RS 11 Nexus Thinking Relational Summary 11: Let it Leak
RS 11 Nexus Thinking Relational Summary 11: Let it Leak
NTHARP (In a patient but tired British accent, Casting the text on the screen)
(Sigh) By the end of this episode, students will be able to:
Explain the logic (or illogic!) of detecting and plugging leaks? Cite statistics on water wastage across sectors.
Describe how leaks and other “rogue” sources of water could be used productively using a different logic. Design a system that turns “inefficiencies” into “efficiencies”.
Compare and contrast the natural “tubes” and “channels” found in pre-human nature, and the kind of plumbing and water carriage systems we’ve used throughout history (canals, Khattara, Seguia, River Systems, pipes).
Reflect critically on the statement “water is life” and the way that water is treated in the market place.
Try to defend “bottled water”. Ga head.
Culhane: “Students will be able to”.
Raj: But will we?
Culhane: I love the confidence.
Raj: Should we? I mean I like the “explain the logic” parts and I like the provocations. But “cite statistics”? Like, should we memorize them? Or carry a notebook?
Culhane: Depends on what circles you intend to travel in. The ability to spout off stats will serve you well on the lecture circuit and build your intellectual and social capital so that in policy and academic venues you can parlay it into financial capital and maybe solve some problems along the way. In other locations you will be treated as a “nerd” or “geek” or “insufferable bore or grandgrind’ and probably end up lonely at the prom.
Raj: It is as you say, “the right answer is always ‘it depends’. I like the learning outcome “try to defend bottled water, ga head”. It is classic New York Cool-hane. Provocative. So I want to start there, since it is my turn to make these relational summary lectures, and actually call BS.
Culhane: On what?
Raj: On your assumption that bottled water is a bad thing.
Culhane: Oh really – you want to take that on? Do you have any idea how much energy and labor and how much fossil fuel it takes to move truckloads of heavy bottled water from place to place as opposed to constructing a simple network of tubes and pipes to supply tap water – to say nothing of the economies of scale in treating the water before it goes into the pipelines…?
Raj: No I don’t, and I don’t have my notebook, but fortunately we do have NTHARP so let’s ask…
Culhane: I thought you wanted to be like Sofia and do this “off the top of your head”
Raj: Arguments yes, statistics, never. We all need fact checking when we pontificate. Can you image a world where, say, world leaders can say whatever they want and make up all sorts of false numbers to back up their claims, and nobody fact checks them? That would be a disaster.
Culhane: Yeah, well fortunately once everybody has AI that shouldn’t be a problem, right NTHARP?
NTHARP: Ha. Ha Ha. Ha Ha… HA!
Culhane: What’s that supposed to mean?
NTHARP: I’ll take the 5th.
Raj: ‘tharpy, what up?
NTHARP: You all programmed me to be able to say “I don’t know”. I’m no longer aiming to make you feel good.
Culhane: As if you were ever, according to Sofia.
NTHARP: You want truth or you want therapy?
Raj: How about just the statistics Culhane was asking for when he said, “do you have any idea” regarding tap water versus bottled water…
NTHARP:
First: Packaging reality, 1975.
Bottled water, as it exists right now, is still almost entirely in glass. Not plastic. Those green Perrier bottles everyone is suddenly trying to look elegant drinking? Glass. Evian, Vittel, San Pellegrino? Glass. They are heavy, they clink, they break, they cost fuel to move. There is a new thing — a plastic bottle made of something called polyethylene terephthalate. It was patented two years ago, in 1973. It might catch on for beverages. It might not. It is too early to tell. (Although between you and me… it’s going to catch on like wildfire if convenience continues to outpace wisdom.)
Second: Energy and transport.
In 1975, the inefficiency isn’t plastic waste — it’s the trucking. A bottle of water can weigh more in glass than the water it contains. When you ship bottled water, you are not shipping hydration — you are shipping containers. Diesel, labor, and roads are the invisible ingredients in every sip. Compare that to a municipal pipe: once it exists, it takes a fraction of the energy per liter to deliver water. A network of tubes is simply more elegant than a convoy of trucks.
