No 186: How the water sector can help solve Covid19 (and, in other news, I am growing a Skullet)

Surely no decade was quite a great as the 1980s. The music was better (Squeeze, Madness), films were happier (Ferris Bueller, Back to the Future) and Supermodels really were Super. Yes, I am talking about you Cindy Crawford (she follows this blog, I just know she does). We even lived through the Chernobyl crisis: I remember vividly being advised by the government that we should all stay at home for a week while the radioactive cloud blew over. A week contained in your house with only your family for company! How would we cope?!

This brings us rather neatly to the ongoing Cov19 epidemic. Hopefully dear reader you are safe, well and sane.

Seven weeks ago I, through the company I work for (Isle Ltd), launched a WhatsApp group for water utilities to share their Cov19 experiences. To be honest, I thought this group might attract a dozen or so like-minded organisations. At the time Italy was 2 weeks into their lockdown and the UK was just about to start. There was a brief window I thought where those who were already deep in the pandemic could help those who were just entering. Within 72 hours over 80 utilities had signed up (from Bogota, Colombia to Hobart, Tasmania). 3 weeks on there was just short of 300 utilities involved (we have had to create subgroups as WhatsApp only allows 256 people per chat). Nothing I have ever done previously, including writing 186 of these damned blogs, has ever caught the zeitgeist like this. It seemed cruelly ironic that this simple Whatsapp platform would be the thing that ‘goes viral’.

I have been blown away by the openness with which utilities have shared. Through the telling of honest stories other organisations have undoubtedly avoided repeating mistakes. Lives will inevitably have been saved. At a time when the world feels quite gloomy this is truly worth celebrating.

Some things have been quite simply fascinating: for example, the morning peak in water demand has shifted from 7 – 8am to 10 – 11am. Clearly when isolated at home people – irrespective of culture colour or creed - like to sleep in (although the Germans are, characteristically, a little more precise; their peak is now at 940am). Furthermore, the domestic water demand has increased by about 20%, whereas industrial usage has dropped by up to 50%. The impact varies for each water utility depending on their customer mix, however those utilities with limited domestic water meters find themselves in the extremely uncomfortable position of providing more water for less income.

My favourite fact however is that at 8pm each Thursday in parts of  Spain there is a 10% reduction in water usage due to people going onto the streets to clap, sing and cheer their thanks for local health workers. Now that is something worth smiling about.

Unfortunately however it is becoming increasingly clear that Cov19 is likely to be with us for many years, at least until we have a vaccine AND >3bn+ people have been inoculated. The initial hopes of herd immunity and seasonality appear to have fallen through, unsupported by the empiric evidence. Bearing this in mind, it is increasingly likely countries will be forced to adopt repetitive cycles of lockdown, responding as the virus takes hold, dies down and then resurges again (just as we are seeing right now in Singapore). If this is the New Normal, what can the water sector do to help?

Well, one very exciting area of research has opened up. Over the last few weeks it has been confirmed that the inactive (ie non contagious) part of the Cov19 virus can be detected in wastewater. This potentially offers the possibility of an early warning system for identifying when the virus is present in a local community. The dream is that samples from the sewer network could provide governments with the ability to deliver a precise, local programme of lockdowns, rather than the current approach of a blunt ‘whole nation/state’ lockdown.

Lots of clever people are working hard to make this dream a reality. If you want to know more then you are welcome to join my weekly webinar (I attempt to summarise in 15 minutes the previous weeks WhatsApp discussion). It is held on Thursdays at 730am British Summer Time and repeated at 430pm. Email Charlotte.dewitte@Isleutilities.com if you want to join. As an added benefit you will get to see me in my 3-months-since-a-haircut state. I am sure we all have our own little hair-dilemmas, however take pity on me. The few hairs I have left on the top of my head stopped growing many years ago, yet the ones at the side and back seem to have the growth virility of a teenager.

Yes, I am growing that quintessential 1980s hair style: a Mullet.

Or if you are bald, a Skullet.

No 185: #TenTimes

The average carbon footprint for a resident of the UK is between 6 – 10 tonnes/year. For my 2020 New Years Resolution I decided to (a) measure my carbon footprint on a daily basis and (b) try and achieve a level of just 3 tonnes/year. I researched various websites, blogs and carbon-measuring sources and decided to focus my monitoring on 4 aspects: energy usage, travel, diet and plastic waste.

