Hey Readers,
We have a lot of news this week as well as some innovations. Let’s get stuck in!
Algae to clean wastewater for a change!
We have talked about the algae nuisance across the world in terms of constraining water ecosystems across the world. Now a team of scientists from India have developed a way to use the algae property of ‘choking off all other life forms’ to actually clean wastewater! Based on a method called ‘algal bioremediation’, they selected a novel microalgal strain Pseudochlorella pringsheimii because it can tolerate high pollutant load and can grow over a wide range of temperatures.
They put this algae strain in pilot test tanks filled with raw urban wastewater and left it for 14 days. They found that the algae had significantly improved the water quality by removing heavy metals and nearly eliminated the total bacteria and coliform in the water. To further test this phenomenon, they put suckerfish into this water and found that while no suckerfish survived in raw wastewater; in treated wastewater, 84% of them not only survived but did so over ten days with their body weight increasing by 47%. Daaang, algae be cleaning!
So we know that chlorine is used the world over for treating / purifying drinking water to some extent. However, if used incorrectly, it can lead to chlorine based compounds forming in the water that are at best, bad for human consumption and at worst, carcinogenic. This is not counting the gene mutations it is causing in the bacteria it has been put in to sterilize. Enter a team of researchers between the University of Melbourne and Riga Technical University who are seeking an alternative to the conventional chlorine-based approach. They found a rare oxide mineral called brownmillerite (Ca2Fe2O5).
While termed a rare oxide, it is found naturally in mineral deposits or can be synthesized cheaply in large volumes. In testing, they found that nanoparticles of brownmillerite reduced the number of bacteria in the sample, from over 5000 in number to just 20 in only 30 minutes. Perhaps more pertinently they say this catalyst is biocompatible and doesn’t contain any components that are toxic to flora or fauna — just calcium, iron, and oxygen! As for external influences, it does not need UV light or anything to activate, it just needs to be stirred into the water being cleaned.
On to the News
A coalition of Swedish entrepreneurs and big industry players are teaming up to build and install up to 100 fully automated plug-and-play water micro factories that can be installed in remote places and powered by solar energy. They say that one micro-factory can produce 150,000 liters of drinking water each month, preventing up to 200,000 plastic bottles and 8 tons of carbon dioxide from entering the ecosystem. Time will tell where they get set up.
Showing the interconnectedness of everything, and the general deteriorating state of the world, a fuel shortage in Lebanon is leading to critical shortages in access to water for the residents. The shortage of fuel is curbing production and distribution of drinking water, which in turn has made the price of water bottles quadruple!
In better news, a manufacturer will donate 101 ezH2O stations at select city sites and non-profits in Chicago. These exH2O stations will give access to filtered drinking water to the historically underserved South and West sides of Chicago.
We talked back in June about a Mexican innovator attaching nanobubble machines to flat bottom boats to clean up their lakes. Now based on the success of the pilot, she and her team of researchers have applied for the necessary patents and permits - they expect to have more than 20 of the brightly colored tourist boats outfitted with these solar powered pumps and aerating the water in Xochimilco by mid-October. Onward & upward!
Shoal Lake 40, a community on the Manitoba-Ontario border, has been under a drinking water advisory since 1997. Finally 24 years later, the government is opening a treatment facility this week. For generations Canada has been unwilling to guarantee access to clean water for Indigenous peoples, and supplies in dozens of communities are considered unsafe to drink. So this is one small step in the right direction.
Due to numerous factors ranging from poor infrastructure to high mining use, the country of Chile has had 12 years of uninterrupted mega-drought and a water shortage decree till March 2022. They are turning to desalination to solve some of this shortage but that needs power, in a country where most of the power generated is hydroelectric.
Steel giant ArcelorMittal has been using some amount of freshwater in their steel production in Brazil, and will now build a desalination plant to cater to their freshwater needs so that they can stop consuming 30% of the water from the Santa Maria da Vitória River in Brazil. The tug-of-war between industrial growth and climate change correction in developing nations is extremely complex but these are more small steps in the right direction.
As reported some time back, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and its National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) launched the Waves to Water Prize, a competition designed to accelerate the development of small, modular, wave-energy-powered desalination systems. As it nears completion, the final five shortlisted teams have 180 days to prepare their devices for an open-ocean trial in North Carolina in April 2022. You can read more about these top-5 ideas here. In our humble opinion, these are all great ideas and worthy of more investment and expansion. Do read about them!
Aaand that is it for this week folks.
'til next Friday, Peace