New for 2023
update on ongoing research, book sections, new website features...
The past few months have been very exciting. I can’t bury the lede: our son was born on November 25th, 2022. Most of my time over the past six weeks has been devoted to caring for baby and mama - hence the light posting on this site.
But I do have some exciting news to share relevant to the wild wonderful world of biochar water treatment - things that will be unfolding over 2023.
These include funding and awards for our field projects and research, publications under review and in preparation, new features of this website, and the beginning of translation of book sections!
Website reorganization and new Field Notebook blog section
You may have noticed that the Substack site got a makeover to - hopefully - improve the user experience.
The navigation bar across the top includes a Book-In-Progress tab. Under this section you will find all of the work-in-progress book sections published so far listed in reverse chronological order. Most of these are for paying subscribers, but several posts are publicly available. New book sections will be added in this department of the Substack site as they become available.
There is a new section of the Substack site accessible under the Field Notebook tab in the navigation bar. This section will be populated with short vignettes and photo-essays depicting current and past field projects. A lot of these come from our partners, friends, collaborators, and trainees carrying out new workshops and installations. All Field Notebook entries will be freely available.
Spanish translation of Book-In-Progress sections!
Our friends/collaborators at Amisacho Restauración (Ecuador) have begun translating Book-In-Progress entries (starting from the very beginning of the book, “Chapter 1 - The importance of chemical toxicants in Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) provision”) into Spanish.
Luis Muñoz of Amisacho Restauración teaching how to make biochar adsorbent for water treatment.
Beginning soon we will be releasing Spanish language sections every week-or-so over the course of 2023. At the moment I don’t know if the Spanish entries will appear on another section of this Substack or if we will create a second, separate Spanish language Substack site. (Most likely the latter.) We are still working out the mechanics of this. The reason is that Spanish language sections will be accessible for a subscription fee, with 100% of the money going to support Amisacho Restauración and their efforts to disseminate biochar water treatment in Amazonian communities and throughout Ecuador. We’re in the process of figuring out the simplest way to channel subscriptions directly to Amisacho - stay tuned if you are interested to get involved with this Spanish language project!
Funding award announcements
We are thrilled to announce that our collaborators at Caminos de Agua (Mexico) were award First Prize in the RELX Environmental Challenge! The award includes a cash prize to support our work expanding the pilot research program implementing the Groundwater Treatment System in additional communities.
First-generation pilot groundwater treatment system.
Ribbon cutting ceremony for the first community to begin receiving treated water, summer 2021.
We are also thrilled to announce that Aqueous Solutions was selected to receive an award from the Roy A. Hunt Family Foundation. This award will support our collaboration with Amisacho Restauración and La Clínica Ambiental to (1) design and fabricate a mobile biochar gasification kiln, and (2) equip the field laboratory at Amisacho for conducting biochar adsorbent and water quality testing.
Ample biomass feedstock exists in the Ecuadorian Amazon for generating biochar adsorbent for water treatment. For example, carpentry shops making household items constantly burn scrap wood and materials that do not pass quality control, such as this pile of reject broomsticks:
The mobile gasifier kiln will be used to convert this wasted resource into high-value adsorbent for community and household water treatment.
The award will also permit us to purchase lab equipment for water testing and for conducing pilot and rapid small-scale column tests (RSSCTs) in the Amisacho field lab. This will provide quality analysis of biochar adsorbent generated from the mobile kiln, and provide quantitative data for designing custom water treatment units for mitigating pollution from petrochemical spills and agricultural runoff.
The setup will be analogous to the one shown here developed in Caminos de Agua’s field lab to mitigate fluoride contamination using bone char sorbent:
Fluoride/bone char pilot and RSSCT experimental equipment, Caminos de Agua.
Ongoing research projects and papers
The “Pleasant, safe, and Healthy” pedagogical framework for water quality
We were invited to submit a practical paper describing our workshop and ongoing efforts in the Ecuadorian Amazon to a special issue of the journal Water Security. Our submission, entitled, “Adaptable community participatory design to provide water that is Estético, Seguro, y Saludable (Pleasant, Safe, and Healthy) in the Ecuadorian Amazon” is currently under review.