Much to my family’s amusement I have covered our fridge with an array of charts and tables over which I gently obsess. They are less amused by how my ‘dad-habit’ of turning off every unused electrical item has reached a particular crescendo. Or how quickly I will share my pre-prepared monologue on the carbon footprint variance between pouring milk (vegetarian, but with milk from a local cow) vs orange juice (vegan, but with juice from halfway across the planet) over my morning muesli. Where I really seem to have pushed the boundaries of acceptable family behaviour is in my obsession (and it IS an obsession) with segregating all plastic from our household rubbish. To be fair, doing the separating is the easy bit. It is the task of weighing, recording and then disposing of it all which is where familial patience runs thinnest. Maybe if I didn’t do it on the kitchen counter I might not upset quite as many people (but where is the fun in wearing a hair shirt if nobody else gets to experience it?). 

We are now at the end of January and the results from Month 1 are fascinating. For example, despite living in a house where gas is only used for heating (we have an electric cooker) the CO2 footprint from my gas usage is 5 times that of my electricity footprint (ie 6kgCO2/day vs 1.2kgCO2/day). Furthermore, turning down the heating and reducing the time that the boiler runs has a negligible impact. It is possible that our 15 year old boiler is inefficient and needs changing. It is equally possible that our neighbours have tapped into our gas line.

On the electrical usage front we are undoubtedly doing better. That said, try as we might, we cannot get the 24/7 smart meter (positioned strategically in the middle of the house so no one can possibly miss its gleaming readings) to go below 200W. Seriously. We have gone around the house turning off every single electrical item, but the reading never goes below 200W. Either the smart meter itself is drawing 200W (unlikely), or, once again, the finger of suspicion points to our neighbours tapping into our electrical circuit. (And to think they seemed such nice people when we moved in.)

Our energy usage is offset by the 7 small rooftop solar panels. Over January the output from these has doubled as the sunlight hours have increased. During the first week of January we ‘recovered’ 0.25kgCO2/day from the photovoltaics, rising to 0.5kgCO2/day in the last week. My hope is that by Spring our PV generation will exceed our domestic electrical usage. Interestingly our neighbours also have pv panels. I am thinking of building a big extension just to overshadow them.

You might expect travel to be the biggest contributor to my carbon footprint but not so. My 2008 Prius generates 200g of carbon per mile, but outside of work I drive less than 10 miles a day (ie 2kg/day). If I started running to the gym it might even be less (and I might be thinner…but then surely I wouldn’t need to go to the gym?). I am not including work-related travel in my calculations. This is because it is dealt with by the company, Isle. At Isle we offset 10 times our carbon footprint. Last year, 10 months into the year, we calculated that our corporate carbon footprint from flights alone was 70 tonnes. We rounded this up to 100 tonnes for the full year and then off-set ten times this amount via the brilliant UN-Carbon Offset Programme (- https://offset.climateneutralnow.org/howtooffset). It is a wonderful website. You simply select your project(s), each of which has a clearly stated £/kg, and then go to the checkout. It’s like shopping on Amazon, but without the guilt. Offsetting a thousand tonnes of carbon took less than 5 minutes and cost less than £3.5k.

My diet is the source of my biggest carbon impact. I decided it would break my marriage to try to calculate the specific carbon input for each ingredient so instead I am standing on the shoulders of giants (Scarborough et al, 2014) and using their carefully researched figures for different meal types. They produced a table for different meals, with a ‘Heavy Meat’ at 7.2kg/carbon, and Vegan at 2.9kg, for example. My average so far is 4.34kg/meal. This puts me just between a Low Meat Eater and a Pescatarian. Or to put it into common language, I am mostly a Vegetarian, but every now and then I like a big roast or a bacon sandwich (Readers of my previous blog will no doubt conclude that this is typical of a middle-class Liberal. I am at least true to type).

The biggest surprise from my little experiment however is plastic. 6kg of carbon is produced for each 1kg of plastic we throw away. When I look at the rubbish we throw away in our house (as oppose to recycle) it is mostly plastic, hence I decided I should include plastic in my carbon metrics. However after a month of diligently separating, measuring and recording it has become clear that while the volume of plastic waste is depressingly large (see photo) its weight is actually very low, typically less than 10g/head/day. It accounts for less than 2% of my typical daily carbon footprint. With this in mind, going forward I am removing the plastic metric from my calculations. Since I weigh the plastic using the kitchen scales this single act may both save my family from the ravages of food poisoning, and may remove the kitchen-ban that I know my wife is contemplating placing on me.

