In part II of Shady Deals, we will discuss an effort to provide shade for evaporating reservoirs by using (this is real) plastic balls partially filled with potable water.
The other part of this shady article is also about shade, but rather than a desert environment, this is quite the opposite – it’s about shade and reservoirs and evaporation. The idea of this project is to prevent evaporation of water from reservoirs by using polyethylene balls.
You can start this portion of the story by just watching this short video about the solution.
These are not your average Chuck E. Cheese’s ball-pit numbers. They’re hermetically sealed, with water inside them as ballast, lest when the wind picks up “they’ll blow out, and you’ll be chasing them down the road,” says Sydney Chase, president of XavierC. You could drink the ballast—don’t want nonpotable water leaking into the reservoirs.
Chase is a 30-year veteran of manufacturing who left a $300,000 job to start XavierC. She sold her house to raise the capital to seed the company. “Either I’m going to end up under an overpass, or this is going to take off,” she recalls thinking. And as much fun as there is to have with “shade balls,” the company was founded for two serious reasons.
Learn more about the shade balls directly from the company’s web site: http://www.xavierc.net/
But as project managers we’re very aware – or should be – of secondary risk. That’s new risk (usually threat) that is added to the project’s objectives from a risk response. If we think of the shade balls as a risk response (which it is), there are a bunch of secondary risks to be considered with the shade balls, including leaching of the plastics into the water, and the acceleration of the growth of bacteria.
For the first issue – plastics leaching into the water, we suggest you read this story from Grist, from which we provide a key extract below:
The black additive [in the balls] is carbon black, which isn’t supposed to be harmful when it leaches, which is great. Yet even with this precaution, most plastics leach endocrine disrupting chemicals that interfere with animal and human hormone systems (Yang 2011). Some endocrine disruptors, like bisphenol A (BPA), break down in water after a few weeks or months. Some don’t. We don’t know what chemicals are in the Shade Balls, but they will leach, especially because the balls are in the hot sun and are meant to be left in the water over a long period (reports say 10 years). Most water treatment systems don’t take these kinds of chemicals out of the water.
And with regards to the bacteria, this extract from the Daily Mail is informative:
It was billed as an innovative solution to four years of record-breaking drought. But it seems the 96 million 'shade balls' that California officials released on to the Los Angeles Reservoir to stop evaporation may cause even more problems. According to hydrologists, the black plastic spheres could simply fuel the amount of bacteria in the water, ultimately heading to taps and showers in people's homes. 'The black spheres form a thermal blanket which provides new surface area to breed bacteria,' Soni Pradhanang, a professor of Water Quality at the University of Rhode Island told Daily Mail Online.
These two stories are worth reading if you want to build your skills in thinking fairly, even-handedly, and importantly about secondary risk.
We are certainly not dismissing the idea of the shade balls and applaud the innovative solution they bring. We need to see how this story plays out. But in the meantime, there’s a real learning opportunity for project managers in the concept of secondary risk.
