I am sure all University United members are as moved by the recent plight of those in Zimbabwe as I am. This is highly relevant to our work and I wonder if we can act as a lobbying force ...rather like the Red Cross or MSF but as an academic force not a charitable one?
It was suggested at the first meeting that we consider busting global distribution systems to deliver clean water and other commodities to those who need them.
Now would seem like the time to do this. Could Helen’s friend Duncan help us to do this sooner rather than later?
I have lots of personal stories about water that I was going to post here, but all these are pathetically personal in the light of this latest heart breaking cholera epidemic...
Any thoughts anyone? Is this what we should be tackling? I think so.
Caroline
Thursday, 11 December 2008
Malaleng Primary - Africa - ONE Water
My other half, Kevin, worked with a wonderful man called Duncan Goose, who had an idea, and needed to know how to deliver it and make it flourish – which together with Kevin and a number of others, they did.Duncan is the founder of ONE Water, and once he got his product into existence, he asked Supermarkets to pay what they felt they wanted to, as all profit would be going direct to those that needed it in places like Africa. Several supermarkets took him up on it – it still sells in abundance today. He has changed the lives of 250,000 people in 200 communities, and children now go to school instead of spending hours walking towards water for collection.
What is wonderful about Duncan, apart from the personal journey he has gone on to get th
is off the ground (including selling his home to put the money into the business, sleeping on the floors of friends for two years, working unpaid 7 days a week, and living on the kindness of others for the same length of time ) is what he uses the profits of his bottled water for: he sends it to areas where there is virtually no water, and builds 'Playpumps' i.e roundabouts, which children play on, the circular motion of ‘play’ pumps up the water from 100’s of meters down, and makes the village, the school, the town, self sufficient in water! So profits in effect, pay for children’s play, roundabouts, and fresh water.This most recent project, pictured here, is at Malaleng Primary School in Swaziland (where there was no water at all). It has been dedicated to Kevin in his memory, and I couldn’t resist the connection between what we are trying to do and what Duncan has achieved.
If you're a Google Earth user, these are the co-ordinates 26-45-14.0, 30-56-35.9 so you can zoom into the area.
Duncan has also just launched ONE condoms where 100% of the profits from the sale of the new condom range will fund HIV projects, also in Africa. They have teamed up with The Donald Woods Foundation to fund outreach clinic
s. The programme will take teams of doctors, nurses and counselors to visit rural communities to help educate and raise awareness of HIV and HIV-related issues as well as testing for HIV. (The condoms are in unique round wrappers, featuring 120 different designs and come in a rather stylish metal tin They are available in two 3-packs; Super Sensitive and Mixed Pleasures - in case you are interested!)I’m going to ask Duncan to come and talk to us at our next meeting, as much for his journey of bringing an idea and a passion alive, as the success he now perpetuates with each new venture he takes on. I also thought about him when we have talked in the past about “ hijacking commercialism“ ie, piggy backing a transport system already in place, to deliver another product, strapping to it, a much needed humanitarian resource, like soap, or water purification tablets - but why not Duncan’s condoms?
I guess when I truly focus on Duncan’s journey, and to some extent the things Caroline and I have over the years tried to change, invent, heave, or alter, for the better, it does feel like it requires ‘a life‘ or a ‘life time’. On a personal level, and specific to this project, it’s interesting to see if, hanging out of the relative safety of my fulltime University window, I can still deliver what it takes, still have the time to prioritise, in both my heart and my head, the globally urgent, over the locally required.
See: One Water
Helen
Friday, 28 November 2008
***Free Radicals*** UU name change suggestion!
In an informal meeting held earlier today a suggestion for Universites United's alternative name came to light. During the course of the meeting (between Phil Waywell, Phil Sams, Sandy Black, Helen Storey and Caroline Coates) and whilst Phil Waywell was talking about what free radicals do, Helen suggested it become the new name for the group - all thought it was great!
But what do you think? Please post a note with your views - we'll need to hear back by Tuesday 2nd Dec. If we have a positive consensus we can put it forward to NESTA for the OK.
Thank you!
But what do you think? Please post a note with your views - we'll need to hear back by Tuesday 2nd Dec. If we have a positive consensus we can put it forward to NESTA for the OK.
Thank you!
