WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, FDCA, Il Cantiere #18: From French megabasins to Italian desalination plants - Ignazio Leone (ca, de, en, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 In the last issue of Il Cantiere, two contributions from France were

published which told us how across the Alps capitalism and related
institutions intend to remedy the serious drought that is affecting France:
not through questioning production and agricultural models (we had no
doubts about it), but through the so-called mega-basins, gigantic water
tanks fed by groundwater! ---- Even in Italy drought hits hard, especially
in the central-northern part, and here too the response put in place by the
Meloni government, through the "Drought Decree" (Legislative Decree 39 of
04/14/2023), does not seem to differ much from France: everything is
focused on technologies presented as innovative and in a certain way almost
miraculous, without any even the slightest revision
critical and organic view of the current development model, of productive
and agricultural systems, as well as of the uses of water resources.
So if in France the new anti-drought heroes are the mega-reservoirs, in
Italy the card of the desalination plants is being played.
Analyzing the Drought Decree, in fact, article 10 catches the eye, which
introduces changes to the discipline of desalination plants. Among other
things, the fact that these changes affect in particular the art. 12 of
another legislative provision, the so-called "Salvamare Law" (Law 60 of
05/17/2022), whose incipit of paragraph 1 read as follows "In order to
protect the marine and coastal environment, all desalination plants are
subjected to a prior environmental impact assessment...". It recited
precisely, because the Drought Decree identifies a threshold for the
treatment capacity of desalination plants, equal to 200 L/s, below which
such plants are excluded from the environmental impact assessment.
The "Salvamare Law" also bound the construction of desalination plants for
the drinking water supply chain to the demonstration that "the appropriate
interventions have been carried out to significantly reduce losses from the
aqueduct network and to rationalize the use of water resources envisaged by
sector planning". It was binding indeed, because this constraint too was
canceled by the Drought Decree.
Now, here we don't want to conduct any crusade against desalination plants:
this technology can also be advantageous in certain contexts, such as for
example the smaller islands (in Ventotene for example, according to what is
reported on the Tuscan Water Authority website, the desalination plant
allows you to produce the necessary water at a cost of 3 euro/m3, while
bringing water by ship would cost no less than 12 euro per cubic metre(1)).
In Malta, the Bahamas, the Maldives and other island areas, all the water
needed is also obtained through desalination plants.
The problem is that desalination also has, like any technology, its
negative sides, and they are certainly not negligible, especially if
applications of this type are no longer limited to particular contexts
(such as the smaller islands), but will become a key strategy in the fight
against drought.
Desalination plants, by separating the salt from the sea water, give rise
to a waste with a high saline concentration which is not easy to manage. As
documented in an article(2) that had the support of the UN, published in
the scientific journal "Science of the Total Environment", the disposal of
this waste often consists, especially in plants located near the coast, in
direct discharge into the sea: this causes an increase in marine salinity
which can lead in turn to a significant decrease in dissolved oxygen, with
the risk of determining hypoxic conditions and the formation of "dead
zones" in which the life of aquatic organisms is practically almost
impossible.
The waste from desalination processes also contains chemical contaminants,
mainly deriving from the pre-treatments to which sea water is subjected
before being desalinated (for example caustic soda, which prevents fouling
and blockages of the filtration membranes in desalination plants that use
the reverse osmosis technique).
Finally, it must be emphasized that the desalination process is
particularly energy-intensive, whether it occurs via reverse osmosis or by
exploiting the evaporation of water, and this is certainly not a secondary
aspect, bearing in mind that currently fossil fuels still play a very
important role in the production of energy.
Having said this, in fairness it must be added that there is intense
research activity around desalination, in particular aimed at solving the
problem of waste with a high saline concentration.
There are many research projects that aim to recover important raw
materials from this waste, including magnesium, vanadium, gallium, indium,
boron and other minerals and metals, as well as the chemicals used in the
pre-treatment of sea water.
At the moment, however, we have a technology with certain critical issues,
certainly already capable of being improved in the short term, especially
in relation to the management of the hypersaline concentrate, but which
cannot be the umpteenth fig leaf behind which to hide the absolute inertia
that has characterized and still characterizes water resource management
policies and, more generally, policies to combat global warming.

The Italian aqueduct network loses on average 42%(3) of the water it
transports to users: this shouldn't be the absolute priority in the fight
against drought, together with careful planning and management of the use
of the water resource, rather than relying on desalination plants, as,
moreover, the part of art. 10 of the Salvamare Law which was surgically
eliminated through the Drought Decree?
One would think that the Meloni government has instead decided to rely on
the "Water for life" project proposed last summer by the Webuild group (the
former Salini Impregilo), which in about 2 years and with an investment of
2-3 billion was proposing to solve the drought problem by resorting
precisely to desalination plants(4): it would be another big blow for
Webuild, after having
collected the alas almost certain construction of the bridge over the
Strait.
As I write these few lines speaking of drought, Romagna is once again under
water, for the second time in the space of a few weeks, while the World
Meteorological Organization (a UN agency) is sounding the alarm that in the
next 4 years there will be a 66% probability that the global temperature
increase will exceed 1.5 °C on at least one occasion, considered a limit
value beyond which climatic events will lead the planet towards completely
unpredictable scenarios.
Need we add more to decide once and for all to consign the capitalist
development model to history and seek alternatives that manage to combine
the protection of ecosystems and the development of a society capable of
guaranteeing a dignified life for any human being?

(1) Elba watermaker: useful and safe, www.autoritaidrica.toscana.it,
https://www.autoritaidrica.toscana.it/content/dissalatore-elba-uti-le-e-sicuro
(2) Edward Jones, Manzoor Qadir, Michelle T.H. van Vliet, Vladimir
Smakhtin, Seong-mu Kang, The state of desalination and brine production: A
global outlook, Science of The Total Environment, Volume 657, 2019, Pages
1343-1356, ISSN
0048-9697,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.12.076
(3) Census of water for civil use, www.istat.it, 29 December 2022,
https://www.istat.it/it/archivio/279363
(4) Claudia Voltattorni, Siccità, Webuild's plan: «Desalinators to make sea
water drinkable», Corriere della Sera, 6 July 2022,
https://www.corriere.it/economia/co
nsumi/22_luglio_06/siccita-pianowebuild-dissalatori-rendere-potabile-l-acqua-mare-dd4e4854-fc9211ec-aaff-f5c76ebe
ca8a.shtml

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