A new way of purifying our waters: application of carbon tax and “quality-credit market” to face wastewater pollution.
British poet W. H. Auden once noted, “Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.” Yet while we all know water is crucial for life, we trash it anyway. Some 80 percent of the world’s wastewater is dumped — largely untreated — back into the environment, polluting rivers, lakes, and oceans.
This widespread problem of water pollution is jeopardizing our health. Unsafe water kills more people each year than war and all other forms of violence combined.
It’s not so much news anymore (even if it doesn’t do it as much as it should) to say that our water resources of the planet are on the way to depletion. There are many reasons for this: water is leaked by bad infrastructures in the distribution process; it is wasted by improper use at home, in agriculture, in industry; it is polluted; the growth of world population implies less water for everybody.
Among the main reasons, one that is very often underestimated is the malfunction of the process of purification of wastewater either because the wastewater exceeds the capacity of the purifier and is poured into the rivers or because many purifiers do only one type of primary treatment instead of others for a better purification.
Take Italy as an example, one of the richest countries in the world: did you know that 48% of the “beautiful” Italian coasts and lakes are polluted? According to a recent survey by “Legambiente”, an Italian non-profit organization for the environment protection, 39% of the monitored waters are highly polluted, 9% are polluted (classified according to the presence of faecal bacteria). And again, of 149 river mouths 106 (71%) were polluted and in Italy most of the large cities are located on the rivers. If you don’t believe me take a look at the image below; you would say “Mamma mia”!
This is a problem not only for health and environment but also for wallets:
- Italy was fined to pay 25 million euros and 30 million of euros per semester by EU for the situation described above. Experts argue that the total cost of fixing the whole situation will reach half a billion euros.
- In US, 4.3 billion (yes, billion) of dollars per year are spent for water pollution causes.
A possible proposal is solution that monitors the quality of the water returned by the purifiers and that taxes hardly those purifiers that do not meet certain parameters of water quality that grows over the years. On the basis of this, to create a “quality-credit” market, following a model similar to that of the carbon tax and the emissions market.
There are two main players in this scenario:
- Virtuous companies that can acquire, then eventually resell, credits (tokens) because they meet the quality thresholds.
- Incorrect companies that do not respect the quality thresholds but that can buy from virtuous companies at most a percentage (which decreases over time) of credits to reach the quality threshold set for that year (or period) otherwise, most likely, they run into the steep fine.
Can you see where we’re going? In this way, the average quality of water grows over time, giving the opportunity to those companies that participate to invest gradually over time.
Let’s now make a little example to see better how it works. Suppose we want to reach the Dissolved Oxygen values (mg/L) described in this document: dissolved oxygen represents the amount of gaseous oxygen (O2) dissolved in the water and an adequate value of the measure is important for good quality and necessary to all forms of life. We would like to achieve it in 5 years. This could be a simple way the things go.
Note how the average of dissolved oxygen values increase over the time passing from 4.0 mg/L to 9.0 mg/L in five years. Moreover, it is advantageous for both the companies: “Company 2" is not fined anymore, actually at the last period would get paid by “Company 1”, and this latter from the beginning would earn because of its good behavior.
Now keep thinking about it: this is a first step before many others!