Tuesday, 18 November 2008
Life-giving and Murderous
As members of Universities United we have all been given water usage charts to fill in. Unless someone is very dirty, I suspect that I will ‘win’ this one. We built a house for ourselves, which helps. It looks like this on the left. It has a composting toilet, and hence no water for flushing. Fact: over 70% of visitors to our house look down the loo.
At our poo.
Weird...
We do not have a dishwasher.
We save all our rainwater and use it for the office toilets and our washing machine. The rest of it (there are two 3000 litre tanks) we use to water our garden in times of need (a garden that is fertilised by the contents of the composting toilet). Two summers ago we felt oh-so-pleased with ourselves as we freely watered during the hose pipe ban, and some snooper had sent round the water police to chastise us; we ended up chastising them.
So this sounds very self-righteous.
So this sounds very self-righteous.
We are water smugs.
But all this is rather less straightforward than it sounds. As with all matters to do with the environment, values in water become contested. The composting toilet is made in Sweden of naughty plastic and takes up two square metres of floor space (with all the embodied energy that takes), and has a small fan running all the time to extract the smells. So, if this blog was about carbon emissions, the composting toilet would be on the bad list. The pumps for the recycled water are temperamental and need constant adjustment, and sometimes very expensive expert help. So if this blog was about lo-tech, they would be out. And then the water police got their own back later, enforcing us to install another piece of kit that stopped our rainwater potentially backing up into the ‘fresh’ water supply.
It is with this latter that the contradictions about water itself are so apparent. Water from the sky is not allowed to ‘contaminate’ recycled wee which has been pushed around in 150 year old pipes.
But all this is rather less straightforward than it sounds. As with all matters to do with the environment, values in water become contested. The composting toilet is made in Sweden of naughty plastic and takes up two square metres of floor space (with all the embodied energy that takes), and has a small fan running all the time to extract the smells. So, if this blog was about carbon emissions, the composting toilet would be on the bad list. The pumps for the recycled water are temperamental and need constant adjustment, and sometimes very expensive expert help. So if this blog was about lo-tech, they would be out. And then the water police got their own back later, enforcing us to install another piece of kit that stopped our rainwater potentially backing up into the ‘fresh’ water supply.
It is with this latter that the contradictions about water itself are so apparent. Water from the sky is not allowed to ‘contaminate’ recycled wee which has been pushed around in 150 year old pipes.
The way that we highlight the contradiction of water is by bottling the liquid that comes out of the composting toilet and putting a rather classy label on the bottle.
We then hand out these bottles to visiting journalists. The more cultured ones smile at the Manzoni reference (the artist who tinned his shit), but most draw back in disgust. We are giving them a bottle of our urine. We are giving them the best liquid compost I know.
The most profound writer I have found on this contradiction is Ivan Illich. Illich always seems to get there first, whether to the medical profession (Medical Nemesis), education (Deschooling Society), technology (Tools for Conviviality) or water (H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness) - all sharp classics which kick against received wisdom. In the last book he writes about the dual nature of water:
“The water we seek is the fluid that drenches the inner and outer spaces of the imagination. More tangible than space, it is even more elusive for two reasons: first, because this water has nearly unlimited ability to carry metaphors, and second, because water…always possesses two sides. The flood, the blood, the rain, milk, semen, and dew, each of the waters has an identical twin. Water is deep and shallow, life-giving and murderous. Twinned, water arises from chaos, and waters cannot but be dual.”
It is this duality that makes water so ripe for this group; neither fully technical nor fully creative, water is the stuff, in the end, of culture and society (hence a male scientist relating it to feminism in an earlier entry), and whenever one half pulls one way, the other half must pull back to locate it in this contested area, where ideas are always located in a wider political territory and not as autonomous technical or creative fixes.
We then hand out these bottles to visiting journalists. The more cultured ones smile at the Manzoni reference (the artist who tinned his shit), but most draw back in disgust. We are giving them a bottle of our urine. We are giving them the best liquid compost I know.
The most profound writer I have found on this contradiction is Ivan Illich. Illich always seems to get there first, whether to the medical profession (Medical Nemesis), education (Deschooling Society), technology (Tools for Conviviality) or water (H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness) - all sharp classics which kick against received wisdom. In the last book he writes about the dual nature of water:
“The water we seek is the fluid that drenches the inner and outer spaces of the imagination. More tangible than space, it is even more elusive for two reasons: first, because this water has nearly unlimited ability to carry metaphors, and second, because water…always possesses two sides. The flood, the blood, the rain, milk, semen, and dew, each of the waters has an identical twin. Water is deep and shallow, life-giving and murderous. Twinned, water arises from chaos, and waters cannot but be dual.”
