Jan
Small Fixes
I have recently discovered a series of interesting articles about solutions to health problems using improved water sanitation technology on The New York Times’ Opinionator blog and in their Small Fixes column. Here are some highlights:
Keeping the Water Flowing in Rural Villages : “A new program was started recently by WaterAid in the north of India. It trains local people, including many women, to repair water pumps. They now run businesses that charge villages low fees for quick, guaranteed and reliable repairs when their hand pumps break down.”
To Maintain Water Pumps, It Takes More Than a Village: This is the follow-up to the “Keeping the Water Flowing” article above. “Readers responded with many practical ideas and incisive comments — some of them speaking from sad experience — to the last column on the sustainability of water pumps.”
LifeStraw Saves Those Without Access to Clean Drinking Water: “LifeStraw, produced by the Swiss company Vestergaard Frandsen, was designed for the poorest of the poor. The personal version works like a chunky drinking straw and can filter about 1,000 liters, enough to keep a person hydrated for a year. The family version — which looks something like an IV drip that ends in a water cannon — can purify 18,000 liters, serving a typical family for about three years.”
Photo credit: Vestergaard Frandsen
Clean Water at No Cost? Just Add Carbon Credits: “Now there’s a new way to save water projects from an early death: make clean water a for-profit business, charging people an unusual price: zero. Several multinational companies, such as Bechtel and Suez, already have run for-profit water systems in cities around the world. These companies have attracted a lot of criticism, especially for the way they treat rural people and slum dwellers. The companies have little incentive to lay pipes to reach people who are far away, and if they do, they charge very high prices. I’m talking about something different: a water business run by a company that has headquarters in Switzerland, Vestergaard Frandsen, that plans to provide clean water to some of the world’s poorest people and charge them nothing. Where will the profits come from? Polluters.”
Follow-up to “Clean Water at No Cost?”: Green Strategies for the Poorest: The author, who had discussed the LifeStraw Family in the article above, writes about how this product’s manufacturer,Vestergaard Frandsen, is planning to make money with it. “Not from the poor families who use it — they will give it away in western Kenya. Instead, the company plans to be paid in credits they can sell on the global carbon markets. In this system, credits are awarded to projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They may then be bought by polluting companies or governments to offset their own emissions. LifeStraw Family users no longer have to boil their water to make it safe to drink. Less boiling means fewer emissions.”
Folding Saris to Filter Cholera-Contaminated Water : Rural Bangladeshi women often use pieces of saris, the traditional dress, to filter sweetened drinks to get rid of leaves, insects and other visible debris. About 10 years ago, researchers in Maryland and Bangladesh, looking for ways to reduce the prevalence of waterborne diseases in local communities, came up with a ridiculously simple solution: Wash and fold the sari. Bangladeshi women in 27 villages were trained to cover water-collecting urns with a laundered sari folded four times before scooping up river water. The cotton fibers strain out 99% of cholera bacilli. “Over the next 18 months the rate of cholera in these villages dropped by about 50 percent, compared with other villages — about the same effect as that achieved by a much more expensive nylon water filter.”
The PeePoo, a Biodegradable Toilet for the Developing World: Forty percent of the world’s population (2.6 billion people) does not have access to a toilet. To address this problem, a Swedish architect and professor named Anders Wilhelmson has invented a biodegradable toilet called a PeePoo which resembles a plastic bag. “After it is used, the bag is knotted and then buried or sold back to the manufacturer. A lining of urea crystals in the bag helps transform the waste into fertilizer…Currently, about 6,000 PeePoo bags are produced every day and distributed in slums in Nairobi, Kenya…Mr. Wilhelmson’s company buys back the used bags for a third of the original price, and the waste is turned into fertilizer.”
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Very informative and thought-provoking post Justine. I am apprehensive about Verstergaard Frandsen’s business plan to provide free water sanitation systems to poor people, subsequently earn “Carbon Credits” from their government, and sell these credits to polluting companies. As a business model, it’s certainly innovative. However, the model is suspect from the “central planning” perspective of how private/public sector cooperations can provide water sanitation to the world’s poor AND reduce carbon emissions.
First, if carbon-emitting companies buy “carbon credits” (and if these companies are profit maximizing), then we can assume that buying the carbon credit is less costly than reducing carbon emission (through using carbon filtering technologies, cleaner production techniques, more local production materials, etc.). As long as buying carbon credits is less costly than actually reducing carbon emission, then industry will continue to emit carbon pollution.
Second, I think it’s unlikely that poor people’s boiling water emits carbon on a level comparable to the world’s heavy industry (an assumption gleaned from the respective carbon footprints of industrialized nations versus undeveloped nations). So reducing the extent that poor people need to boil their water probably won’t compensate for the carbon emitted in industry. However, I suppose we need numbers of carbon emissions by individuals’ fuel consumption compared to industrial carbon emissions to see if they’re on par or not.
So, looking forward, the question is whether or not carbon credit markets can reduce carbon emissions enough, or whether the market equlibrium level of carbon emission will still exceed the environmental demands.
Thanks for your insight Ned. I was reading through the comments on the “Clean Water at No Cost? Just Add Carbon Credits” article and came across one that echoes your concern. Shi-Ling Hsu from Vancouver, Canada writes:
“I admire the work being done to alleviate water shortages. But I worry that the carbon credits won’t be real. The problem with offsets (or carbon credits) is that when you issue credits, you’re raising the “cap” on greenhouse gas emissions. If boiling water is truly truly being displaced, then there is no real net increase on the cap, and thus no problem. But the problem with offsets is that often (very often), there is no way to be even reasonably confident that the displacing activity was going to happen. A well-known story now is how refrigerant factories are being built in China to generate carbon credits. The factories get carbon credits for capturing the HFC’s that would otherwise contribute to global warming, but the problem is that there was never any demand for the refrigerant in the first place. The only reason those factories were constructed was to generate carbon credits.”
I think you both make a good point that it’s important to look closer at the intentions of seemingly green-conscious companies so as to evaluate whether they are doing more harm than good. Also, you might be interested in reading this interesting article about the carbon credits system.