Californians want more seawater desalination
Californians overwhelmingly support building more seawater desalination plants to address the state’s ongoing water needs, and most would be willing to pay a few dollars more a month for it, according to polls conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California and Tulchin Research. The state is currently considering a large-scale seawater desalination project in Huntington Beach that would produce 50 million gallons per day of locally controlled, drought-proof drinking water. The facility would be a public-private partnership between the Orange County Water District and Poseidon Water.
Aquabio celebrates 20th anniversary
U.K. water recycling company Aquabio Ltd. is celebrating its 20th anniversary. The company was set up as a private business in in Worchester, England in 1997, with a focus on innovation and environmental sustainability. Since then, the company has developed some of the world’s most advanced systems for the treatment and reuse of industrial wastewater, specifically in the fields of membrane bioreactors, reverse osmosis and anaerobic digestion. Aquabio is now part of the Freudenberg Group, a global company which operates in 60 countries around the world.
Reusable, carbon nanotube-reinforced filters clean toxins from water
Rice University researchers have developed carbon nanotubes in a tuft of quartz fiber that can remove toxic heavy metals from water. The filters absorb more than 99 percent of the metals such as cadmium, cobalt, copper, mercury, nickel and lead. Once saturated, the filters can be washed with a mild household chemical like vinegar and be reused. One gram of the material could treat as much as 83,000 liters of contaminated water to World Health Organization standards – enough to supply the daily needs of 11,000 people. An analysis of the new filters can be found in the July 2017 issue of Nature’s open access Scientific Reports.
