Water shortages should be the last thing that folks in Vancouver have to worry about. Despite the rainy climate and the seemingly boundless water supplies, regional municipalities in British Columbia are taking water conservation very seriously as they gear up for the 2010 Olympic Games.
At the City of Richmond's Olympic speed skating oval facility for example, runoff rainwater from its massive 6.5-acre roof is captured and put through a biofiltration process to remove the sediment, and then reused to flush toilets and irrigate the dozen acres of parks and plaza space.
The Vancouver Olympic/Paralympic Centre Complex curling venue and the Vancouver Olympic Village are creating their own water conservation legacies by applying similar variations on the rainwater capture and recycling themes. And the new Vancouver Convention Centre is the first building in Canada to combine ultra-filtration and reverse osmosis systems to desalinate ocean water and treat wastewater for flushing toilets and irrigating a green roof garden.
The fact that water reuse is front and centre in the Games' sustainability efforts, is an indication of where things are heading. The general thinking now is that whether you live in a rainforest or desert, clean, usable water supplies are running out. And municipalities, industry and government are looking beyond simply cleaning up water for disposal, to figuring out better ways to recapture, retreat and reuse what they already have.
The new Vancouver Convention Centre is the first building in Canada to combine ultra-filtration and reverse osmosis systems to desalinate ocean water and treat wastewater for flushing toilets and irrigating its green roof garden.
David Kratochvil, president and COO of BioteQ Environmental Technologies Inc. in Vancouver, confirms that until recently, industry in particular has been focusing more on cleaning up water for discharge – but the reuse issue is rapidly gaining momentum. “The reality is we're depleting supplies of a finite resource.”
The growing pressure to look at reuse options has been driven by a number of factors. For one, explosive population growth, especially in drier regions such as the western United States, is rapidly depleting available supplies. Industrial activities are straining existing fresh water supplies to the max; and acquiring new licenses for water rights is harder – if not impossible – to come by.
Mining and utility operations in water-strapped zones in particular often draw upon underground aquifers (water tables) – a practice that has now been placed squarely under the legislative microscope. And the quality of many water sources is compromised to the point where shortages exist even where resources seem plentiful…on the surface.
While Canada may be less affected by shortages to date, Dr. Lorne Taylor, chair of the Alberta Water Research Institute in Edmonton, explains that the time to change our ways is now. “Usually reuse comes up when people get themselves in a crisis, such as in California, Arizona or Australia. And unfortunately, people don't make the best decisions in a crisis. We're not there yet – and if we plan properly today, we won't be. But water is a huge issue, so we need to make good decisions around usage as we go forward. After all you can't make more water, and you can't store more.”
There is a “very compelling urgency” to consider water reuse technologies, confirms Robert Sandford, chair of the Canadian Partnership Initiative, United Nations “Water for Life” Decade in Canmore, Alberta. “Water is not nearly as abundant as we think. In addition, we don't have the proper institutions in place to make sure water makes its way to the place it needs to be in the condition it needs to be in. Even where there is an abundance of water, there is a plethora of needs. The advantage of treatment and reuse is that it provides a way to expand water suppliers without constructing more dams, digging new wells or seeding clouds.”