It is this duality that makes water so ripe for this group; neither fully technical nor fully creative, water is the stuff, in the end, of culture and society (hence a male scientist relating it to feminism in an earlier entry), and whenever one half pulls one way, the other half must pull back to locate it in this contested area, where ideas are always located in a wider political territory and not as autonomous technical or creative fixes.
Jeremy Till
Friday, 7 November 2008
Picking up on the simple-but-fun water meter, I gave Miles Pennington of RCA and DesignStream a ring and asked why it had disappeared from their website. A very pleasing answer - he's finalising a deal to get it up and running and thence into the market, so everything is under wraps until Feb next year. I really hope it flies - take it from me, dear reader, Miles's stuff is always good, and it will be something to look forward to.
Today we have finished having a new bathroom fitted, complete with the now-standard 6l flush - just in time for the on-the-blog water diary for UU. My main problem with diaries is remembering to do them...
phil
Today we have finished having a new bathroom fitted, complete with the now-standard 6l flush - just in time for the on-the-blog water diary for UU. My main problem with diaries is remembering to do them...
phil
Thursday, 6 November 2008
So I didn't regale you with water stories
Because of the vagaries of the US immigration I never got to sit next to Christine on the plane. She’s a British subject and not a British Citizen (having been born in Ireland but lived in the UK for nearly 60 years) and needed a visa to enter America. Unfortunately we only found out that she wasn’t a British citizen when we were checking in, and, to cut a long and sad story short she stayed at home! We did talk about water the night I posted but I’m sure she would have enjoyed telling me more about life growing up on a farm in rural Ireland.
They collected rainwater in butts and used it for washing. She insists that your hair feels softer washed in rain water and who am I to question that. She was a young girl when she washed it that way, it had never seen a perm or a colour, and I’m sure it was softer then than it is now. Perhaps our Unilever colleagues can offer some evidence here. I guess rainwater is really soft (i.e. low Calcium ion content) so that will make a difference.
We also talked about sanitation. My wife, Angela, remembers going Elfin as a child. In the mid-60s the toilet was still a bench over a bucket in the cowshed and she hated going to the toilet there as a child because the cows were only a few feet away when you were sat down! How different to our children’s experience with 3 WC inside the house and 4th at the bottom of the garden. Never-the-less our youngest still enjoys the occasional ablution in the open air and many of my outdoor mates take some pride in being fellows of the ODL (outdoor defecators league) and the joy of using sphagnum moss instead of paper. But the clichéd “Do bears crap in the woods?” takes on a whole different meaning when you realise that 2.5 billion people have no option but to do what the bears do. And this could become a theme for us in the future. How can we provide sanitation and improved public health for those in the world who are deprived of it? And in the UK can we harness the intellectual power and campaigning energy of Universities United to come up with acceptable technical solutions that don’t use vast amount of potable water?
So when I was on my vacation in Florida I reflected on the worlds need for improved sanitation every time I saw the euphemistic signs for “restrooms”. What was interesting though was that in nearly all the facilities I used the amount of water per flush was stated on the cistern. It was as if they were expecting me to be filling out my Universities United Water Diary whilst I was there. I also thought about the Aldous Huxley novel Brave New World a lot. It remains one of my favourite books, I read it as an impressionable sixteen year old, and I’ll have to go back a read it again. As far as I can tell Huxley was a time traveller and has visited present day Orlando. I came back to try and find my copy and stumbled upon a great analysis http://www.huxley.net/. In Brave New World, happiness comes from consuming mass-produced goods, sports such as Obstacle Golf and Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy, promiscuous sex, "the feelies", and a supposedly perfect pleasure-drug soma. Well I missed out on the promiscuous sex and had to substitute cycling and Sam Adams for soma; but we looked at each and said “we are at the feelies” during a 3-D cinema show at Disney World. The seat puffed out steam, splashed us with water and generated smells as the cartoon characters charged out the screen and made us duck for cover. Orlando is dedicated to consumption of mass-produced goods and whilst we couldn’t find activities with precisely the same names the sporting opportunities of Pharoahs MiniGolf and Baby ‘Gator Wrestlin came pretty close. So it really was a pleasant surprise to see that every patch of landscaped vegetation carried a sign that said “irrigated with recycled water”. It went some way to assuage my guilt at having flown there as the residents are obviously aware of the impact of our excessive consumption of the worlds resources.
