Imagine you have one quart of water to last for a couple of
days. You should probably use it wisely, taking a sip here and
there to stay hydrated, but instead, you dump it on the ground
to wash a piece of sidewalk in front of your apartment building.
Now, you have no water to drink. According to Raymond Farinato,
a senior researcher and fellow at Cytec Industries (and an
Aikido master to boot), a similar process often happens when
mining companies use potable water for extraction operations.
“Why waste high quality groundwater for some of these operations
when you only need low quality recycled water?” he asked a group
of students and professors at the Columbia Water Center last
Friday afternoon. “Now is a golden opportunity to do that,
because the mining industry is a lot more willing to listen now
that they have been in the past.” Farinato, the Water Center’s
final guest lecturer in the spring seminar series, honed in on
ways to make mining and oil sand production more efficient
consumers of water resources