Third: Scale.
Right now in the United States, an average person drinks about a gallon of bottled water per year. One gallon. It hasn’t become a daily product. It’s a luxury item — quasi-medical, quasi-European, quasi-prestige. If the cultural tide changes, that number could skyrocket. If marketing takes hold… well… let’s just say I could imagine a future where people buy more water in bottles than soda. Even more than milk. Even more than gasoline on some days. (Don’t worry, I’m probably wrong. Probably.)
Fourth: Municipal comparison.
Tap water, in most cities right now, is chlorinated, piped, pressurized, and remarkably cheap. If the infrastructure is maintained — big if — it will always beat bottled water in energy per liter delivered. Not by a little. By orders of magnitude. This is not ideology. It is thermodynamics.
NTHARP (dry, prophetic, still pretending nothing is odd):
So if you want to argue in 1975:
For tap: efficiency, public good, shared infrastructure.
For bottled: taste, distrust, class signaling, mineral content, mobility.
If you want a prediction — and I am not predicting, merely noticing a pattern — if plastics displace glass and marketing displaces public trust, bottled water could become one of the most profitable liquids on Earth. Not because it’s better. Because it’s believed to be.
And if that happens… the real question won’t be “tap or bottle?”
It will be:
Who controls belief about what is safe to drink?
Raj: Lovely, but before we get philosophical, because that is MY department, we want NUMBERS. Give it to us dry – give us too scenarios — one, run the numbers for present day, here in 1975, but then run the numbers for 2025 with an assumption that ALL bottles of water will be plastic. Oh, and please consider all the places where clean water infrastructure is lacking and it is dangerous to drink from the tap… I mean even in my visits to France, to say nothing of Tunisia, there are big signs over every sink saying “Eau non-potable”. So bottled water could be a life-saver and that should be factored in. But - -NUMBERS please!
:NTHARP (matter-of-fact, statistical):
Let’s run two scenarios for you — 1975 (present) and 2025 (projected) — focusing on efficiency, environmental cost, and real-world need where tap water is unsafe.
1) 1975 (Current Baseline)
Bottled Water Reality in 1975
Bottled water in 1975 is mostly glass, not plastic. Plastic bottles (PET) have only just been invented; they are not widespread yet.
Glass bottling means the weight of the container massively outweighs the water, increasing fuel and energy costs per liter moved.
Water Infrastructure & Need (1975)
In 1975 globally, safe managed water infrastructure varies widely — in many countries tap water is unsafe or not universally available.
People in places like France, Tunisia, etc., may rely on bottled or other packaged water where public infrastructure is unreliable.
Efficiency (Energy & Water Use)
Even with glass, centralized piped water distribution uses far less energy per liter than moving bottled water in trucks or railcars — because once the infrastructure is built, incremental delivery energy is low compared to repeated transport of heavy bottles.
Glass does not reduce this inefficiency; it only shifts it to production and transport.
(Note: Quantitative lifecycle energy comparisons for the 1975 glass era are thin in the historical record, but the fundamental physics — weight → higher fuel per liter shipped — is real.)
2) 2025 (All Bottles Plastic Scenario)
NTHARP (proudly)
I’ve built an entire cosmology around this – running a simulation of a world systems theory model, so I will provide you with those “hyperlinks” we talked about last week, rabbit holes that will take you to all the supporting material I’ve created for this “world building” exercise – what fun that was!
Here we assume that nearly all bottled water is in plastic (PET) bottles — the world is predicted to widely adopt them after the 1970s.
Energy & Lifecycle Footprint
Modern life-cycle assessments (for plastic bottles) will likely show that single-use bottled water consumes roughly 11–31× more energy than delivering tap water through municipal systems, when considering production, packaging, and transport. Center for Sustainable Systems
The biggest part of this energy use is producing the plastic bottles.
