Thursday, August 27, 2015

It’s not a magic water-saving tactic; it’s a PR move. And this isn’t the only problem with shade balls




Max Liboiron, a professor who studies marine pollution at Memorial University of Newfoundland, did a deep dive (aggregator speak) into the story, and wrote:

The black additive [in the balls] is carbon black, which isn’t supposed to be harmful when it leaches, which is great. Yet even with this precaution, most plastics leach endocrine disrupting chemicals that interfere with animal and human hormone systems (Yang 2011). Some endocrine disruptors, like bisphenol A (BPA), break down in water after a few weeks or months. Some don’t. We don’t know what chemicals are in the Shade Balls, but they will leach, especially because the balls are in the hot sun and are meant to be left in the water over a long period (reports say 10 years). Most water treatment systems don’t take these kinds of chemicals out of the water.

If endocrine-disrupting plastics leaching into the water supply wasn’t enough to worry about, there’s also the environmental impact. Liboiron writes:

Most plastics found in the marine environment start out as larger objects you would easily recognize, like plastic bags and toothbrushes. Or balls. Over time, they fragment into tiny microplastics. 92% of the 5.25 trillion plastic pieces floating on the surface of oceans (Eriksen 2014) are smaller than a grain of rice because plastics don’t decay into their constituent molecules like organic substances. Instead, they fragment into smaller and smaller bits.

Those smaller and smaller bits are then consumed by you in your drinking water, as well as by the fish that you eat, the whales that you watch, the sea lions that show up at your bar demanding a drink.



The cost of the shade balls? $34.5 million.

The shade balls must be replaced every 10 years, so figure about $20 million of water savings for every $34.5 million of balls.

In other words, if the point of this were to save water, it would be a very, very stupid idea. Even the DWP is not that stupid. It's doing this to comply with federal drinking water quality mandates.
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