Hey Folks,
We have some enhancements to older innovations as well as a lot of good people taking action and showing us the way, so let’s get to it.
Disclaimer - the views expressed herein are ours and ours alone.
We wrote a while back about a Moroccan concept whereby they catch the humidity in a fog using nets and condense it into potable water. We have also mentioned the fog-harvesting beetles of the Namibian desert. Building on these two known concepts, a team of students at the Boston University have designed a water-from-air capture method that calls for wrapping sheets of fog-harvesting mesh around a tower six meters tall, using water-repellent nylon rope to guide the condensation droplets down into a collection tank in a spiderweb-like pattern.
Drawing further inspiration from nature, the team envisions an array of towers placed in and around a community for easier collection which they say is adapted from underground fungi networks. Biomimicry is awesome and to see it applied in so many different ways in this design is just fantastic!
A research team at Purdue University have developed a method to transform the most common form of plastic, into gasoline, diesel fuel and other high-value items. Targeted squarely at remediating the plastic pollution problem, this process called low-pressure Hydrothermal Processing, uses a combination of heat and pressure to liquify the plastic which in turn causes it to split into oil or naphtha, which can be used as a feedstock for other chemicals/ products. They say that the clean fuels derived from the polyolefin waste generated each year can satisfy 4% of the annual demand for gasoline or diesel fuels.
As with anything that required this much heat and effort, the question of economic/environmental viability is rather pertinent. The hydrothermal process is now being demonstrated at a pilot-scale which they say ‘is a less-expensive approach to produce fuels from plastic than from crude oil, making it a profitable venture to collect and process plastic, keeping it out of landfills and oceans.’ Whether this holds true or not, time will tell. However this writer isn’t convinced this is a net positive from an environmental standpoint.
Nanobubbles and UV to clean canals in Mexico
Putting good ideas into practice is hard and only gets harder when the solution is high-tech. We wanted to tell you about this Mexican scientist who saw the water being used for irrigation and how it was polluted with fertilizer run-off and subsequently choked with algae. So she did something about it - she bought a small parcel of land and built a water purification setup on it. The purification setup uses UV light and pressurized air nanobubbles to destroy harmful microbes in the water. Seeing the success of this setup, she has helped setup similar machines for other farmers in the area. Not done there, she has been teaching the farmers how to compost to wean them off chemical fertilizer!
But the piece-de-resistance is that she has attached a nanobubble pump to several local trajineras (flat bottom boats used for pleasure cruises around the canals). The pumps run on solar power from panels strapped to the boats’ rooftops, and they push high-pressure nanobubbles deep into the canals’ water. The size and force of the nanobubbles cause them to remain underwater and provide oxygen to areas that are in desperate need of it, as well as destroy harmful microbes and bust open the particles of greenhouse gases, eliminating them from the water’s chemical makeup!
Cheaper Wastewater treatment from India
Staying with polluted water treatment, a research team in India say they have developed a single stage hybrid Electrocoagulation and Electroflotation Enhanced Membrane Module (ECEFMM) for waste-water treatment. Without getting too technical they have developed a hybrid system that co-locates processes to reduce cost as well as sharing of resources, not to mention reduce maintenance needs.
How you say? - electrocoagulation and electroflotation are adjoined with membrane in a single setup meaning that they share the membrane for their specific needs while also reducing one separate process. As these are both process enhanced by electricity, the electric field also helps substantially reduce membrane fouling and restricts the membrane ageing, which in turn reduces maintenance costs. All of this adds up to significantly lower initial capital investment expense along with the additional advantage of reduced installation area requirement.
Detecting pollutant levels by measuring microorganism swimming speeds
Researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) have developed technology that rapidly detects pollutants in water by measuring their impacts on swimming microorganisms. Their technology which is at proof-of-concept, uses the regular camera of a smartphone to video microorganisms called Paramecia that are ever present in water bodies. Why Paramecia? - Well, they are large enough to be seen with a normal camera. They are also fast swimmers, so small differences in their swimming speed will translate to large changes.