But I want to end on a note about the joy of water. My favourite day of the holiday was spent on Daytona Beach. It was cold by Floridian standards and the sea was warmer than the air. So I spent a couple of hours jumping waves with my daughters and a flock of pelicans. The shore was covered in all kinds of birds: sandpipers, herons, egrets and many different gulls. The sandpipers were very busy, dashing about and squabbling, they gave us much joy. But the highlight of the day was sat on a dock, in the inlet behind the beach, watching the spectacular sunset and having dinner. There were lots of birds out on the water and the catfish were literally jumping. Then a Manatee slowly rose from the water and breathed in before slowly sliding back below the surface. We were convinced it looked at us, and they do seem to have a smile on their faces. It was the perfect antidote to the Florida most tourists see. Later that night the Obama campaign was in Kissimee. I didn’t have the energy to attend the midnight rally but how we have since rejoiced that he prevailed!
They collected rainwater in butts and used it for washing. She insists that your hair feels softer washed in rain water and who am I to question that. She was a young girl when she washed it that way, it had never seen a perm or a colour, and I’m sure it was softer then than it is now. Perhaps our Unilever colleagues can offer some evidence here. I guess rainwater is really soft (i.e. low Calcium ion content) so that will make a difference.
We also talked about sanitation. My wife, Angela, remembers going Elfin as a child. In the mid-60s the toilet was still a bench over a bucket in the cowshed and she hated going to the toilet there as a child because the cows were only a few feet away when you were sat down! How different to our children’s experience with 3 WC inside the house and 4th at the bottom of the garden. Never-the-less our youngest still enjoys the occasional ablution in the open air and many of my outdoor mates take some pride in being fellows of the ODL (outdoor defecators league) and the joy of using sphagnum moss instead of paper. But the clichéd “Do bears crap in the woods?” takes on a whole different meaning when you realise that 2.5 billion people have no option but to do what the bears do. And this could become a theme for us in the future. How can we provide sanitation and improved public health for those in the world who are deprived of it? And in the UK can we harness the intellectual power and campaigning energy of Universities United to come up with acceptable technical solutions that don’t use vast amount of potable water?
So when I was on my vacation in Florida I reflected on the worlds need for improved sanitation every time I saw the euphemistic signs for “restrooms”. What was interesting though was that in nearly all the facilities I used the amount of water per flush was stated on the cistern. It was as if they were expecting me to be filling out my Universities United Water Diary whilst I was there. I also thought about the Aldous Huxley novel Brave New World a lot. It remains one of my favourite books, I read it as an impressionable sixteen year old, and I’ll have to go back a read it again. As far as I can tell Huxley was a time traveller and has visited present day Orlando. I came back to try and find my copy and stumbled upon a great analysis http://www.huxley.net/. In Brave New World, happiness comes from consuming mass-produced goods, sports such as Obstacle Golf and Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy, promiscuous sex, "the feelies", and a supposedly perfect pleasure-drug soma. Well I missed out on the promiscuous sex and had to substitute cycling and Sam Adams for soma; but we looked at each and said “we are at the feelies” during a 3-D cinema show at Disney World. The seat puffed out steam, splashed us with water and generated smells as the cartoon characters charged out the screen and made us duck for cover. Orlando is dedicated to consumption of mass-produced goods and whilst we couldn’t find activities with precisely the same names the sporting opportunities of Pharoahs MiniGolf and Baby ‘Gator Wrestlin came pretty close. So it really was a pleasant surprise to see that every patch of landscaped vegetation carried a sign that said “irrigated with recycled water”. It went some way to assuage my guilt at having flown there as the residents are obviously aware of the impact of our excessive consumption of the worlds resources.
