Brave Blue World

I recently watched this documentary with my family and kids over the weekend. I was eager to see what Matt Damon had to say about water!! All of my family enjoyed the film and learned something new including my 8 and 9 year old kids who have just informed me they would like to work in water!

The solutions presented were the right mix of science and story and the film really broke down some of the challenges in the water industry.

I hope there will be a Brave Blue part 2 or a series where they will go more into detail about each of the different areas within this complex industry.

(Beth's story was without doubt my favourite!)

This film tells us about inovative ways of conserving water, conjuring water where there is none and dealing with it once it becames waste.

I am a chemist, engineer, and water resource scientist. While I'm always happy to see a documentary raise awareness of water availability/quality issues, this documentary has a number of issues of its own.

First of all, the so-called 'solutions' being offered by its sprawling list of do-gooder celebrities are not innovative, novel, or sustainable. They're well-proven technologies putting temporary band-aids on deep sociopolitical problems for the sake of making their celebrity sponsors feel good.

Second, the film has a number of corporate sponsors. As a result, it failed to touch on some very real issues with the way we currently treat water. For example, Reverse Osmosis is disgustingly inefficient. It wastes about half the water it treats. It also absolute munches through power, and the waste stream from RO is a concentrated pollutant being shot back into the environment. But Suez, one of the sponsors, is a major player in RO and membrane desalination. So that got glossed over.

Third, it perpetuates the myth of a straight-up bogus technology. Humidity-condensers are not viable products. They've been debunked over and over and over again. The thermodynamics of converting whatever small amount of moisture is in the air to drinking water are enormous. And other than that lone instance of local innovation, the rest of the documentary reeks of western-savior complex.

This documentary is mental candy. Replaces real nutrition, and is bad for your teeth (from all the clenching).

A number of these technologies are very interesting and promising, but the notion that they're a panacea, that the technology is all there and all that lacks is political will, investment and societal change is frankly false. The energy intensity of many of these solutions is a key problem that was not covered, whilst the prohibitive cost of installing and maintaining others, particularly in developing countries, was not really mentioned. Furthermore, the biggest anthropogenic uses of water, e.g. for irrigation, provide some of the greatest opportunities to reduce water use, so that using marginal sources to reach the very high levels of purity required for drinking may not be required. But innovations in irrigation which dwarf other savings were hardly mentioned at all. It's great to see this massive issue in the popular mainstream, and I credit the creators with achieving that, but a more thoroughly researched sequel would be helpful in due course.

The film is ok. The technologies shown are interesting and inspire some hope in the survival of the humanity, but the simplest and maybe the most important solution was not even mentioned. Ok, home filters of the "grey" water waste can save several thousand liters of water per month, but let's have a look at another example. The production cycle of just one liter of milk requires around a thousand liters of water; one burger patty requires several thousands liters. Just by switching to an oat or soy milk and ditching beef (and preferably all the meat) you will save enormous amounts of water, hundreds of thousands liters per year just in your household. We need to think globally. Water is used not only in our taps, but for all the products which we buy and we eat.