By tracking the swimming speeds and movements of waterborne Paramecia through a simple microscope set up on camera phones, they found that they could accurately infer the quality of and presence of pollutants in water samples within minutes. Its smartphone compatibility makes it especially suitable for assessing water drinkability in underdeveloped regions. They have tested this method on heavy metal pollutants as well as antibiotics, and measured changes to swim speeds. For example they found that at heavy metal concentrations half of those considered unsafe for drinking water, the average swimming speed of Paramecia was nearly halved. Very handy metric and measurement method.
Standalone brackish water treatment system
A research team at the Tarbiat Modares University (TMU) in Iran has fabricated a brackish water reverse osmosis (BWRO) desalination unit powered by a stand-alone hybrid photovoltaic-thermal (PVT) system which is claimed to produce freshwater at a cost that is close to that of conventional large-scale reverse osmosis (RO) desalination plants. With a stated production rate of 11.80 Liters/hour they say the PVT system generates enough power to run the high-pressure water pump and a diaphragm-type circulation pump utilized to circulate soft water beneath the PV module for the active cooling of the PV panel itself.
In Other News
We have a bumper crop of good and some not-so-good news to share so let’s jump right in.
First up, a unique concept out of Ecuador, wherein the Regional Water Fund of Southern Ecuador (FORAGUA), either purchases land, or enters into five- or 10-year agreements under which the land is turned into conservation areas that protect the municipality’s water sources. For converting these farm lands into conservation areas, the fund pays the farmers to let them re-wild! The fund currently operates in 14 municipalities in southern Ecuador, serving 500,000 residents, and has restored 1,500 hectares (3,700 acres) of land and put an additional 337,000 hectares (833,000 acres) under conservation and sustainable-use ordinances. By 2030, FORAGUA aims to work in 39 municipalities, serving 1 million people and conserving 600,000 hectares (1.48 million acres) of land. More power to them!
A joint research team has analyzed 20 years of storm data for Hawaiʻi to help scientists and policy makers better understand how rainfall is impacted by specific weather events. The main objective was to determine how each of four types of atmospheric disturbances contribute to rainfall at different times of the year in Hawaiʻi. Why is this important? - well, as ground water becomes more and more scarce, this tracking system will allow researchers to better understand the nature of disturbance driven rainfall and for resource/utility managers to make important water management decisions in near-real time.
An indicator for the direction of future living comes from an off-grid luxury eco-camp in Australia. Apart from using rainwater harvesting for their water needs, and solar for their power needs, they also have a fancy wastewater treatment system that reduces the high nitrate levels from the waste (human beings are disgusting like that) and dissipates this reusable water into the groundwater systems. Reading around the sales heavy material in the article we learned that the system is very low on power consumption, strong on nitrogen-reduction capability, and effective for seasonal use with simple maintenance requirements.
On to the not-so-good news, Canadian mining waste including such wonderfully healthy things (no, not really) like selenium, nitrates, and other contaminants are flowing into a large US watershed in Montana across the border. While this article talks about the pollutants effect on the aquatic species in the water bodies being polluted, none of this is good for humans either and has been a problem for the last few decades! Also no one really has a viable solution yet.
A Denver-based private equity firm that launched this spring by Will Sarni, will invest $5 million in startups with technology-based solutions to water shortages in Utah and the wider West Coast region. This money will finance more local startups, which is a mere drop in the ocean of drought trouble facing the larger region. Calling on more VCs to step up to solve the water problem growing in their own backyard (Literally!)
Another development we are somewhat ambivalent about is the development of Water Treatment as a Service or WaaS. As the name suggests ‘service + technology’ offerings such as these turn water treatment into a pay-as-you-use service which amortizes the capital costs for large corporations into easy-to-consume monthly pills as it were. While this is great right now, we have debated long and hard with no answer as to what happens when it becomes as ubiquitous as other service providers like Verizon, Uber, Amazon, Netflix etc. and we, as end-consumers are at the mercy of their monopoly market pricing?
Dear Reader, Your thoughts on this are more than welcome!
That’s it for this week’s edition, until next Friday, Peace!