But I want to end on a note about the joy of water. My favourite day of the holiday was spent on Daytona Beach. It was cold by Floridian standards and the sea was warmer than the air. So I spent a couple of hours jumping waves with my daughters and a flock of pelicans. The shore was covered in all kinds of birds: sandpipers, herons, egrets and many different gulls. The sandpipers were very busy, dashing about and squabbling, they gave us much joy. But the highlight of the day was sat on a dock, in the inlet behind the beach, watching the spectacular sunset and having dinner. There were lots of birds out on the water and the catfish were literally jumping. Then a Manatee slowly rose from the water and breathed in before slowly sliding back below the surface. We were convinced it looked at us, and they do seem to have a smile on their faces. It was the perfect antidote to the Florida most tourists see. Later that night the Obama campaign was in Kissimee. I didn’t have the energy to attend the midnight rally but how we have since rejoiced that he prevailed!
It's Thursday and my turn for the blog.
I'm stood here in my kitchen in Ludlow, looking out over the river Teme to Whitcliffe Common. Last year, the floods came up the garden twice. Could have been worse – if I knew how to put pics into this posting, I'd show you what one of the bridges in town looked like after the flood destroyed it... and not even over the main river, but a (usually) small tributary.
So, the power of water – and that's just in a provincial middle England town.
It's lovely when you've got plenty of water like us, but that's no reason to be complacent.
I'm gonna toss into the soup a couple of pieces of work that link to things we talked about in Belfast.
First, there's the No-Wash Sweatshirt, because water and energy use through washing is a bigger resource sink for clothes than manufacture. For those of you who don't know the lovely collection of design stories that is 5-Ways from Kate Fletcher and Becky Early, do take a look at them all http://www.5ways.info/docs/projects/nowash/projects.htm - so simple yet such clear signposts to core ways for design to make more sustainable products.
Kate is now Reader at LCF, and was at at the Fashioning the Future Summit meeting there last week. So too was (eco)architect Mike McDonough. He preached that the way towards a durable/sustainable future involves appropriate technology. I have found that a good way to use 5-ways is as a challenge to technologists “Kate and Becky use simple design routes to make their stories come to life – can you add to it/do it better through technology”
On the no-wash subject, really bringing the Man in the White Suit to life is one of the projects that I've always wanted to do to link fashion and technology. Perhaps this is one for Universities United.
Then there's the magic greenhouse. I've lost all my late-stage concepts on this, but I have an early sketch to show you sometime (again, I would post if I knew how - perhaps someone can advise!). It is all about using the power of bacteria and condensed water to create a living “washing machine” . This was territory explored by some young industrial designers at RCA back in 2005 – and I'm very pleased they have stayed good friends. The main idea they worked on was for a low-water, hand powered washing machine, probably more practical, but it is the greenhouse that really catches my imagination.
That's it for now. I've still got a water use visual meter to talk about, but am trying to contact the designer to get some information on current status – so hopefully more soon.
Best wishes
Phil
I'm stood here in my kitchen in Ludlow, looking out over the river Teme to Whitcliffe Common. Last year, the floods came up the garden twice. Could have been worse – if I knew how to put pics into this posting, I'd show you what one of the bridges in town looked like after the flood destroyed it... and not even over the main river, but a (usually) small tributary.
So, the power of water – and that's just in a provincial middle England town.
It's lovely when you've got plenty of water like us, but that's no reason to be complacent.
I'm gonna toss into the soup a couple of pieces of work that link to things we talked about in Belfast.
First, there's the No-Wash Sweatshirt, because water and energy use through washing is a bigger resource sink for clothes than manufacture. For those of you who don't know the lovely collection of design stories that is 5-Ways from Kate Fletcher and Becky Early, do take a look at them all http://www.5ways.info/docs/projects/nowash/projects.htm - so simple yet such clear signposts to core ways for design to make more sustainable products.
Kate is now Reader at LCF, and was at at the Fashioning the Future Summit meeting there last week. So too was (eco)architect Mike McDonough. He preached that the way towards a durable/sustainable future involves appropriate technology. I have found that a good way to use 5-ways is as a challenge to technologists “Kate and Becky use simple design routes to make their stories come to life – can you add to it/do it better through technology”
On the no-wash subject, really bringing the Man in the White Suit to life is one of the projects that I've always wanted to do to link fashion and technology. Perhaps this is one for Universities United.
Then there's the magic greenhouse. I've lost all my late-stage concepts on this, but I have an early sketch to show you sometime (again, I would post if I knew how - perhaps someone can advise!). It is all about using the power of bacteria and condensed water to create a living “washing machine” . This was territory explored by some young industrial designers at RCA back in 2005 – and I'm very pleased they have stayed good friends. The main idea they worked on was for a low-water, hand powered washing machine, probably more practical, but it is the greenhouse that really catches my imagination.