As I’ve mentioned many times on this site and elsewhere, a big part of our mission over the years has been to draw attention to the chemical dimensions of water quality in the context of water-sanitation-hygiene (WASH) development in low-resource settings. In this paper we introduce the lexicon of “Pleasant, Safe, and Healthy” as a way to bring multi-faceted water quality considerations in “developing regions” into parity with the affluent world. It also provides a pedagogical framework to support learning about different dimensions of water quality, from water aesthetics (taste, color, odor), to safety from a microbiological perspective, to healthy from a chemical/chronic disease perspective.
A experimentally minimalist approach for design of fluoride/bone char treatment systems
With Caminos de Agua, we are using pilot and RSSCT data with different bone chars and groundwaters to determine the minimum set of experiments that needs to be performed with a unique bone char/water combination to support design and monitoring of treatment units.
Experimental resources (reagents and supplies, labor, time) are often a limiting factor in field lab settings. With this project we’re developing a method to leverage diffusion and sorption modeling, using a minimized dataset to train the model, to provide quantitative information to field practitioners to design, value engineer, and monitor bone char treatment units.
The idea is this: say you’re in Tanzania and someone brings you a sample of bone char and their high-fluoride groundwater…can you use one column test plus sorption modeling to derive everything you need to design a contactor to treat their water as well as other “geochemically similar” groundwaters in the region? The goal is to obtain contactor dimensions, empty bed contact time, and bone char replacement frequency. This quantitative information will guide value engineering (i.e., designing cost-effective contactors) as well as monitoring programs (i.e., to focus monitoring intensity during key period of operation, rather than continuously).
Biochar water treatment system decision support and design toolkit
As described in many of the writings on this site, several factors affect the design and operation criteria and performance of biochar water treatment units for removal of harmful chemicals. These include biochar adsorption capacity, background water characteristics such as concentration and character of background dissolved organic matter, physical-chemical properties of pollutants of concern and their desired level of removal. Biochar contactor design parameters such as adsorbent particle size, contact time, contactor dimensions and loading rate, along with water quality factors determine biochar replacement frequency for meeting daily water throughput requirements.
The biochar water treatment decision support and design toolkit will assist WASH practitioners to develop quantitative scenarios to identify treatment unit design and operational specifications from a small number of user inputs based on local circumstances. The decision support tool will aid the user to determine biochar treatment capacity (volume of water treated per mass of biochar) based on biochar adsorbent quality, background water characteristics, target chemical pollutants and treatment objective(s). The design tool uses the user-determined treatment capacity to generate design and operational scenarios, e.g., explore a range of biochar contactor dimensions and loading rates given locally available materials, daily water throughput requirements, and desired biochar replacement frequency.
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Publishing these two major R&D projects in the peer-reviewed literature represent next steps that need to be taken prior to their incorporation in biochar water treatment book sections. Over the coming months I will be intensively working on these two initiatives, although it may seem like a period of inactivity on the Substack site. For that reason, I have arranged with collaborators to continue posting entries in the Field Notebook and Spanish translation sections, so that readers can stay abreast of developments in the field of biochar water treatment and on this site.
We appreciate your ongoing support and enthusiasm for this work!
I began this entry on a personal note, and would like to end on one as well. In a previous Field Notebook entry I alluded to overlapping vocations I have in the realm of resilience, sustainability, bioregionalism, and local economies.
Agroecology and regenerative agriculture are practices that are complimentary to biochar/low-tech/do-it-yourself/decentralized water treatment. All of these are tools to support the autonomy, self-reliance, economic and environmental sustainability of households and communities. They are as applicable in developed, affluent regions as they are in low-resource “underdeveloped” areas.
In fact, I argue that it is even more important for the affluent to embrace these tools, techniques, and life-ways since our affluent way-of-life bears disproportionate responsibility for resource depletion, ecological and biodiversity degradation, pollutant emissions, and exploitation of impoverished people and places.
If these topics, which range beyond the technical aspects of biochar water treatment, are also of interest to you, I recommend we connect through our other Substack website/newsletter. It is 100% free, and depicts our efforts in practical agroecology at the small regenerative farm where I live with my family, Magpie Hollow.
Happy New Year to you and your loved ones! Here’s to new adventures in 2023!