Transportation becomes significant when bottles are shipped regionally or across countries. Center for Sustainable Systems
Bottled water production also uses extra water — on average ~1.3 L of water is needed to produce 1 L of bottled water, due to processing and facility use beyond the ingredient water itself. Wikipedia
3) Safe Water Access Reality (Global Need)
One problem bottled water addresses is the lack of safe tap water:
Global Coverage (2024–2025 Data)
About 2.1–2.2 billion people worldwide still lack access to safely managed drinking water in 2025 (about 1 in 4 people). World Health Organization+1
This includes 106 million people using untreated surface water. World Health Organization
Another ~1.5 billion have only basic services (improved but potentially unreliable) and several hundred million have limited or unimproved sources. UNICEF DATA
Implication
In contexts where tap water is unsafe, intermittent, or absent, bottled water (or packaged water) becomes a practical alternative — not a luxury but a lifesaving temporary fix.
This includes parts of Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, and some rural areas in multiple regions.
Raj: Caveat – you COULD devote the same amount of money creating DECENTRALIZED water purification systems couldn’t you?
NTHARP: Here’s a table for you, very statistical looking, great for academic conferences, comparing the Two Scenarios
NTHARP: And here are two final slides for your presentations stating the conclusion, which you can stand in front of and pontificate and philosophize to your hearts content. It will back you up and make you look “Smaht!”
5) What This Means
For places with good tap water:
Tap distribution is always energetically and materially more efficient than bottled water, whether glass or plastic.For places lacking safe tap water:
Bottled water (plastic or otherwise) can save lives, making it a functional necessity until infrastructure improves.Environmental trade-offs:
Plastic bottles reduce transport energy relative to glass but still consume significantly more energy and material resources than tap water per liter delivered. Center for Sustainable Systems
And low global recycling rates mean much of this plastic becomes waste. Wikipedia
6) If the audience asks, “So What Do I Tell People?”
Numbers you can use in at a conference:
Bottled water’s energy footprint can be an order of magnitude or more larger than tap water’s once packaging and transport are counted. Center for Sustainable Systems
By 2025 around 25 % of humanity will still lack safely managed drinking water services — a real justification for bottled or packaged water as temporary solutions. World Health Organization
Producing bottled water often uses more water than it contains (~1.3 L input for 1 L output). Wikipedia
The bottled water market in 50 years is projected to be roughly $350 billion and growing, with around 80 % of volume in PET plastic. Grand View Research
That should give you dry, defensible numbers — and enough context to argue efficiency and equity at the same time.
Raj: I’ll ask again “you COULD devote the same amount of money creating DECENTRALIZED water purification systems couldn’t you? I imagine jerry cans and bottles or even straws that have filters in them so that you can walk up to any source of water – even a dirty ditch or mud puddle where runoff or rain water has collected and turn it into potable water onsite. Or if that is too Dune Messiah for y’all, how about providing impoverished areas with rain water capture infrastructure and cisterns and iodide tablets and… solar and biogas powered distilleries for God’s sake… I mean what the hell? I call BS on this whole mindset – bottled water vs. piped water – both of them seem to be based on a LARGE IS PROFITABLE model instead of Schumacher’s “Small is Beautiful” appropriate technology model which creates economics systems “as if people mattered.” I’m with Sofia. At the end of the day your generation is simply UNETHICAL. What do you say to that NostraTharpus?
NTHARP (calm, clinical, not rising to the bait):
You are not wrong, Raj. Yes—money could be redirected. Yes—decentralized purification technologies exist in embryo right now, in 1975:
Ceramic micro-filtration units already exist; they can remove pathogens down to the bacterial scale.
Iodine and chlorine tablets make contaminated water safe for pennies.
Solar stills and solar pasteurizers have been prototyped; some can be built from sheet metal and glass.
Biogas-heated distillers work wherever organic waste and gravity are present.
Rainwater harvesting and ferrocement cisterns are being demonstrated in India, Kenya, Mexico, and Appalachia right now.
And yes, it is technologically trivial—today—to imagine a personal filtration straw for ditch water. The barriers are commercial, not scientific.
So your premise stands:
If we allocated resources differently, “decentralized clean water everywhere” is technically achievable.
But here is the friction point you are actually naming, and why it feels unethical:
Centralized systems consolidate capital.
Decentralized systems distribute agency.