That's it for now. I've still got a water use visual meter to talk about, but am trying to contact the designer to get some information on current status – so hopefully more soon.
Best wishes
Phil
Thursday, 23 October 2008
The longest day
The longest day at work is the one before you go on vacation. I'm now at my mother-in-laws in Potter Bar Hertfordshire and soup of the day is my last job of the day. I had have quite some time to reflect on water since we last met. The thing that has stayed with me most since Belfast is "water work is womens work" and we have just talked about her water supply as a child. Christine Conry (my mother-in-law) grew up on a farm in rural Ireland before WW2. The source of potable water a well in the town and it was more than a kilometre from the house. Before school, she and here sibling would pump and carry water, in enamalled buckets. Another source of water for the house was rain-butts - used for bathing and washing clothes. Tomorrow I'll regale you with all her tales of water sources as we'll be flying to Florida together. I didn't realise quite how close I was to the WHO definition of patable water supply.
Last night I introduced the 6th Annual Roberts Lecture at the University of Sheffield. The guest speaker, Maureen McTeer, is both a graduate and an honorary graduate of The University of Sheffield. She is an academic lawyer, author and speaker who has made a important contributions to the public understanding of complex legal and ethical questions about science and technology in the 21st century. Her work in this field, and her advocacy for the legal and health rights of women, has been a source of inspiration to countless people throughout the world. She was born in Ottawa and attended its university, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in History and Communications, and later in Common Law. In 1993 she received a Master of Laws degree in Health Law from Dalhousie University, Halifax. She has been a member of the Ontario Bar since 1980. Having searched world-wide for a top-ranking Law School that would offer her advanced studies about relationships between law, health, science and ethics, she identified Sheffield as a leading centre and graduated here in 2004 with a Master’s degree in Biotechnology, Law and Ethics. The title of her Sheffield degree describes aptly the subjects for which Maureen McTeer has an international reputation and in July this year our University honoured her with the degree of Doctor of Laws honoris causa. In great demand as a speaker on aspects of law, science and technology, she is known for her ability to convey, in a clear and concise way, how these phenomena affect our everyday lives. She is a world-renowned expert on intellectual property in relation to biotechnology and health and holds robust views on the ethical implications of ownership. In May of this year Maureen McTeer received the DIVA award for her long-standing commitment to women’s health in Canada. This, and the many other awards she has gained, bring to the fore her work as a social activist for women’s rights, particularly their rights to health care and to full participation in democratic politics, not least in the developing world. Her autobiography, In My Own Name, was a bestseller, inspiring and encouraging thousands of Canada’s women to seek equality and to pursue their personal goals. Even her private life is distinguished – her husband, Joe Clark who was there with us last night, is a former Prime Minister of Canada. In all her public speaking, in her writing and research, in her advocacy, personal issues become public problems. The personal and the political spheres are linked, just as a public academic should link them. And she gave a great lecture on the topic ‘Designs on Life: Being Human in the 21st Century’.
We had a fascinating and wide ranging conversation over dinner and it struck me that she would be a great addition to our Universities United team,. We did discuss the feminist issues surrounding water and the education of girls in the 3rd world, perhaps I should have asked her to join us? But given the need for me to concentrate on implementing some of our UK focussed projects I decided not to ask!
Last night I introduced the 6th Annual Roberts Lecture at the University of Sheffield. The guest speaker, Maureen McTeer, is both a graduate and an honorary graduate of The University of Sheffield. She is an academic lawyer, author and speaker who has made a important contributions to the public understanding of complex legal and ethical questions about science and technology in the 21st century. Her work in this field, and her advocacy for the legal and health rights of women, has been a source of inspiration to countless people throughout the world. She was born in Ottawa and attended its university, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in History and Communications, and later in Common Law. In 1993 she received a Master of Laws degree in Health Law from Dalhousie University, Halifax. She has been a member of the Ontario Bar since 1980. Having searched world-wide for a top-ranking Law School that would offer her advanced studies about relationships between law, health, science and ethics, she identified Sheffield as a leading centre and graduated here in 2004 with a Master’s degree in Biotechnology, Law and Ethics. The title of her Sheffield degree describes aptly the subjects for which Maureen McTeer has an international reputation and in July this year our University honoured her with the degree of Doctor of Laws honoris causa. In great demand as a speaker on aspects of law, science and technology, she is known for her ability to convey, in a clear and concise way, how these phenomena affect our everyday lives. She is a world-renowned expert on intellectual property in relation to biotechnology and health and holds robust views on the ethical implications of ownership. In May of this year Maureen McTeer received the DIVA award for her long-standing commitment to women’s health in Canada. This, and the many other awards she has gained, bring to the fore her work as a social activist for women’s rights, particularly their rights to health care and to full participation in democratic politics, not least in the developing world. Her autobiography, In My Own Name, was a bestseller, inspiring and encouraging thousands of Canada’s women to seek equality and to pursue their personal goals. Even her private life is distinguished – her husband, Joe Clark who was there with us last night, is a former Prime Minister of Canada. In all her public speaking, in her writing and research, in her advocacy, personal issues become public problems. The personal and the political spheres are linked, just as a public academic should link them. And she gave a great lecture on the topic ‘Designs on Life: Being Human in the 21st Century’.
