Trends in Indirect and Direct Potable Reuse

Water Density

Can you imagine a world without water! Water is strange! We need it for almost everything we do to be alive. Personally I was so happy after reading the news that about 2 percent of the soil of the surface of Mars is made up of water. 

We  know that density of water is changing with temperature, pressure and also salinity. Commonly in our calculation we consider having fresh water (with very low salinity) and 1 bar pressure. In this situation the maximum density of water is around 4 degree Celsius. 

I made a small software to calculate the density of water based on its temperature. You can download it here (32, 64). Please let me know if you have any questions or want me to add more features to this software. 

Environmental Awareness

1- 

Choosing career path is an important decision in everyone's life. Personally I went down some roads and have some experiences as an engineer in three different sections. I worked in consultant and contractor firms. Also in a testing lab. 

                                              (Career vs. Job)

2- 

If you cant explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough (Albert Einstein). 

3-

If I didn't know the name of one of my courses, even though at this moment which is two weeks till the end of the semester, I had no idea what this course is about. No structure, poor delivery, no coherence between lectures, poor designed tests and exams, bad timing for the class, bad TA. On the other hand in my other course. OMG, everything is well structured. You know whats going on in each lecture. The class is so engaging which keeps you on board all the time during the semester. 

4- 

"Who saves one life, saves the world entire" (Thomas Keneally, Schindler List - originally from Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:9).

5-

I was thinking to join UN or World Bank after getting my degree. I was born in a so called third world country (see the definition here and here). I know and experienced lots of their problems (besides I love traveling). 

6-

We need Environmental Awareness.

7- 

I have decided to join academia. 

Emissions Gap Report 2013

I was thinking about the age of earth after watching this and having a look at  this. If you google the age of earth, it will tell you: 4.54 billion years. And the age of universe is: 13.8 billion years.
So it took the universe 9.26 billion years to give birth to the earth and four and half billion years for earth to come up with the diverse living species on it (and also this level of intellectuality). On the other hand our Sun got more than 6 billion years to finish its fuel. You got where Im going with this. In less than four billion years we will evolve to super humans, Sumans! The rate of evolution would be much faster and I don't think we really need that much time. On the contrary, think about what just we did to our beautiful planet during the last 100 years (with all of the pollution, increasing in temperature, accumulated CO2, nukes, and lots of irreversible damages). Do you remember the Flash Crash(watch it here)? Almost the same thing will happen to the earth if we don't do anything about it. Do you think we can make it to the end of this century?!
This is a serious question. Last week it was a meeting called "The Global Emissions Gap Report 2013" in Germany (you can find Gap Report for year 2012 here - I will have another post on this report later). Basically countries (actually 13) who are producing more than 70 percent of global emissions are trying to fill the gap between what is expected as a pledge made by them to reduce emissions and the amount of emissions that is needed to keep the temperature change less than 2 degree Celsius till 2020. 

2020 is not that far, fingers crossed! 

One thing is for sure: Any delay will be very expensive for Sumans! 

bathrooms

I don't know your heard about this or you experienced it yourself. The best ideas come when we are in the bathroom and while we are taking shower. Yes, Aha effect! This  guy talks about that here. He is mentioning why we are experiencing so called “creative pause”. You can reach to this state in different situation, jogging is a good example. Sorry if I messed up with your imagination talking all about bathrooms, you can find beautiful pictures for them all around the world here. Anyways, today I was thinking again how we can reduce wasting treated water in the bathrooms! Bill Gates is spending good amount of money for redesigning toilets. And if you are more interested, you can participate in their Reinvent Toilet Challenge. 

When you want to establish a new lifestyle, you may need to think about may things. Paradigm shift is one of the important things in this procedure. Slow by slow people know and understand the effect of their behaviors. I appreciate Bill Gate for his perspective in this matter.

Here are some ideas for reducing teated water consumption in toilets:

1) Using used water from sink or shower

This guy made a project out of it. 

2) Saving water in shower before it warms up. Have a bucket in your bathroom and fill it while you are waiting to the water gets hot. 

3) Installing multi flush toilet.

4) Install the tank in higher elevation. 

5) Installing Urine Diverting (UD) toilet.

What about showers? How can we save water there? Milk bath?!   :) 

Closed loop showers seems promising! 


Please let me know if you have other ideas that you want to be added to this list.

New Project

I got involved in an amazing project. I will tell you more about it in future posts. But I will give you some ideas to think about ...
Did you hear about green gas emissions? Did you hear about global warming? How about global dimming? Did you know oceans contain more than 93% of the global heat content? How you heard about effects of jet contrails? Did you hear about destabilized methane hydrates? Do you know many of models we are using today are not well calibrated? Do you know the projected temperature at the end of the 21st century using current models? Do you have any idea how accurate they are? 
I have some stories for you ...