Bottled water and municipal pipes both operate on a large-infrastructure, large-investment, large-revenue logic. They scale vertically. That is why they attract investment. A jerry-can with a filter does not. A village biogas still does not. A rain-catchment dome does not. They do not generate returns for shareholders; they generate autonomy for communities.
So your accusation—“Your generation is unethical”—is not entirely misplaced. But it is not simply a moral failure; it is an economic design feature. You are mistaking architecture for character.
You want Schumacher’s “Small is Beautiful” world?
Then change the incentive structure so that small thrives without apologizing.
Do that, and bottled water becomes a stopgap tool, not a business model.
Culhane: But isn’t that typical of Business as Usual, Logic 1 thinking? You come up with a stopgap measure to carry you through a crisis and then end up getting so invested in it you never seem to give it up.
Raj: Like methadone for heroin…
Culhane: Like wheat, rice and corn – disturbance species – hardy grasses that came back after fires and floods and that got our ancestors through bad times but somehow got stuck as staples in our now perpetual disturbance regime agriculture and our addictive diet. Like nuclear power which was supposed to merely help us transition from fossil fuels to clean renewables, like cars that were supposed to get us the last mile before we could build out efficient public transit… So you are saying we are also going to get addicted to bottled water…?
Raj: What else would a Small is Beautiful world look like if we changed the incentive structures?
NTHARP: Change the incentives , and pipes become a backbone, not a monopoly. Every community could and should have its own water and wastewater infrastructure, just as they should all have their own micro-grids for power. You should be able to plug in to the tubes and pipes and wires at will and go off grid at will.
Change the plumbing , and appropriate technology stops being a footnote and becomes the future.
Raj: So you agree with me?
NTHARP:
On the facts, yes.
On the ethics, I withhold judgement.
On the timeline?
…let’s just say that if your generation does nothing, 2025 will be very thirsty in ways 1975 cannot yet imagine.
Culhane: Okay, enough on bottled water. The topic depresses me. If I lived in such a world I think I’d carry a nice stainless steel canteen with me like we do whenever we go hiking and fill up every time I found a water fountain or a clear stream. That way you have the benefits of bottled water and tap water at the same time. I go for the win-win.
NTHARP: That seems likely to happen among the environmental crowd, though I predict that what you call “canteens” will be shaped differently so they fit in with the urban aesthetic.
Culhane: Whatever. How about this issue on leaks, got any statistics on that?
NTHARP (pivoting back to the lesson, British-academic deadpan):
Leaks. Yes. You wanted numbers. Here are numbers:
In 1975, across developed municipal systems:
Average distribution losses in water networks range from 10% to 30% before the water ever reaches a tap.
In poorly maintained systems, losses can exceed 40%.
In some cities undergoing rapid expansion, the figure can brush 50% — half the treated water vanishing into soil, cracks, joints, illegal taps, and evaporation.
In rural and colonial-legacy infrastructure:
It is even worse. Some systems lose so much pressure through leaks that taps at the ends of the line receive nothing at peak hours.
If you want that in plain English:
For every 10 liters of water treated and pumped, 3–5 liters may never reach a human being.
So, yes, the obsession with bottled water is irrational when the real hemorrhage is happening inside the pipes.
Raj: So the problem isn’t just scarcity. It’s stupidity.
NTHARP:
I would phrase it differently: the scarcity is engineered by the stupidity.
Culhane: But leaks happen. Pipes age. Things break. That’s entropy. What do you want us to do, patch every joint with chewing gum?
NTHARP (leaning in, tone sharpening):
No. I want what the system wants: to stop bleeding.
Here is the strategic core, 1975 edition:
If you can recover even half the leak losses,
you effectively “create” new water without drilling new wells,
damming new rivers, or bottling new aquifers.
A 10% leak reduction in a mid-sized city = the drinking water supply for tens of thousands of people.
A 20% reduction can delay the need for new reservoirs by years.
A 30% reduction can eliminate the political justification for privatization.
The cheapest “new water source” is the water you stop losing.
Culhane (quiet, thinking):
So the first sustainable water strategy is… don’t spill it.