We had a fascinating and wide ranging conversation over dinner and it struck me that she would be a great addition to our Universities United team,. We did discuss the feminist issues surrounding water and the education of girls in the 3rd world, perhaps I should have asked her to join us? But given the need for me to concentrate on implementing some of our UK focussed projects I decided not to ask!
Monday, 6 October 2008
Solving water problems through nanotechnology
Since we're talking about water on Wednesday, here's a summary (recycled from my own blog Soft Machines) of a recent review article in Nature about potential technological solutions to world water problems. The big question for me is to what extent the lack of access to clean water is a political problem rather than a technological problem. We'll be hearing from David Grimshaw, from the charity Practical Action, which has been looking into nanotechnology's potential for water; this recent entry on Practical Action's own blog seems to show some guarded optimism - Some nano progress towards targets on clean water.
The lack of availability of clean water to many of the world's population currently leads to suffering and premature death for millions of people, and as population pressures increase, climate change starts to bite, and food supplies become tighter (perhaps exacerbated by an ill-considered move to biofuels) these problems will only intensify. It's possible that nanotechnology may be able to contribute to solving these problems (see this earlier post, for example). A couple of weeks ago, Nature magazine ran a special issue on water, which included a very helpful review article: Science and technology for water purification in the coming decades. This article (which seems to be available without subscription) is all the more helpful for not focusing specifically on nanotechnology, instead making it clear where nanotechnology could fit into other existing technologies to create affordable and workable solutions.
One sometimes hears the criticism that there's no point worrying about the promise of new nanotechnological solutions, when workable solutions are already known but aren't being implemented, for political or economic reasons. That's an argument that's not without force, but the authors do begin to address it, by outlining what's wrong with existing technical solutions. "These treatment methods are often chemically, energetically and operationally intensive, focused on large systems, and thus require considerable infusion of capital, engineering expertise and infrastructure" Thus we should be looking for decentralised solutions, that can be easily, reliably and cheaply installed using local expertise and preferably without the need for large scale industrial infrastructure.
To start with the problem of the sterilisation of water to kill pathogens, traditional methods start with chlorine. This isn't ideal, as some pathogens are remarkably tolerant of it, and it can lead to toxic by-products. Ultra-violet sterilisation, on the other hand, offers a lot of promise - it's good for bacteria, though less effective for viruses. But in combination with photocatalytic surfaces of titanium dioxide nanoparticles it could be very effective. Here what is required is either much cheaper sources of ultraviolet light, (which could come from new nanostructured semiconductor light emitting diodes) or new types of nanoparticles with surfaces excited by lower wavelength light, including sunlight.
Another problem is the removal of contamination by toxic chemicals, which can arise either naturally or through pollution. Problem contaminants include heavy metals, arsenic, pesticide residues, and endocrine disrupters; the difficulty is that these can have dangerous effects even at rather low concentrations, which can't be detected without expensive laboratory-based analysis equipment. Here methods for robust, low cost chemical sensing would be very useful - perhaps a combination of molecular recognition elements integrated in nanofluidic devices could do the job.
