[blue4]

> By one count 48 million people in China lack sufficient drinking water. The number of people facing severe drinking water shortages doubled to 5.9 million in early 2008 because of a severe winter drought. China has more than a fifth of the world's population but only 7 percent of its fresh water.

Not from the article, but if there was a startup needed and one that could jump start their sector there, a significant problem to solve is clean water.

[piokoch]

Unrelated, but interesting in this context: Michael Burry, one of the guys who predicted 2007 housing bubble (and made good money thanks to that), is investing in water. Looks like he might be right again.

[rchaud]

In 2007, the reading list for my Political Economy class had a book focused entirely on the water wars of the future. Lack of clean water isn't a hidden opportunity, it's a planet-altering challenge.

[hangonhn]

How does one (without access to exotic financial instruments) even do that?

[vitohuang]

There are two sides

1. Buy-side - ETF for companies leading in clean water or purification, or the second level that companies provide components for those companies in the first group.

2. Sell-side - bet on the companies will do badly in the situation e.g big polluters.

But the hard thing is timing, you can sit there for decades for the outcome and so many factors can affect your bet between now and then.

[rchaud]

I mean, there are significant environmental problems in the US as well, but that doesn't mean VCs are going to suddenly start moving money away from food delivery and rent-a-bike plays.

Access to resources historically is a problem "solved" by military action. VCs will only get in on the action when the resources are secured, and they find a way to insert themselves into the action.

[adventured]

What's China's position when it comes to desalination? I'd expect they have massive desalination plants along their large coast.

[exabrial]

The problem isn't the lack of fresh water sources, the distribution network is riddled with pathogens. This is due to poor design and workers taking shortcuts (not performing sanitation steps to meet deadlines).

[yorwba]

Apparently there are desalination plants, but they are not cost-competitive with other freshwater sources, so only industrial developments that are required to provide their own water supply use them. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601861/chinas-massive-eff...

[baybal2]

China has enormous amount of freshwater, it's just not managed properly. Pakistan - same story.

[ElBarto]

This is an infrastructure problem. A startup isn't going to solve this.

Between lack of water and unsafe water, I'm not sure that the proportion in the US is much different.

[adventured]

> Between lack of water and unsafe water, I'm not sure that the proportion in the US is much different.

Care to show me the figures on that? I don't believe for a second that the US and China are comparable on freshwater when it comes to quality and supply. The US is among the top several nations on freshwater per capita and has a truly vast supply of inexpensive, safe water. Flint was/is such a big deal because it's an exception, not the common. Freshwater supply challenges are exclusive to building large cities in deserts (eg Las Vegas), or poor decisions on allocation (eg California agriculture, which is ~80% of their water use).

[senorjazz]

> Flint was/is such a big deal because it's an exception, not the common

Saw an interesting documentary the other day. "what lies upstream" [0] about water quality. No idea of the validity of it, as no further research was performed, but it had me convinced it is a serious issue.

Assuming the documentary was factual and not sensationalised , the issue is much bigger than Flint.

But as you mention at the end of your comment, I thought (before watching the doc) with the US wasn't water available on the country as a whole, but in specific areas, due to building in arid desert areas.

--------------------------------

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5165878/

[ElBarto]

One of the first results on Google:

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2018/02/12/tens-mi...

[adventured]

Your result is including all infractions of any type across the board and indicates that poor water safety is rare and isolated.

To get the total sum, it's compiled over 34 years, and says: "relatively few community water systems (3–10%) incur health-based violations in a given year."

It also states that in the most dense parts of the country, urban regions, there are rarely problems.

As well as this conclusion: "Generally, water systems in the United States provide reliable and high-quality drinking water. Violations tend to be infrequent."

[ElBarto]

"In 2015, nearly 21 million people relied on community water systems that violated health-based quality standards"

The number given for water access issues in China was 3.5% of the population (which is 'infrequent'...)

That's why I ventured that the situation there is not that bad proportionally to population.

Why arguing on something that isn't even the main point of my initial comment... It's exhausting. It also feels like an attempt at denying issues.

[adventured]

I already covered that quoted segment. The 21 million figure includes all infractions of any type, regardless of severity.

The primary problem in the US is aging infrastructure in sparsely populated rural areas, as stated in the study the USA Today article quotes from. Nearly the entire US gets a good violations score in terms of low instance counts, except for Oklahoma (they show an extreme number of violations), rural West Texas (also intense), and a few isolated rural pockets in eg California and Idaho (~1/10th or fewer the violation counts of the OK & W.TX examples). The OK and West TX examples are no doubt caused by the polluting energy industries there.

[jerf]

You also have to look at the standards themselves. If a US water supplier violates a standard about some chemical not having more than 2 parts per billion because it had 2.5, and in some other country there's no violation because the standard is 15 parts per billion and they had 12, that's still not an advantage to the other country.

Last time I looked at this, yes, the US has very high standards and tends to meet them. Western Europe does as well, and also tends to meet them. ISTR there wasn't a systematic difference between the two, either; this chemical's limit might be slightly high here, but some other chemical's limit would be slightly lower. It looked more like what you'd expect from two similarly-concerned regulators that simply have no reason to coordinate than either side having higher standards.

You can't just look at violations. That procedure always makes things look bad because even just one violation is a violation, even just one error is an error, oh no! You have to look at the system holistically, and, yes, US water is pretty darned good when you look at it that way. You can't just look at problems but pretend to yourself or others that you're looking holistically at the situation.

(The Internet trains people to go "Oh, so we should just stop worrying about it then?" when someone says it's going pretty well, but what I'm actually saying is that our current level of concern is pretty much correct. It shouldn't be lowered. But there isn't much compelling reason to raise it globally, either. Only locally in certain places in response to local issues.)

[achow]

Well not really. I stay in a place where water drought is a looming dark cloud on the horizon, so from that perspective..

1. Affordable device that harvests water from air

Water wastage is a huge problem, so..

2. IoT devices that detects leakages in main pipes

3. IoT water meters for individual apartments in housing societies. One of the major problem is water is not metered per households in large apartments, so there is very less incentive to repair leakages (flush etc.) or use water carefully the same way as metered electricity.

4. Rain water harvesting

5. Home water purifier

I maybe missing many more obvious ones but sure there would be many more if one gives this problem space deeper thought.

[ElBarto]

Not everything can be solved by IoT/AI/blockchain...

[achow]

Inclusion of the term "IoT" was deliberate, monitoring water (distribution, use, misuse, quality) remotely and at a scale precisely is the problem that IoT can solve.

[ForHackernews]

There's no "IoT" problem here. You can have plenty of automated systems monitoring your infrastructure without the security nightmare of making them accessible on the public internet.

[trashcan]

I don't think that IoT implies publicly accessible (correct me if I'm wrong). "IoT" smart water meters exist, and they usually use cellphone networks to send data (water usage) to the utility company.

[cr1895]

>4. Rain water harvesting

Is there a risk of significantly altering the local water cycle if everyone is doing this? Same with extracting moisture from air, I suppose.

[trashcan]

> 2. IoT devices that detects leakages in main pipes

I used to work for a company that does this: http://gwfathom.com/

They replace traditional water meters with smart meters and then provide software tooling around monitoring and managing them.

[rockxloose]

> This is an infrastructure problem. A startup isn't going to solve this.

Opportunity in the Himalayas. Bottle the snow melt rivers flowing in unbelievable blue before they turn shitbrown.

Did Steve Jobs get cancer in China from drinking contaminated water?