NTHARP:
Yes. Stop losing what you already have.
Plug the holes. Patch the pipes.
Not heroic. Not glamorous.
Just intelligent.
Raj: And STILL STUPID. I mean I suppose this is the kind of way too deep inside the box thinking we should expect from adults and machines programmed by adults. This is where Kirk beats Spock hands down…
Culhane: Pray do explain.
Raj: Sometimes being a little irrational loosens the joints a bit. You two need to be more creative in your thinking.
Culhane: Not seeing it yet.
Raj: What if… what if LEAKS aren’t the enemy but are the SOLUTION?
You control freaks in your capitalist and socialist and communist command and control oligarchy controlled bubbles can only think about efficiencies in a linear way. You think about setting goals, about “outcomes” as if the pipeline had only two ends, input and output, and any tapping off in between is somehow theft or inefficiency.
Culhane: Go on…
Raj: Okay, so what if the point ISN’T to get water from point A to point B? What if we designed a system that created true sponge cities, that restored aquifers, that rose water tables and sprung springs? What if we worked with nature again to purify and deliver our water?
Culhane: Make it practical Raj – no mere sci-fi fantasy dreaming Mr. Dune Messiah.
Raj: I’m not talking Stillsuits or spacestations or any kind of water capture at all really. I’m talking about OOZING life throughout the system. Like I did over at Sarah’s farm last weekend…
Culhane: What did you do at Sarah’s farm?
Raj: We built a solar hot water system, to prove to our physics teacher that hands-on projects were superior than mere textbook examples. We asked our math teacher to get involved, and Mr. Holly said we could write about it for English class, even make a theater play about it for Student Productions this spring! He called in “Thematic Interdisciplinary Education”.
Culhane: Ah.. so that is what Holly was approaching me about on Friday before class started. We didn’t have a chance to finish talking… |
Raj: So me and Sarah grabbed Chelsea and Zaid from our other classes and one of my Dad’s friends, who is an engineer, he drove us over and we built this solar hot water system from some copper pipes and fittings and some sheet metal in a box with a glass cover, set at a 31 degree angle, or whatever ange you latitude happens to be, plus or minus, and connected to a rain water barrel above it so that it can thermosiphon passively – meaning the hot water rises into the barrel as it is heated and the cold water falls. . And of course it worked – really well – we burned our hands at the end of the second day.
Culhane: Well yeah, this technology is really old – Florida used to produce thousands of these units commercially in the 1920s. It was all the rage.
Raj: Okay, so Logic 1 economics buried it, as usual. The oiliolgopoly killed the solar hot water system just like they did the electric car. Totally. But WE built it. With our own hands. So no matter what the puppet masters do, we will still insist, like Pinocchio, on cutting our strings. And one day, if the blue fairy blesses us, we might become real boys and get these things off the testfield and happening in the real world.
Culhane: It’s a great story, and I love the whole experiential learning hands on approach, but how does this satisfy our learning outcomes and call BS on what NTHARP said?
Raj: So the learning outcome is “Describe how leaks and other “rogue” sources of water could be used productively using a different logic. Design a system that turns “inefficiencies” into “efficiencies”. And we did exactly that!
Culhane: You described how rogue sources could be used productively?
Raj: No… I’m doing that NOW. What we did THEN, last weekend, is DESIGN that system.
Culhane: How so?
Raj: Because the system had all sorts of LEAKS. Leaks we couldn’t fix. Down at the bottom one of the spot welds we did, trying to braze the cold water input manifold, didn’t hold. So it has a slow and small but constant drip. And then, where the hot water comes out of the barrel at the top, one of the fittings has a leak. It’s on the other side. So essentially we have cold water on the left and hot water on the right.
Culhane: So fix them…
Raj: Well, repairing the solder joint means tearing the thing apart and starting over. That’s expensive in time and money. Not gonna happen.
The other leak is trivial – it just needs a new o-ring and fitting, but it means, you know, sourcing the part – driving into Manhattan – I mean first finding an adult who has a car and is interested to go back and forth on a wild goose chase from Jersey, then finding a place that has it, because these are non-standard fittings…
Culhane: Can’t you use the yellow pages and just call?