To help incentivise me to keep my carbon levels low I have committed to off-set 10 times my carbon footprint at the end of the year. Why 10 times? Well, the number 10 is particularly special for me this year. Very little happened of note on January 29^th 2010 (in fact, I have searched numerous websites and found it to be a uniquely uneventful date) but, for me at least, it will always be noteworthy. January 29^th 2010 was the official birthday of Isle. It was the day Isle was incorporated. This week therefore marks our 10^th birthday! Over the past decade Isle has steadily grown to become a team of 90 people working across 12 countries for over 300 utility clients.  

As noted above, my dream target is keep my carbon contribution below 3 tonne/year during 2020. If anyone wants to join me in this challenge I would be delighted to share my spreadsheet (it comes with all the usual caveats and denials). Based on my performance during the first week of January I was heading for over 6 tonnes/year,  but the average for the last week has been just over 4 tonnes. Squeezing out that extra tonne is going to be tough. I think I need to go and speak to my neighbours…

No 184: When your grandchildren ask what you did, will your answer make them proud?

In the UK we have special legislation (the Fixed Term Parliament Act) which stipulates that there should only be an election once every 5 years. The fact that on Dec 12^th 2019 we will have our third election in 4 years demonstrates just how staggeringly successful this piece of legislation has been. This coming election will be  the most important UK general election for a generation. Hanging on the outcome is not just the UK’s relationship with Europe, but whether the UK stays as a ‘united’ kingdom. Depending on how the votes land there is a very credible series of events that could unfold which would lead to the end of the England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland union.

For overseas readers unfamiliar with the UK political parties, there are two main parties: the Conservatives (often called the Tories) on the right, and Labour on the left. There are a handful of smaller parties, the biggest of which is the Liberal Democrats, who fill the centre ground and are unapologetically pro-Europe (I am a proud Liberal Democrat).

If the parties were processes on a sewage treatment works then the Tories would be the de-ragging and grit removal chambers at the head of the works: excellent in theory, and when they work they can be brilliant. However they just can’t be trusted to do what they claim. In my 28 years working in the wastewater sector I am yet to see a headworks working as it was designed.  An unnervingly large amount of clumpy shxt always manages to seep through.

Labour on the other hand are like a secondary treatment process (think Activated Sludge). Big, bold, mechanical, able to treat pretty much anything that might come down the pipe. However they have a tendency to be inflexible,  and are eye-wateringly expensive to operate. (I resisted the urge to refer to lots of hot air).

Finally there are the Lib Dems. They are the primary settlement tanks, nestling neatly between the Tory screens and the Labouresque nutrient removal. They quietly, robustly, reliably do their job removing the bulk of the solids from the wastewater. They arguably provide the most important stage in the whole treatment process, yet attract almost no attention whatsoever. Overlooked and under-appreciated. The LibDems currently have about 15% of the popular vote, yet just 3% of the seats in House of Commons (20 out of 650). The last Liberal Prime Minster was David Lloyd George.  In 1922.

The defining policy for the Lib Dems in 2019 is to ‘cancel Brexit’. It is a bold, high risk stance and will either alienate or resonate with voters. I am proudly European and am thankful for the freedoms that being part of the EU has brought me over the years. The European Union clearly isn’t perfect, but it has given us 50 years of strong trading relationships, travel freedoms and multi-country environmental controls. It was my grandparents generation who voted for our entry into Europe in the 1970s and I am extremely grateful to them for their foresight. I worry that my grandchildren will look back at the 2019 election and be disappointed.   

Being a fully paid up Lib Dem I did my duty last weekend and posted 300 leaflets in my neighbourhood. It was a gloriously cathartic exercise, with two notable events. The first was when I met a man vigorously cleaning his car. I didn’t recognise him at first, but it turned out he was someone I have spent the last 15 years sharing a swimming lane each Saturday morning. I didn’t recognise him with his clothes on. My second encounter was with a lady in her 30s who, upon taking the Lib Dem leaflet from my hand said, with a definite flirtatious smile, ‘Better than the Tories…but not as good as Labour’. We chatted for a few minutes and she wished me good luck. Both of the above exchanges were surprisingly cordial, despite our differing political views. I came away thinking (perhaps naively) that if all sides could adopt an open mind and a big smile (and could visualise at least half of their opponents naked) then we could probably find a workable solution.

