This video from a shade ball deployment at a reservoir in Las Virgenes, Calif., two months ago shows what I mean.
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Known as shade balls, they play an essential role in protecting the city’s water supply, which has been severely threatened by this year’s brutal California drought.
Today, shade balls got their moment in the Sunday.
They have also been used in the past to keep birds out of waterways near airports.
Via email, Marty Adams, one of the city’s water system managers, assured me the balls are completely safe for contact with drinking water, having been made of the same high-density polyethylene that would be used to construct a gallon milk jug. Catherine Kavanaugh of Plastic News reports that they’ve been deployed to “keep birds out of water near airport runways, control vapors in industrial ammonia tanks, or stop water from evaporating at petroleum operations”.
On Monday afternoon, the 20,000 black plastic balls tumbled down the slopes of Los Angeles Reservoir, joining 95,980,000 of their brethren already covering the surface of the water.
LADWP is the first utility company to use this technology for water quality protection. Some of those ideas are good, some are decidedly less so. And shade balls were a cheap option.
Can 96 million balls improve water quality?
They can also be recycled, and are expected to last up to 10 years.
Edwards said: “Shade balls are an affordable and effective way to comply with regulations and helps us continue to deliver the best drinking water to our customers”.
The shade balls are part of a $47.5 million plan to prevent water evaporation and algae growth in Los Angeles’ water reservoirs.
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To be clear, 300 million gallons a year isn’t a tonof water in the grand scheme of things – Los Angeles consumed 13.6 billion gallons of water in June 2015 alone. Silver Lake is not one of the reservoirs receiving shade balls (it’s being taken offline and will soon be replaced by the Headworks reservoir). Still, every little bit helps.
