MC Weekly Issue #8, Tuesday, January 31, 2006

“Now that we can do anything, what will we do?”

Welcome to Massive Change Weekly, an electronic newsletter sharing news about groundbreaking achievements in global design.

“Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

It’s too often assumed that our global water supply is without limit, yet available fresh water is less than half of one percent of the world’s total water stock. We must look to the limits, clean what we have, and help those suffering from thirst.

According to the United Nations, Europeans spend $11 billion per year on ice cream, $2 billion more than the estimated total money needed to provide clean water and safe sewers for the world’s population. Astounding as that sounds, the reality is that billions go without clean water everyday and more than five million people, most of them children, die from illnesses caused by drinking poor-quality water every year.

According to Maude Barlow, in her comprehensive report on the world’s global water supply (”Blue Gold”), before we can develop a worldwide water ethic, it’s compulsory that we first acknowledge the profound human inequity in the access to fresh water sources around the world. Rather than insisting on the water-rich sharing with the water-poor, and unnecessarily damaging local bionetworks, we need to first look to sustainable solutions. In many cases, the technology to remediate this global condition lies dormant in labs and test facilities all over the developed world. In other cases, corporations like Oakville, Ontario-based Zenon Environmental, Inc. ( http://www.zenon.com/ ), and water stewards like eco-designer John Todd and environmental physicist Ashok Gadgil recognize the capacity we have for action and refuse to sit still on the issue: Gadgil, based in San Francisco at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, has made it his mission to globally distribute his invention, UV Waterworks, a lightweight, cost-effective unit that makes dirty water safe to drink by way of ultraviolet light. John Todd, founder of Ocean Arks International, designs and builds “living” systems to restore balance to distressed ecosystems.

In short: providing clean water to the world is one of the most easily resolved global crises. The design solutions are manifold, ranging from large-scale, high-tech enterprises to ingenious small-scale initiatives.

At the largest scale, desalination seems to be the Holy Grail with respect to providing clean water. Given that the majority of the earth’s surface is comprised of water, it seems almost counter-intuitive that providing clean water remains a global crisis. Desalination involves processes that remove salt and other minerals from water in order to produce fresh water suitable for consumption and irrigation. Desalination is in use in over a hundred countries, with Saudi Arabia employing it to provide for about 1/4 of the world’s total water capacity.

The two main methods for desalinating water are reverse osmosis and multi-stage flash.

Desalination of ocean water is common in the Middle East and the Caribbean, and is growing fast in the USA, North Africa, Spain, Australia and China. It is also used on ships, submarines and islands. The traditional process used in these operations is distillation - essentially the boiling of water at less than atmospheric pressure, and thus a much lower temperature than normal. Due to the reduced temperature, energy is saved, however, bacteria are not killed. Therefore additional water processing is necessary before the water can be used by the public. Typically, this involves technologies that use semi-permeable membranes to filter out dissolved material or fine solids. The systems are usually driven by high-pressure pumps, but the growth of more efficient energy-recovery devices has reduced the power consumption of these plants and made them much more viable, however, they remain energy intensive and, as energy costs rise, so does the cost of reverse osmosis water. This problem, in turn, has given rise to “cogeneration” facilities, whereby the process is used to develop both electricity and clean water.

For now, desalination isn’t yet the magical solution to the world’s clean water shortage. Besides needing large amounts of energy for the filtering process, there are serious issues with regard to collateral waste. Currently, desalination plants produce hypersaline brine that must be disposed of. These concentrates are classified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as industrial wastes. The hypersaline brine has the potential to harm ecosystems, especially marine environments in regions with low turbidity and high evaporation that already have elevated salinity. Examples of such locations are the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and, in particular, coral lagoons of atolls and other tropical islands around the world.

Nonetheless, the U.S. Government, for example, is working to develop practical solar powered desalination. This development has much potential, since the regions in which desalination is most needed often have an abundance of solar energy. This doesn’t address the problem of brine waste, but demonstrates that we are talking about technical details to what may be a revolutionary response to the world’s most global health problem.

In the meantime, hundreds, if not thousands, of other more low-tech solutions have been developed. See previous issues of this newsletter for stories on the Life Straw and other radical developments.

Ashok Gadgil on safe drinking water

This text originated as part of Massive Change Radio, broadcast on CIUT-FM, and conducted by Jennifer Leonard. This excerpt was published in Massive Change (see credit information below).

What happened in northeastern India in the summer of 1992 and how did it affect the direction you took with your career?

There was an outbreak of a mutant strain of cholera in Bengal, which became known as “Bengal cholera.” Because the surface protein on this mutant strain was slightly different from what’s common, all of the cholera vaccines were ineffective in protecting populations from this particular strain. So thousands of people contracted cholera within weeks. In one month alone, as the epidemic spread, some 10,000 people died from this cholera epidemic, in a single state in India. Soon after, this particular strain spread from India to Bangladesh and also turned up in Thailand. That’s when I decided to do something about it. I had to do something about it because I had been thinking about ultraviolet (UV) disinfection for quite some time as a potential way to disinfect drinking water inexpensively for poor communities in poor countries.

