry. There are 250 companies in the sector of which 200 export their products. 50 companies in the sector are defined as start-ups.

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You’ve probably heard the reports about drugs in our water that aren’t removed by traditional wastewater treatment.

Maybe you’ve heard about the harmful byproducts spawned when chlorine is used in the water treatment process.

Here’s a new one: Super bacteria that are actually being created (and made stronger) in the wastewater treatment process. It goes back, in part, to the common use of antibiotics to treat routine illnesses. Remember the last time you were sick and went to the doctor? Did you leave with a prescription for Z-Pac?

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This is kind of backward. States have banned phosphorus fertilizers for lawns, because the phosphorus runs off the landscape, into rivers and streams, and breeds algal blooms and muck. Ever visited a beach visited by muck? It’s not a vacation.

But here comes some new warnings: Climate change can cause more phosphorus to leach from the soil. I can see the conflicts now: People who want thicker lawns vs. people who want to relax in the sweet, sweet sugar sand.

The argument for phosphorus bans has been the need to keep beaches free of dead algae, and the fact that soil in places like Michigan already contains enough natural phosphorus to grow a decent lawn.

But climate change predictions include more heavy rainstorms, with soil being rewetted more frequently. Apparently, this rewetting means an increase in phosphorus that leaches from the soil and into our waterways.

And this is about more than the beach.

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