On Tuesday January 29th, I spoke at a Water Reuse Technology Conference in beautiful Del Mar California, near San Diego. My presentation was on the merits of WaterMatch and what Intel has been doing to save fresh water, by reusing effluent or waste-water in our Fab operations. At the opening of my talk, I told the attendees that I don’t often get to the beach as I live in Arizona. Therefore, before the conference started I took a walk in the morning on the beach to admire the beautiful view. As I was walking along the beach, I came across an old bottle which I picked up to examine more closely. As I wiped away the sand on the bottle, a genie escaped from the bottle and said he would grant me one wish. As I was in quite a bit of shock at the presence of the genie, and I had been thinking about the beach and the ocean that morning, the first thing that jumped into my mind and out of my mouth was, “I would like a bridge built from San Diego to Hawaii”….You see I enjoy the beach in Hawaii, but it is expensive to fly from Phoenix to Hawaii and unlike San Diego, I can’t drive to Hawaii from Phoenix.
After making my wish, the genie became very incredulous at my over-the-top request, and he replied in a stern voice and said, “Do you know how much steel and concrete it would take to build a bridge all the way to Hawaii?....”Do you know how deep the Pacific Ocean is and how incredibly difficult this would be to do?...... “Don’t’ be ridiculous, can you please give me a wish that is more reasonable and doable?” So I told the genie that I was speaking later that day at the water reuse conference, and one of my goals was to make the public and all of society excited about saving precious water, through increasing water reuse; so I said to the genie, “my wish is to make water reuse sexy!” The genie thought for a minute, shrugged his shoulders and then replied to me, “How many lanes do you want on that bridge to Hawaii?”
Learn more about the WaterMatch initiative here.