As it happens I will not be in the UK on Dec 12^th. I am trusting that my wife, who does not share the same political allegiances as myself, will deploy my proxy vote carefully. I will be in Madrid, co-chairing the EU Water Innovation Conference (https://www.eip-water.eu/eu-water-innovation-conference-2019-0). As of last Friday there are 850 people registered to attend (tickets are free…). Rather splendidly for a LibDemer like myself, the conference will celebrate all that is great about EU: the collaboration, the policy making, the leveraging of learning, and the innovation breakthroughs.

Unfortunately the conference ends too late for me to make it back to the UK that evening. I will therefore be watching the election results alone in my hotel room. I am realistic about the results.  I doubt the Lib Dems will sweep gloriously into power, but I hope we will make some gains and perhaps be a tempering voice on whoever does. We have more in common that binds us than we do which divides us. However, as noted by the exchanges with my neighbours, even our differences can be rather fun to unpick.

No 183: ‘Like a squirrel on speed…’

About 4 months ago I was interviewed for a podcast. It has just been published and the link is copied below. My performance has been described (by someone who I thought loved me) as being like that of a squirrel on speed.

I was attending a conference in Denver and the interviewer, Robert Osbourne (from the Outfall Podcast), and I were meeting at the end of a long day. We searched the conference venue for a quiet place to sit, eventually finding a sofa in one of the dark corners of the exhibition centre. It was a large expansive sofa, and had a man gently resting his eyelids at one end. We sat at the other end and started our chat, which at the time I thought had progressed relatively staidly. When we left the man who had been feigning sleep opened his eyes and had a look of such overwhelming relief that we were leaving I wondered if we had disturbed him. Listening to the interview 4 months on I have some insight into how he must have felt.

Listening to the interview is like playing a game of Spot The Error. There are an embarrassingly large number of misquotes and basic errors in my schpeel. I put it down to a mix of jetlag and unadulterated enthusiasm. I feel a sense of deep shame that I claimed it was Joseph Faraday who predicted The Great Stink in 1856. Obviously everyone who is anyone clearly knows it was Michael Faraday (I got mixed up between Michael Faraday and Joseph Bazalgette, JB being the mastermind behind the London sewer solution to the Great Stink).

I also cringe at my quote that mussels can ‘hold their breath for 3 weeks’. They cant. Obviously they cant. Only a complete fool would think they can. They can however not feed for this length of time. That’s what I meant to say.  

The error I am most ashamed of is where I boldly state an outright factual lie: that we will run out of phosphorus in 30 years. This is simply not true. What I meant to say was that some people predict we will be at  ‘peak phosphorus’ in 30 years (ie the point from which we are on a clear downward run thereafter). My hope is that despite this exuberant statement I have not detracted from the message that Phosphorus is a problem we need to think much harder about.

You can judge for yourselves. The link is here:  https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-outfall?refid=stpr

No 182: The Message Has Changed! (or, alternatively, ‘Housekeeping Tips from World Leaders’)

For years the core message preached at climate change conferences around the world has been ‘Time is running out…’. That message has now changed. At the EcoSperity conference in Singapore last week, in front of an audience of over 1000 world leaders, business heads and academics a new message was proposed. Subtly different in structure but starkly different in message: ‘Time has run out’. This conference provided the clearest presentation of the climate crisis I have seen. Yet the doomsday message was balanced by credible suggestions of ways forward. What was different was the urgency of the call to action. Three decades of talk has had no tangible effect on the rate of temperature rise. The time for talk has run out.

