Exploring the Boundaries of Water Quality Management in Asia

Abstract

Beginning with the case of iodine-131 detection in Tokyo's water supply in March 2011, this paper explores the boundaries of water quality management, with focus on Asian cities. Boundaries include those of definition, of measurement, of the significance of measurements, of public perceptions and trust, of disjunctures between human and natural systems, of dis-integrated water resources management, and of social and political marginality. Delineating these boundaries, most of them well known, is not a call for inaction or despair, but for clarity and recognition of the difficult road ahead.

Notes

 1. According to the “Indices Relating to Limits on Food and Drink Ingestion” formulated by the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan (orig. 1980, with periodic updates), incorporated into the “Manual for Measuring Radioactivity of Foods in Case of Emergency” produced by the Ministry of Health and Labour in March 2002 as an “office memo”, and established by that ministry (now the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare) as provisional regulation values in a notice of 17 March. At this point they became “official”, but they appear to have existed as working guidelines for much longer. In December 2011, the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) replaced the “temporary” standards for radiation in food and drinking water that were the basis of the 23 March health alert with new, revised values that were much stricter (Yamamoto, 2011). This would appear to reflect a policy of extreme caution in the face of public scepticism, since as noted the temporary standards were themselves conservative by international standards.

 2. Professor Richard Wakeford at Manchester University “calculated that drinking water for a year at the Japanese limit would give an infant a dose of 0.4 mSv” (millisieverts). Average background dose per year in the UK is about 2.7 mSv, and goes up to 7.8 mSv in Cornwall (Walsh, 2011).

 3. An even more significant tipping point may have been a 1994 pollution event in the Huai River, already one of the most polluted rivers in China, when a heavy rainfall forced the release of impounded waters containing high levels of industrial and municipal wastewater (Wang & Ongley, 2004; Xia, 2011)

 4. In the latest volume of The World's Water, Palaniappan et al. (2012) specify 10 broad categories of factors affecting water quality: nutrients, erosion and sedimentation, water temperature, acidification, salinity, pathogenic organisms, trace metals, human-produced chemicals and other toxins, introduced species and other biological disruptions, and emerging contaminants (including pathogens). Radionuclides miss mention.

 5. BOD, COD, NH₃N, pH, DO, and suspended solids.

 6. The US Environmental Protection Agency lists primary (legally enforceable) drinking water standards for 6 microorganisms, 3 disinfectants, 3 disinfection by-products, 16 inorganic chemicals, 53 organic chemicals, and 4 radionuclides, as well as 15 secondary (non-enforceable) standards (EPA, n.d.).

 7. “EPA's selection of contaminants for regulatory determination in 2003 and 2008 was driven by data availability—not consideration of public health concern. EPA does not have criteria for identifying contaminants of greatest public health concern” (GAO, 2011, inside front cover).

 8. Thanks to Patricia Holm for this observation.

 9. “EPA … based most of its final determinations to not regulate 20 contaminants on the rationale of little or no occurrence of the contaminants in public water systems” (GAO, 2011, inside front cover).

10. Thanks to Peter Gleick for this observation. Actually, at a general level, there may not have been a high level of trust in the government in Japan even before the incident.

11. A vice-director of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) was quoted as saying, “There are many ways to spread information. Notifying the people is one way, and notifying local governments and affected enterprises is another way” (Spaeth, 2005). In January-February 2012, another major industrial spill, this time of cadmium in the southern province of Guangxi, tested the environmental and political response system.

12. Witnessed in field visit, 1990.

13. At the same time, victims of Minamata Disease from the 1960s protest to the Ministry of the Environment, because it is responsible for overseeing certification and compensation, even though it was not set up until 1971 and has no control over industrial processes.

14. The latest intriguing example from the news is a “super sand” combining inexpensive graphite oxide with ordinary coarse sand to create a rapid but more effective sand filter to clear out heavy metals and much more (Moskvitch, 2011).