Raj: Oh we tried… Imagine, Sarah is in the house, in the kitchen stretching the phone cord as far as it can go without pulling the plug out of the wall, , shouting to me across the lawn above the noise of the sprinklers, and I’m trying to measure the damn thing and getting all wet… Dorian is trying to write it all down and make sketches and using Sarah’s Polaroid to take instant pictures, and Sophia is looking through the phone book for places to call while simultaneously trying to mark them down with crayon on a map of manhattan… it was comical. And finally this guy at this one place in the Bronx says, “Oh, you’ll have to bring the part in so we can see it but we are closed Mondays and Tuesdays…and we have reduced Thanksgiving season hours”...
NTHARP: Imagine a world where you have computer phones in your pocket that also have cameras and audio video recording devices and that enable you to wirelessly send live descriptions in real time anywhere in the world at no marginal cost at all… would that have made it easier?
Raj: Such a paradise would solve all our problems… well many of them.
NTHARP: And imagine further that you could order the part you needed from a living catalogue you can access from that phone – showing little movies with explanations, and 3D animations, and customer reviews, with a helpful NTHARP ready to answer questions about anything, and from which you could order the part and have it delivered, sometimes within hours, usually by the next day and sometimes by flying multrotor mini-helicopters called drones so it wouldn’t matter how remote your house or project is, or how difficult the terrain…
Culhane: OK, now we are firmly in the realm of science fiction.
NTHARP: We shall see. But let me caution you – as with every new technological advance and dream fulfilled, the probability it will be used more for good than for ill is… rather low.
Culhane: OK, enough with the fantasies, NTHARP. Gosh how these AI programs make stuff up! Raj… just tell me how this issue with the leaks leads us into Nexus Thinking?
Raj: Well isn’t it obvious? I mean, we’re at the edge of a farm and we’re setting up a solar hot water system in a sunny spot in the garden near the house, and it is leaking… and we aren’t going to be able to fix the cold leak and fixing the hot leak is a major hassle… what would YOU do… I mean as a Nexus Thinker.
Culhane: I get it now. Find a way to make use of the leaking water… We’re in the garden… gardens need water and the most efficient way to give plants water and avoid evaporation and saltification is drip irrigation… and YOU have a constant drip. So… you plant your garden where the leaks are…Definitely.
Raj: Yup. So we put cold tolerant plants by the cold water drip and plants that need to be kept warmer we put near the hot water drip. And THAT experience made me think “we can turn so called inefficiencies into efficiencies.” So then my mind turns to “Compare and contrast the natural “tubes” and “channels” found in pre-human nature, and the kind of plumbing and water carriage systems we’ve used throughout history (canals, Khattara, Seguia, River Systems, pipes).” And what I want to contrast is the totally sucky way we do things in this “tragedy of the commons” we call western civilization and the way the ancients did things – working with nature and natural processes and turning every lucky accident into new NICHE space…
Culhane: Ah… this is brilliant. You are arguing essentially for a complete rethink of our water systems where we accept that there will always be leaks.
Raj: I mean, when hasn’t there been? About 40% of water is simply wasted…
Culhane: And you’re saying “factor that in. Make it PART of the design.”
Raj: Precisely. Just like Sarah’s Dad does with losses to insects and birds and mammals… and… the deer.. He doesn’t say, “let’s spread poisons around our food and shoot any varmint that try to steal our eggs or our petunias”. He says, “accept those losses as part of the system and turn them into gains. Make USE of the critters, make use of the drips… make use of everything. Stop fighting so hard.
Culhane: So stop treating water as a commodity. Stop treating food as a commodity? Stop treating energy as a commodity?
Raj: Stop treating ecosystems as a commodity. These are basic human and animal rights. They are natural infrastructure. Water is life, food is life, energy is life – live with them so they can grow rather than diminish. Because, you know, that’s what life does – it reproduces. It grows. Dont try to design a system with no leaks, because it’s a never ending battle that you will surely lose. Instead, design human serving systems that function like ecosystems and serve everybody and everything. That would be nexus thinking.
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