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Contributed by Ashley Baker, Scientific Content and Community Manager (Contractor), ACS Green Chemistry Institute
To set the stage for the upcoming ACS Clean Water Summit on December 11, two of the organizers shared their perspectives on the biggest challenges facing the delivery of clean water and sanitation worldwide. Prof. Bryan Brooks, Editor-in-Chief, ES&T Letters and Prof. Fernando Rosario-Ortiz, Executive Editor, ES&T urge chemists and engineers to apply their unique skills and – just as critically – listen to community needs.
In 2017, I was astonished by the documentary Water and Power about water access and control in California. Perhaps naively, I didn’t realize there are places in the U.S. where bottled water rations are delivered by truck due to nonexistent or failing public water systems. Words like “PFAS,” “Flint,” and “water rights,” have entered the public lexicon over the past few years as water-related challenges – whether too much or too little or too contaminated – become increasingly extreme. This month in Washington, D.C. where I'm writing, we soared past the record for the area’s longest dry spell while November temperatures topped 80 degrees.
Not long before I saw that documentary, another phrase entered my vocabulary: green chemistry. As an undergraduate student passionate about the marvels of chemistry, I was shocked to learn about historical human and environmental exposures to hazardous chemicals. Many of the striking examples I encountered first were water-related, such as Tom’s River in New Jersey and the Minimata Bay Incident for which a disease was later named.
Currently, 2.2 billion people worldwide lack safely managed drinking water, making water one of the greatest – and most urgent – issues facing humanity. It is the world’s most vulnerable people – including remote communities and Indigenous groups – that shoulder the burden of many of the most dramatic changes in water availability. We must therefore work quickly, collectively, and globally to avoid the worst projected outcomes, using local knowledge and worldwide expertise to determine what aspects of advanced technologies implemented in wealthy communities can be realistically deployed to create scalable progress in lower-middle-income countries.
In a conversation I had with two organizers of the upcoming ACS Clean Water Summit, three key areas emerged as critical for effectively meeting the need for clean water and sanitation worldwide: innovation that builds resilience to climate change impacts, globally developed technologies deployed locally, and training that enables delivery of effective water treatment systems.
Climate Change: a Moving Target for Solutions
“When I was growing up in California, my dad worked in forestry,” said Bryan Brooks, Distinguished Professor of Environmental Science at Baylor University. “This time every year, he would be in southern California because it was on fire. Well now, British Columbia is on fire. Climate change is shifting how we think. We need to be able to embrace lessons learned from other communities.”
As climate change forces us to keep pace with ever-changing natural risks arising in previously unheard-of locations, meeting all people’s fundamental right to clean water and sanitation has never been more complex.
Baylor University, where Bryan is a professor, is located in Texas, a state that has faced some of the most major water shortages in the U.S. Many have described the state of water in Texas as a crisis.
“In Texas, there are rural areas where we don’t have consistent drinking water and waste sanitation services,” he said.
Even with technological advancements in clean water delivery, water availability is becoming less predictable in many places. In some regions, droughts exacerbate water scarcity, negatively impacting people’s health and threatening agriculture and biodiversity. Others face the opposite problem, with rising sea levels, erosion, and changing precipitation patterns increasing the risk of floods and threatening infrastructure. Wildfires and algal blooms which have increased with climate change also introduce new contaminants into waterways. According to the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, 90% of disasters triggered by natural hazards in the last ten years were related to water.
“When you think about any type of technology development, you also have to consider the world that we live in which includes more disasters, the impacts of those disasters on people, communities, businesses, and ecosystems,” said Bryan.
Fernando Rosario-Ortiz, Professor of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, also explained how climate change has affected the focus of his work.
“My research is now mostly in two veins: the fundamental chemical side related to source water and the other related to newer watershed perturbations like algal toxins,” said Fernando. “A big part of my research is around wildfires and water quality.”
According to Taumata Arowai, the water services regulator for Aotearoa, multi-barrier approaches are needed, meaning that safeguards should be put in place so that if one part of the system fails, back-ups can minimize the risk of public health impacts.
Meanwhile, solutions that once worked in an area may not work there anymore. On the plus side, communities can now share their solutions. So what communities in southern California have learned about wildfires, they now share with their neighbors to the north.
But complicating the matter further is that what works in one community isn’t the solution for all communities. People have different perceptions about technologies. Despite advanced wastewater treatment systems that enable water reuse – a valuable option to meet the increasing demand for safe drinking water – reclaimed water has a marketing problem.
Reusing water in an area like southern California that increasingly faces water scarcity might seem like an obvious solution to some, but it’s common for the public to perceive reuse of “sewage” as seriously icky.
“When you have to spend so much money to basically take wastewater down to distilled water because people think ‘yuck,’ even the greatest technology isn’t going to be effective or get approval to be implemented,” said Fernando. “You’ll never remove the ‘yuck’ factor unless you work with the people.”
“In Orange County, they had hundreds of public meetings and community engagements to increase the uptick of acceptance of water reuse,” said Bryan.
On top of challenges related to the “toilet to tap” narrative, Bryan points out that scientists are trying to implement solutions in communities when distrust in science has never been higher.
“At the same time, everyone deserves access to clean water,” he said. “So we have to continue to advance the science and make sure we’re interfacing with the public and having humility and appreciation for what can be accomplished based on people’s preferences. Here, cocreation of knowledge with local communities is key.”
