Dive Brief:
- California residents are feeling the burden of the state's several-year drought. In Cambria, for example, residents now use an average of about 32 gallons per day, which is less than half of the water supply they used before the drought struck in 2011.
- Some parts of California, such as Orange County, are finding novel ways to sanitize and distill waste water to add back to the drinking water supply.
- California Gov. Jerry Brown passed an executive order that implements a $10,000 per day penalty for water agencies that do not implement a 25% reduction in water usage.
Dive Insight:
California isn't the only region to rethink its water supply. In China, one facility will employ desalination on a massive scale beginning in 2019, removing salt from 120,000 tons of sea water per day to produce 50,000 tons of potable water it will then send off to Beijing, where scant rain and abating water reserves threaten the capital city. According to Bloomberg, "The [Chinese] central government’s Special Plan for Seawater Utilization calls for producing 3 million tons (807 million gallons) a day of purified seawater by 2020—roughly quadruple the country’s current capacity."