#99 - Peptides, Whey-based Filters, Mobile Box, COP26, Lumistraw & more
Water Water Everywhere...
Hi Readers,
We have some innovations, a smattering of positive developments and some not-so-good news to share this week, so let’s get into it.
Portable Atmospheric Water Generation
We have written in the past about these Israeli innovators and their atmospheric water generation machines being deployed to at-risk populations across the globe from Native Americans to Palestinians and most recently for the Bahamas. They have now upped the ante by making a version of their machines mobile i.e., not fixed to a location. Aimed squarely at outdoor enthusiasts, van-lifers and preppies, their 33lb machine is built to fit in the back of your truck.
Similar to the larger machines, this runs on traditional power sources, and in this case, the 220V power outlets you find in most modern cars these days. The aptly named Mobile Box, condenses moisture out of the air using their patented heat exchanger and condenser tech, after which it is filtered and zapped with UV light to make it safe to drink. The box can produce up to 20 liters of drinking water in a day. They were also showcased with Ford’s camper truck design at SEMA last week. Onwards and upwards!
In certain parts of the world, the biggest block to clean water is the high toxic mineral content in existing water bodies. In Peru, a big problem is arsenic, being 100 times the safe permissible limit in some places. Enter the fine minds from ETH Zurich, who developed a filtration screen from whey. Commonly used by gym enthusiasts to maintain their body regimen, this milk protein was found to have other properties. The scientist developed a filtration system using activated carbon and whey fibres. They used heat and a low pH to convert whey, into nanofibrils. Amino acids on the surface of the whey nanofibrils are available to bind metal or metalloid ions, including arsenic.
Having tested this method of cleaning in various parts of Peru, their published research shows that 99.9% of the arsenic has been removed by these whey-based filters. Perhaps as an additional upside, they were only looking at reductions in arsenic but will check in the future how good this filter is at reducing other contaminants.
Straw with in-built filter + UV light
We have all seen or heard about Lifestraw and their simple approach to providing clean water across the world. Their success has spawned many imitators and innovators in the straw filter space, the latest and greatest being this innovator from Singapore that incorporates a UV-C purification beam into a straw that can be used in most water bodies.
They are going the crowdfunding route and here are the links to their pages on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Their rechargeable UV light can purify upto 45 cups of water per charge i.e., one person’s consumption for a week, but what was most amazing to us is their claim that there are no consumable filters in their design (meaning, there will be no ongoing replacement costs or anything), just charge and drink!
Nanocomposite to solve solar water purification efficiency
Solar powered anything these days is gaining traction, however, in the field of clean water, the sheer power requirement means it cannot be scaled up well right now. However, as with most of mankind’s challenges, it does mean that smart people are working on improving that technology everyday. So in the same vein, researchers from the Institute of Process Engineering (IPE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have developed an ultra-stable amorphous Ta2O5/C nanocomposite with a hollow multishelled structure (HoMS) for solar evaporation, which can improve the efficiency of water purification.
They go on to say that this HoMS reduces the energy needed for water evaporation (as the first step in purification) as well as water transport along the fibers (via capillary effect) all of which lends to a highly efficient photoabsorption and photothermal conversion of 4.02 kilograms per square meter per hour. They say the composite can be readily fabricated, stored and crucially recycled. They are now building a desalination system prototype to prove the research in practice.
Protein sensor to detect dissolved microplastics
Microplastics are fast becoming the unseen public enemy #1 of water purification. Their size and ability to be water soluble meant that they were almost too hard to detect. Now scientists at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed a new peptide sensor that can identify water soluble polymers i.e., microplastics.
To get technical for a minute, proteins are made up of long chains of amino acids. Short chains of these amino acids are called peptides. Peptides can undergo specific and non-specific interactions with molecules, such as polymers, in different ways with different levels of affinity. Focusing on this interactive nature of peptides, these scientists developed a new peptide sensor and added a fluorescent tag for the identification of water-soluble polymers in mixed solutions. They measure the change in fluorescence of the protein to help identify the concentration of polymers/microplastics.
In Other News
First the good news, after months of negotiation, the Biden infrastructure bill is all but signed. This bill has a lot of good things tied to it, but perhaps the nicest to us was that this will fund lead pipe removal plans across the country. The bill has a provision for $15 billion to replace lead service lines and $200 million for schools to prevent lead contamination of their water.
In another much needed piece of public information, Food & Water Watch have released a detailed analysis of where California’s depleted water resources are being deployed with them tagging what they deem as wasteful uses of the water. Hint - Fossil Fuels are at the very top of that list (between January 2018 and March 2021, the oil and gas industry used the equivalent of 120 million showers for California households).
There’s no denying that while COP26 helped move the needle a little further on climate action, it still has a long long way to go. You can read about Euro news’ take here. We’ll leave you with the one sentence that got us hooked - ‘In the time it takes world leaders to agree on climate action at COP26, women in developing countries will miss out the equivalent of 2.5 million working days due to a lack of clean water.’
In new research by a whole host of universities, they found that nitrates in drinking water could be causing up to 100 bowel cancer cases and 40 deaths in New Zealand every year! While the researchers hope this will drive water purification reform in NZ, what’s worth bearing in mind is how the nitrates got in the water - intensive dairy farming and fertilizer. Nitrate leaching from animal urine patches was the largest source of nitrate contamination from pastoral farming! Ooof
Economist Impact launched their inaugural City Water Optimisation Index, which details how 51 cities around the world can / are ensuring that all end-users have access to safe, affordable and reliable water, both now and in the future. However we are taking this index with a big pinch of salt since it is sponsored by DuPont who say that they hope this will be a measurement tool for city leaders, policymakers, and regulators to make resource, investment and policy decisions. Investment and policy decision favoring whom, we wonder? Perhaps a chemical company with a wide range of water technology?
That is it for this week folks,
‘Til next Friday, Peace