Poverty is often the primary driver for lack of access to services and the effective and equitable delivery of those services. While developed countries may be more focused on long-term toxicological and human health impacts as opposed to acute health risks, the best technology still depends on what exactly the issue is in a given location. There’s a vast technology continuum of what could be useful, ranging from elegant materials science implementation to guaranteeing a basic level of public health protection. According to the World Bank, high poverty is strongly correlated to low access to drinking water and sanitation with about 1.6 billion people experiencing both. This number is forecasted to double by 2050 without dramatic intervention.
“What is sustainable for lower-middle-income countries is different to what’s sustainable in high- income economies. The available technology ranges from people trying to limit erosion to people trying to limit PFAS to tiny parts per trillion,” said Fernando. “In one place we might be thinking about activated carbon for PFAS removal, but you go to other places in the world – like Puerto Rico after a hurricane – and the priority is just keeping a chlorine tablet in place so the water gets disinfected.”
“I’ve been working on five continents for a long time in very different situations, so the systems are different,” said Bryan, who brings a wealth of public health knowledge to his work. “All environmental public health and water issues are local issues.”
Including the right people in the right conversations is essential to reconcile wildly different challenges related to water around the world. Fernando explained that journals like Environmental Science and Technology (ES&T), where he has served as Executive and Associate Editor, are trying to open the conversation up to global perspectives to address acute issues not always on the radar in wealthier communities. He stresses the importance of life cycle thinking-guided, economically feasible solutions. Bryan, meanwhile, expressed feeling privileged to have worked closely with Indigenous scholars and encourages others to identify and bring to the table deep knowledge held by community members before trying to implement new technologies.
“There are First Nations experts with knowledge of concepts that have been applied sustainably with the Earth for a long time,” he said. “We should never be pushing a solution on people; they should be telling us what will work for them. We need to be humble. We need to listen to people in local communities.”
This emphasis on listening is tied to another key element of successful delivery of clean water and sanitation: education and training.
Education and Training for Clean and Safe Water Delivery
Each year, undergraduate students at Baylor University do blind taste tests of different waters – from the local tap, to Orange County water, to bottled water, among others – and rank which ones they like the best. Which ones rise to the top?
“You’d be surprised how often Orange County and our local Waco water utilities drinking water score higher than the fancy bottled waters,” said Bryan. “That creates the opportunity to talk about drinking water treatment, broader carbon footprints and the sustainability of things like shipping water around the world.”
Training can start in college courses, where real-world problems help anchor fundamental chemistry concepts in practical applications. To Fernando, the most important thing is stressing the connection between reality and science, making sure students understand and incorporate cultural needs and on-the-ground realities when addressing water issues.
“There’s a ton of chemistry in source water protection and clean water issues,” said Fernando. “I’m fascinated by the interaction between fundamental science and how that impacts water production – to the point that when I teach, I love to emphasize to my students that it’s actually chemists who manage a lot of drinking water treatment because it’s all precipitation reactions.”
Not only do students have to understand the science of water treatment; they also have to develop an awareness that the location where they work might drastically change the conversations they have when implementing solutions. Bryan recommends that chemists and engineers visit their community drinking water treatment facility to understand the scale – far greater than the lab – at which solutions are needed.
But it’s not just one-sided. Everyone along the water treatment train must be able to implement solutions effectively for water to be safe and potable.
“There is also a training component for operators of water treatment systems. Are we appropriately equipping people in different settings who have different education levels? If not, we can’t sustainably achieve safe, clean water for all,” said Bryan.
Not communicating effectively with local communities – and meeting them at their various education levels – has real consequences.
“I remember working on a small decentralized drinking water system in a mountain range, and the person in charge had a second-grade education,” said Fernando. “In another community, there was a little girl with a cut on her leg that wouldn’t get better because it was being washed with water that wasn’t disinfected. When they put the chlorinator in the water, the wound healed. You can’t act like you’re better than the people you work with. You have to say, let’s talk about how this chlorine tablet is so important, and meet them where they are.”
With its emphasis on pollution prevention, green chemistry in education for both students and working professionals is also critical to preventing contamination of water in the first place. While we’re facing different – and perhaps greater – challenges than ever before, we have new frameworks and ways of thinking that can help us address complex systems-level issues. In addition, the selection of solutions is widening. In the upcoming Clean Water Summit, panelists will explore learnings from the implementation of cutting-edge technologies like desalination, membrane processes, advanced methods for contaminant reduction, nature-based solutions, and more. Through a combination of understanding new technologies, listening to community needs and local insights, and remaining humble while leveraging our unique skills as chemists and engineers, it’s possible to make a positive, long-lasting impact.
“Green chemistry and engineering are absolutely essential,” said Bryan. “We will see more exciting progress and innovation in this space, and I think it will happen faster than we expect”
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Faced with the challenges outlined in this article, the virtual ACS Clean Water Summit will serve as a critical platform to advance our understanding of how chemistry can contribute to achieving clean water goals globally. The proceedings from the Summit will be captured in a Report and published in ACS journals. Register now for “Putting Chemistry to Work for Clean Water.” The virtual Summit is free to attend, and will take place December 11, 2024 11:00 AM – 2:30 PM ET. Check out our lineup of speakers and an agenda packed with three panels on cutting-edge water technologies plus a networking session. Part 2 of the Summit will take place in person at ACS Spring 2025 in San Diego.
For research dedicated to water topics, including manuscripts from under-represented geographies, explore the ACS ES&T Water journal. The journal's Editor-in-Chief, Shane Snyder, Ph.D. BCES, is also one of the Clean Water Summit Organizers, and his research for over 20 years has focused on the identification, fate, and health relevance of emerging water pollutants. Learn more.