Practice of Water Banking Questioned in Lawsuits. Anglo American Gypsum - turning mining waste into low-cost homes | Guardian Sustainable Business. In a country where jobs and housing are in short supply, a water reclamation plant is turning mining waste into low cost homes. Anglo American's eMalahleni plant in Mpumalanga province, South Africa, purifies waste water from five mines and turns it into drinking water for local people.
But that's just one strand. The waste produced from this process – 200 tonnes of gypsum a day – is being made into bricks to build homes that will enable workers moving away from mine villages to buy affordable homes. The plant is the first of its kind in the mining industry. It recovers 99.5% of its water and provides 80,000 people with drinking water, meeting 20% of their daily needs and those of the five mines. Mining operations generate mineral and non-mineral waste. Last year Anglo American's Zimele communities fund helped set up enterprises to manufacture bricks and build the homes. The plant aims to produce zero waste, a move which will mean big cuts in running costs.
Reef, kelp forest: Southern California Edison's man-made kelp reef is thriving - latimes.com. It was a gamble when Southern California Edison crews pushed basketball-size chunks of rock from a barge off San Clemente three years ago. Eventually, the utility company hoped, the artificial reef it had assembled 50 feet below the waves would support a new kelp forest and fulfill state-imposed requirements to offset the damage its nearby nuclear power plant causes to marine life. Photos: Thriving kelp forest rises from a rock reef But no one expected the 174-acre Wheeler North Reef would thrive the way it has. Or as quickly. Edison just happened to build its reef during the greatest giant kelp resurgence in decades, one that has brought an impressive buildup of floating green foliage to long-depleted waters near the Southern California shore. Yet in recent decades, Southern California's kelp forests have been on the decline, reduced by up to 80% of their historic range.
Pollution from sewage and storm runoff has made it harder for sunlight to reach the leafy algae. Calif. water plan for delta full of holes. After four years and $150 million, California has a Bay Delta Conservation Plan that makes major scientific omissions and probably won't conserve any water. What went wrong? The core failure of the plan is that it has no clear strategy. That's what the National Research Council concluded this week in an 81-page report that blasted the plan for incoherence and ineffectiveness. The council, which is the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences, sent 12 accomplished scientists and engineers to weigh in on California's plans for the delta. Basically, they concluded that California's state and local water agencies don't pay attention to science and can't figure out a plan that will balance competing interests in a sensible and sustainable way.
It's embarrassing but not surprising. Most people still expect that the delta plan, incomplete as it is, will trundle on. The authors of the delta plan bowed to their influence and wrote the plan as if there were no other option. Rethinking Flood Control. (Saving...) How to shrink a city.