The reuse of waste water offers hard problems because of the high content organic matter that needs to be removed, in addition to the removal of other contaminants. Membrane bioreactors combine the use of the sorts of microbes that are exploited in activated sludge processes of conventional sewage treatment with ultrafiltration through a membrane to get faster throughputs of waste water. The tighter the pores in this sort of membrane, the more effective it is at removing suspended material, but the problem is that this sort of membrane quickly gets blocked up. One solution is to line the micro- and nano- pores of the membranes with a single layer of hairy molecules - one of the paper's co-authors, MIT's Anne Mayes, developed a particularly elegant scheme for doing this exploiting self-assembly of comb-shaped copolymers.
Of course, most of the water in the world is salty (97.5%, to be precise), so the ultimate solution to water shortages is desalination. Desalination costs energy - necessarily so, as the second law of thermodynamics puts a lower limit on the cost of separating pure water from the higher entropy solution state. This theoretical limit is 0.7 kWh per cubic meter, and to date the most efficient practical process uses a not at all unreasonable 4 kWh per cubic meter. Achieving these figures, and pushing them down further, is a matter of membrane engineering, achieving precisely nanostructured pores that resist fouling and yet are mechanically and chemically robust.
The lack of availability of clean water to many of the world's population currently leads to suffering and premature death for millions of people, and as population pressures increase, climate change starts to bite, and food supplies become tighter (perhaps exacerbated by an ill-considered move to biofuels) these problems will only intensify. It's possible that nanotechnology may be able to contribute to solving these problems (see this earlier post, for example). A couple of weeks ago, Nature magazine ran a special issue on water, which included a very helpful review article: Science and technology for water purification in the coming decades. This article (which seems to be available without subscription) is all the more helpful for not focusing specifically on nanotechnology, instead making it clear where nanotechnology could fit into other existing technologies to create affordable and workable solutions.
One sometimes hears the criticism that there's no point worrying about the promise of new nanotechnological solutions, when workable solutions are already known but aren't being implemented, for political or economic reasons. That's an argument that's not without force, but the authors do begin to address it, by outlining what's wrong with existing technical solutions. "These treatment methods are often chemically, energetically and operationally intensive, focused on large systems, and thus require considerable infusion of capital, engineering expertise and infrastructure" Thus we should be looking for decentralised solutions, that can be easily, reliably and cheaply installed using local expertise and preferably without the need for large scale industrial infrastructure.
To start with the problem of the sterilisation of water to kill pathogens, traditional methods start with chlorine. This isn't ideal, as some pathogens are remarkably tolerant of it, and it can lead to toxic by-products. Ultra-violet sterilisation, on the other hand, offers a lot of promise - it's good for bacteria, though less effective for viruses. But in combination with photocatalytic surfaces of titanium dioxide nanoparticles it could be very effective. Here what is required is either much cheaper sources of ultraviolet light, (which could come from new nanostructured semiconductor light emitting diodes) or new types of nanoparticles with surfaces excited by lower wavelength light, including sunlight.
Another problem is the removal of contamination by toxic chemicals, which can arise either naturally or through pollution. Problem contaminants include heavy metals, arsenic, pesticide residues, and endocrine disrupters; the difficulty is that these can have dangerous effects even at rather low concentrations, which can't be detected without expensive laboratory-based analysis equipment. Here methods for robust, low cost chemical sensing would be very useful - perhaps a combination of molecular recognition elements integrated in nanofluidic devices could do the job.
The reuse of waste water offers hard problems because of the high content organic matter that needs to be removed, in addition to the removal of other contaminants. Membrane bioreactors combine the use of the sorts of microbes that are exploited in activated sludge processes of conventional sewage treatment with ultrafiltration through a membrane to get faster throughputs of waste water. The tighter the pores in this sort of membrane, the more effective it is at removing suspended material, but the problem is that this sort of membrane quickly gets blocked up. One solution is to line the micro- and nano- pores of the membranes with a single layer of hairy molecules - one of the paper's co-authors, MIT's Anne Mayes, developed a particularly elegant scheme for doing this exploiting self-assembly of comb-shaped copolymers.
Of course, most of the water in the world is salty (97.5%, to be precise), so the ultimate solution to water shortages is desalination. Desalination costs energy - necessarily so, as the second law of thermodynamics puts a lower limit on the cost of separating pure water from the higher entropy solution state. This theoretical limit is 0.7 kWh per cubic meter, and to date the most efficient practical process uses a not at all unreasonable 4 kWh per cubic meter. Achieving these figures, and pushing them down further, is a matter of membrane engineering, achieving precisely nanostructured pores that resist fouling and yet are mechanically and chemically robust.
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