Great pieces on water and resource utilization

There's been a few few different pieces (and one video) I've seen recently that struck me as fascinating on the subject of water as a resource.

From a recent issue of Businessweek was "Israel's Water Ninja" by Amanda Little on the Israeli Integrated Water Network Management startup TaKaDu. It's a remarkably interesting look at water efficiency and identifying leakage on a widespread utility scale where the losses prevented can be enormous.

Related to water usage required was a piece from the Jan issue of Outside Magazine with "The Top-Secret Food That Will Change the Way You Eat" by Rowan Jacobsen. Written about the company Beyond Meat and its forthcoming Beast Burger, it's a well written and important look at the idea of getting away from eating beef, among other reasons for the huge amounts of water needed to generate a pound for eating.

For the Dec/Jan issue of Fast Company was "We're Running Out of Water" by Jon Gertner, an interesting piece that notes how water systems, and the concept of desalination from saltwater to drinking water, can have fairly entrenched markets, effectively limiting the amount of innovation and people looking to enter the field.

The last thing to note here on the subject of water isn't actually a written piece, but rather a video on the Google Ventures website with Kevin Rose interviewing Scott Harrison of the highly regarded Charity: Water. Just a fascinating guy doing important work.

Charles Fishman on Water - from Fast Company Magazine

Excellent piece from the April 2011 issue of Fast Company, which brought to mind some other interesting writing on the same topic of... water.

The recent article was "Why GE, Coca-Cola, and IBM Are Getting Into the Water Business" by Charles Fishman. Adapted from Fishman's book The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water, it's an interesting look at how cheap and easy water is becoming more scarce... and what that means for both society and business.

It's really interesting reading and I imagine the book came out of Fishman's 2007 Fast Company article "Message in a Bottle".... with this original piece linked to and written on in this post also about bottled water and the found in plastic bottles industrial chemical BPA.

Solid writing on an important topic.