What is the scale of the global drinking water problem right now?

About two billion people, roughly one third of the global population, need to go outside their home to fetch water for daily use. Of those, 1.2 billion people don’t have access to safe drinking water; they are forced to rely on biologically contaminated water, in most cases. This leads to a large number of diseases and deaths, particularly for children below age five. Young children have low resistance to dehydration, which is the resultant condition of diarrheal diseases.

With all of the advances in public health, technology, and medicine today, why is it that still 20% of our world’s population is without access to safe drinking water?

Right, it is 20% if you exclude the residents of large metropolitan areas like Jakarta, Bombay, Cairo, and Mexico City; if you include them, then the number rises to about 30%. We already have the science and technology to address this problem. It is not anymore a scientifically inaccessible domain, intellectually. It’s something that we can do. It just hasn’t been done, for a variety of reasons, including inadequate investment in water infrastructure. There is also the mindset that in the developing countries we’ll just follow the model of what’s been done in the industrial countries, which is to pipe pressurized safe water 24/7 to everybody - and that requires a level of investment and a level of water availability that’s often just not supportable. There is also the problem of governance. In many developing countries, the political will to provide safe drinking water dissipates as soon as the politically most vocal and powerful segments of society have access to safe drinking water. Sadly, those who are relatively voiceless and politically weak are left to fend for themselves.

Is water a fundamental human right or is it a commodity?

This is a societal question and the views are sharply divided. Initially, the overall opinion of global policy-makers was that water should be considered a right. However, it appeared after some 20 years of experience that even if they considered it a fundamental human right, investment and aid kept on getting funnelled into supplying water only to those who had political access or a political voice in the developing world. It also led to huge incompetence and inefficiency in the supply management of water systems in the developing countries. This was because of enormously bloated bureaucracies with no performance metrics and no accountability. About three years ago there was, after much pushing and debate, a sea change in the way this problem was viewed, at least in the industrial countries. Now the viewpoint, led by the World Bank, is that water should be treated as a commodity, and full cost should be recovered for its supply, which would then, one hopes, amount to some kind of financial accountability in terms of supply costs, and presumably lead to improved efficiency.

How could a strategy based on public-private partnerships work?

This type of strategy draws on the best of both the private sector and the nongovernmental organizations’ grassroots outreach efforts. Relying on government alone has not been successful. We have not been able to get safe drinking water to people who need it badly, with a horrendous toll: About 400 children die from diarrheal diseases per hour in the developing countries - every one of the deaths preventable. The public-private partnership vision is not easy to implement, but when it works, it works beautifully. You have elements of the private sector - the flexibility, the dynamism, the entrepreneurial spirit, and the ability to rapidly expand services and go out and do something - coupled with the sense of public purpose to do what’s considered essential.

Where and how many of your UV Waterworks units are distributed around the world?

Over 300 units are functioning daily throughout the developing countries. There is a handful in the U.S., but most of them are in the developing countries; and most of those - say, 200 out of 300 - are in Mexico and in the Philippines. The rest are scattered throughout Asia, Africa, and Central America, all the way from South Africa to some in Nicaragua and Honduras. There are also some in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh.

What do these units do to pathogenic bacteria and viruses?

The light that’s used in the UV Waterworks is known as C band, the short wavelength end of the UV spectrum. UV light causes the adjacent base pair in the DNA helix to fuse together, so that when the DNA tries to replicate, or the organism tries to replicate, it cannot unzip the DNA, and it dies. UV disinfectors, based on this principal, have been around for a long time. To produce the UV light, one essentially passes an electric arc through mercury plasma, which causes the mercury atoms to excite and de-excite. The lamp in the UV Waterworks units is made of quartz, so the UV light can pass through. Normal glass will block it. As well, the UV lamp doesn’t have a layer of phosphor on the inside of the glass tube so that you don’t get visible light; you just get UV light coming right out. This is a very efficient process.

In terms of energy use, 60 watts of electrical power - which is comparable to the power used in one ordinary table lamp - is enough to disinfect water at the rate of one ton per hour, or fifteen litres per minute, which is approximately two and a half times the water flow in a standard bathtub faucet. This much water is enough to meet the drinking water needs of a community of 2,000 people.

What is your next big project?

I am currently working on trying to figure out a way to remove arsenic from drinking water in Bangladesh. The arsenic crisis in Bangladesh is rightly described as the largest case of mass poisoning in the history of mankind. Forty-six million people are forced to choose between arsenic-laced groundwater or biologically contaminated surface water. Given that choice - either slow death by arsenic poisoning or immediate extreme sickness with surface water pathogens - they inevitably and consistently choose the arsenic-laced groundwater. For the arsenic removal process, the goals are similar to UV Waterworks. In terms of cost, it must be affordable; it must be cheaper than what’s being tried today in Bangladesh. It must be highly effective. It must have very large margins of safety. And it must be very easy to use. We have some good, exciting preliminary results in hand that suggest that we might be able to meet all these goals.

Ashok Gadgil is an environmental physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California.

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