The link to the 3 minute tone-setting opening video for the conference is here: https://www.ecosperity.sg/en/2019-conference.html. The full conference is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo4aoLFlY_k. I encourage you to jump to 45 minutes to hear Dr Will Stefan from the Australian National University give his prognosis (is it a shame that his slides on ‘planetary boundaries’ are not visible on the video). Additionally go to 1hr 8min and watch Christiana Figueres, Former Exec Secretary for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. She was awesomely brilliant, captivating the whole room. Her demonstration of the scale of the challenge before us, using just a single sheet of A4, is gloriously simple yet also terrifying (1hr 13min). I was less persuaded by her explanation (for non-scientists) of what exponential means, but she won me back when she unconsciously started channelling Monty Python with her discussion about coal (‘coal is dead, it is demised, it is no more…’)

Alternatively you could jump to 3hr 30 min and watch the section where water, which had not been discussed as yet in the conference, made it onto the agenda. This was a session I was honoured to have been asked to chair. When designing the session I wanted to do something different to the traditional conference discussion panel. Borrowing heavily (ok…, stealing outright) from the format of Radio 4s ‘Museum of Curiosities’ I gave my three expert panellists the task of imagining they were 50 years in the future and were proposing an artefact for the new Museum of Water. You can discover why a 300yr old abacas, a 200yr old piece of wood and a suspicious looking 0.5kg of white powder were chosen by Francois Fevrier (CEO Suez Asia), Dr Helge Daebel (Investment Director, Emerald Ventures) and George Hawkins (former CEO for DC Water and now founder of Moonshot Mission Partners) respectively. They had an artist at the back of the room doing cartoon summaries of each of the sessions and attached is our summary picture. What I like most about this is the fact that I have been given a surprisingly butch face (as opposed to my usual chinless wonder look) AND a full head of hair!

The EcoSperity (Ecology and Prosperity coming together) event flowed neatly into the annual PUB Singapore International Water Week conference. Last year 24,000 people attended SIWW. On alternate years (such as this year) PUB host a smaller, more intimate, specialist conference with 200 or so invite-only guests. The focus this year was Industrial Water and I had been asked to be the Convener/Chairperson. My role was to set the tone, summarise the speeches, provide informative/amusing/probing questions (delete depending on the speakers attitude) during the panel sessions and to generally make sure the whole thing kept to time. It is harder than it sounds. During the opening session I had to speak in Malay while introducing an Eid-inspired video on Kinship (‘Air dicincang tidak akan putus’).  The secret is to pronounce the ‘Air’ part as Ah-eh, and after that you just run with it and hope for the best. This proverb translates into ‘Water does not break when you chop it’ and was accompanied by a lovely video on Muslim brotherhood. It was astonishingly relevant bearing in mind the Ecosperity message, and the global challenges we all face which will only be resolved if we work together.

I spent the whole of last week in South East Asia and on the Monday I had met with a local client. I was due to give a presentation to an audience of 40 or so people, and I had been told that one of them might be the Chairperson, a lady who was so well connected that she would almost certainly top the list of Most Powerful Women in Asia. Two minutes before I commenced my talk the audience filed into the room. I saw a middle aged lady dressed in a power-suit and assumed it was she. As I gave my presentation I focused my attention, charm and guile on this poor lady. It was only when we finished that I was directed to the real Chairwoman, a rather unassuming-looking lady who had sat quietly at a table at the back of the room. As we chatted she reminded me of my grandmother: clear-thinking, forthright, gracious.

She invited me to join her and her team for a buffet lunch, and as we sat chatting our conversation drifted away from water. Through a series of connections I still cannot quire recall we started discussing housework. I learned that in Asia housework is very much the domain of the female. I commented that actually I quite like ironing. In the Clark household ironing is a man-task. It is also an important part of my schedule when I am travelling. Fans of Die Hard 1 will recall that the hero John McLean overcomes jetlag by walking barefoot on a hotel carpet (before running around the building in a grubby T-shirt shooting lots of baddies). I have a similar routine: when I arrive at a hotel I like to take out all my shirts and crisply iron them (before sitting down in my underpants to clear my email backlog). It is an almost identical routine.

On sharing my love of ironing my new bestie, the Most Powerful Woman in Asia, was clearly not convinced of my sincerity. ‘Tell me’, she said in an enquiring and slightly accusatory voice, ‘how do you iron your shirts?’. Without hesitation I responded back confidently with the order my grandmother had shared with me some 40 years ago: collar, shoulders, sleeves, back, front. ‘Well done!’ she exclaimed ‘That is correct!’. Her confidence in me was restored. We then discussed vacuum cleaners (honestly we did!).

I truly hope to meet her again soon. I have a tip for dealing with stains on furniture I want to share with her which I think she might like.

Take furniture outside. Burn it. Buy new furniture.