30 April 2022
Radio New Zealand brings news today that there there’s concern that addressing water and sanitation challenges in the Pacific has become an afterthought for regional politicians and international leaders.
The Pacific Community (SPC), which provides scientific and technical expertise to the island nations on issues like water and climate change, is reporting a decline in water hygiene initiatives in the region.
Around 70 percent of the Pacific population doesn’t have their basic sanitation needs met including access to running water to wash hands after using the toilet.
"Forty-five percent of the Pacific population still lacks access to basic drinking water facilities," SPC Director-General, Stuart Minchin said.
He said it was a worry that water "doesn't get the same focus from leaders in the region and internationally as some of the more obvious issues like disaster resilience and climate change."
"It has many negative impacts health-wise. In places where there is no access to clean water from a tap, people have to walk to extract water from streams and wells, and often it's the children and women that get that job. That interferes with education and has flow-on impacts."
In the Solomon Islands the government has recently announce plans to improve water access as part of proposed infrastructure and development planning and one might guess financial support could be part of Chinese development aid.
That said, I suppose it would be much akin to pie in the sky to see the Solomon Islands one day have a major desalination plant built to turn sea water into fresh, clean drinking water, as is now the case in places like Israel, the USA, Australia and in places in China, but it might one day eventuate with the costs of creating large scale desalination costs coming down by using green energy sources as the supplier of power.
The shortage of fresh water supplies seems to be behind research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where it is claimed a team of scientists have created a device that transforms brackish seawater into clean drinking water at the push of a button.
Writing on this matter, Tony Ho Tran in the publication, ‘Daily Beast’ said today, and I quote.
The new desalination device (a term used to describe a machine that can remove salt from seawater) is roughly the size of a suitcase, weighs less than 10 kilograms, and uses less energy than a cell phone charger, according to a paper published on April 14 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. At a push of a button, can automatically create potable drinking water that exceeds the World Health Organization’s water quality standards.
“Even a kindergarten student can carry and use the desalination unit,” Junghyo Yoon, a research scientist in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT and co-author of the paper, told The Daily Beast. “[Ease of use] was one of the main motivations of creating the device.”
The device doesn’t rely on any filters like traditional desalination machines. Instead, it zaps the water with electric currents to remove minerals such as salt particles from the water. Due to its portability and the lack of filters that need to be replaced, it has a wide range of applications including being sent to seaside communities, climate catastrophe refugees, or even doomsday preppers, according to Yoon.
“My team and I have been working on desalination technology for more than ten years now,” Jongyoon Han, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and of biological engineering at MIT and lead author of the paper, told The Daily Beast. “This particular technology went through many different iterations and finally we reached a milestone of a system that can be demonstrated.”
Yoon’s and Han’s new device solves a few issues that plague most commercially-available desalination machines. For one, pushing water via pumps through filters is fairly energy intensive so it’s difficult to create a smaller, portable version of it. Instead, the MIT team’s device relies on a process called ion concentration polarization (ICP), which utilizes an electric field sent through membranes above and below a channel of water. The field repels charged particles and contaminants into a separate channel of water that is discarded. This allows clean, drinkable water to be produced. “We apply an electric field in the water flow and the electricity helps remove the particles like salt in the water,” Yoon explained. “That’s the basic principle of the device’s desalination process.”
The researchers now want to build off of their device in order to improve its production rate and usability. After all, the more water that the device can make at a time, the more people will be able to access potable and safe drinking water. To that end, Yoon plans to launch a startup in the coming years in order to create a viable, commercial desalination device using the ICP technology with the support of MIT.
However, Han said he has broader and more “long-term goals” for his desalination efforts. Specifically, he wants to take a more critical look at reverse osmosis (RO), a process of desalination in which salt water is pushed through a membrane or filter resulting in clean water. “That achieves good enough energy efficiency, but it has significant maintenance requirements and it only operates on a large scale, such as a big plant,” Han said, adding that it’s an inefficient process for places in the world such as California where “the water demand is always fluctuating” and currently, is in dire need of clean, potable water.
The user-friendly unit, which weighs less than 10 kilograms and does not require the use of filters, can be powered by a small, portable solar panel.
“That flux doesn’t work well with a rigid model of desalination that’s employed by an RO plant,” he said. “So I’m thinking about how we can apply more flexible desalination processes, like ICP. That’s a really long-term direction I’m interested in.”
He also explained that he wants to tackle challenges beyond desalination including detecting and removing contaminants in water such as heavy metals and disease-causing pathogens like viruses and bacteria.
“Most of these contaminants are open charge, so technically speaking we have the opportunity to remove a broad spectrum of contaminants such as lead and bacteria,” Han said. “In the future, we want to engineer our system to remove industrial contaminants. Those prospects are very exciting.
Comment
Could the Solomon Islands Government consider following up the developments of the research into the progress of the portable desalination plant for possible community use one day?
Yours sincerely
Frank Short
