Trickles of Water, Mountains of Garbage

Global resource questions demand innovation, answers

On a Sunday morning, I noticed after breakfast that the water pressure at my house was lower than normal. Had my water lines sprung a leak somewhere? I suited up and commenced looking for the source of the problem.  

Hours of detective work turned up no clues, and I then went outside my fence to check to see if my water meter was spinning. Aha! Nothing. I saw my neighbor Wally do the same and by the process of deduction, we concluded it was a city issue, and I headed out on a walk. 

By the time I got home, the flow of water had totally stopped, not even a trickle. I called the Water Department and learned that an auto accident had taken out a fire hydrant and damaged a water main. There was nothing I could do but wait. I was fortunate to have a few bottles of water and several sodas on hand, and I would take steps to avoid having to flush the toilet.

Most of us have no real appreciation for what it takes to maintain a clean, safe, reliable source of drinking water. We trust without thinking about them that aquifers never will be drained. We don’t often consider that throughout much of the world, a lack of water is accounting for burgeoning numbers of refugees who have been forced to leave their homelands in search of the most fundamental means to survive.

I received my Waste Management bill yesterday and wrote a $15 check for another service that I take for granted — the disposal of household garbage and yard trash. All I do is roll the big black can to the street every Wednesday afternoon, and magically, when I get home on Thursday, the garbage is gone. Where it goes, I’m not really sure. I’m just glad it’s gone. 

Solid waste disposal is a challenge that has come home to roost in cities across the country. Landfills are becoming exhausted, and the international demand for recyclables has dried up. Cities from New York to Key West are having to truck garbage at considerable cost to sites hundreds of miles away.

Garbage disposal has been a particular problem at remote military installations that have resorted to burn pits that exposed personnel to toxic fumes — an approach that has resulted in massive class-action lawsuits.

It’s hard to get your head around the massive amounts of garbage that an affluent consumer society like the United States produces. In today’s edition of 850 Business Magazine, you will read about the various ways in which tourism-promotion organizations are using bed tax dollars. They include removing trash from our region’s beaches.

In Walton County alone, beach maintenance crews removed 1,083 tons of garbage from Gulf-front and bayfront locations in 2022, the equivalent of 108,396 bags of trash. Those crews carried away 26,538 items of beach gear including chairs, umbrellas and towels.

You don’t have to ponder the global garbage problem for very long before you realize that our current disposal methods are not sustainable. Over time, we would be overcome by our own refuse.

But help is on the way, and it’s coming from our own backyard. Pensacola-based scientist and entrepreneur Dave Robau, the founder of a company called National Energy USA, is pioneering waste-to-energy systems capable of substantially reducing the volume of waste reaching landfills while providing sources of off-the-grid energy.

Robau is among many talented minds who call our region home and are seeing to it that Northwest Florida is becoming a center of innovation in addition to one
of recreation.

With gratitude,

Brian Rowland
browland@rowlandpublishing.com