Water Water Everywhere...

Hello everyone!

This week’s highlights include the confounding case of PFAS levels in drinking water and the reversal of reverse osmosis, as well as a new “Innovator’s Corner” featuring products that literally pluck water out of thin air.

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Disclaimer - the views expressed herein are ours and ours alone.

PFAS in drinking water is high, now what?

Following last week’s revelation that the sitting administration will veto any PFAS related laws, a report published by the EWG shows the levels of PFAS or ‘forever chemicals’ in drinking water supplies across the US. They say, that of ‘tap water samples from 44 places in 31 states and the District of Columbia, only one location had no detectable PFAS, and only two other locations had PFAS below the level that pose risks to human health.’ As reported on CNN, the water supplies in Brunswick County, North Carolina, and Quad Cities, Iowa, contained the highest levels of the chemicals, more than 100 times the EWG's suggested limit. 

Also of note is that the EWG's recommended PFAS limit is 1 part per trillion in drinking water, which is about 70 times stronger than federal (EPA) recommendations, as researchers aren’t sure what specific health effects a person might experience from PFAS. However as per the initial studies by the CDC, these chemicals are non-biodegradable, interfere with the body’s natural hormones, increase cholesterol levels, affect the immune system, and increase the risk of some cancers.

FO, not RO as an energy, and cost effective answer to water purification?

Porifera, a California-based company manufactures proprietary forward osmosis membranes & solutions enabling industries to efficiently desalinate and purify water while facilitating reduction of water waste, improvements to water reuse, and using less energy. If that sounded like a press release, that’s because it is! They say that while only being used in the demonstration plant in South Korea, it is an important step in commercializing ‘forward osmosis’ as a process. 

The company is led by CEO and founder Dr.Olgica Bakajin. Bakajin earned a doctorate in physics at Princeton, then spent a decade at Lawrence Livermore National Lab where she helped develop carbon nanotube membrane as a filtration technology. After initial grants from NASA and DARPA, Bakajin and her team continued innovating, developing a process that uses their proprietary membrane to form concentrates. Their published white paper talks to the various benefits of this process, but time will tell if this does improve on the efficiency or wastage over the current reverse osmosis (RO) processes.

Innovator’s Corner - Pluck it right out of the Air

While we have heard about the dwindling clean water sources the world over, innovators have found a unique source of fresh water - Air! We’ve only listed three, but there are a bunch more doing this across the globe.

• from Israel - Watergen's GENNY, which is a water-from-air system for the home or office that is able to create fresh drinking water from the air around us. GENNY being a standalone water dispensing unit also completely eliminates for restocking, thus significantly cutting back on plastic usage. GENNY additionally works as a home air purifier, circulating clean air back into the room as part of the water generation process. TIME magazine named GENNY a best invention of 2019, calling it a “fancier dehumidifier.”

• from Mexico - Innovaqua NUBE SS30: Air to Water Generator, which somewhat similar to the GENNY, through condensation and subsequent filtration pull water particles out the air and clean it up for drinking. This machine that has a production capacity of 30 liters per day, in the domestic version, and up to 5,000 liters in its industrial line.
• from Canada - Rainmaker Worldwide’s Air-to-Water, that provide communities with local, sustainable and affordable access to clean water from humidity in the atmosphere. This organization is focussed on using this tech in the developing world only, and these Air-to-Water units are available in three sizes, producing 5,000, 10,000 or 20,000 liters of drinking water per day.

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Have a great weekend!