Team:Western Canada/Human Practices
Integrated Human Practice
Emerging contaminants are a term used by water quality professionals to describe pollutants that have been detected in water bodies, that may cause ecological or human health impacts, and typically are not regulated under current environmental laws.1
The goal of Western Canada’s project is to provide a way for safe, clean water to be flowing from every wastewater treatment plant across the globe. Providing a solution for removing emerging contaminants in wastewater ensures no polluted water ends up back in fresh water sources or recirculates back into public drinking water. This goal is a large undertaking, but we believe if we start small and prove our methodologies have promise within our local community, we can then provide the same solution to the masses.
Current wastewater treatment plants lack the technology in place to remove emerging contaminants2. Throughout our project we wanted to enable transparency within the wastewater industry to provide the most realistic guidance and optimization of our project. Below our team outlines the academic, industry, government and community experts our human practices team met with, all of which played a crucial role in integrating interdisciplinary influences towards the success of our project.
Industry Perspective
Wastewater Treatment Plant Tour
Gaining knowledge and guidance from front line experts working in wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) was crucial for proper implementation and feasibility of our project. Members from our human practices, dry lab and wet lab teams toured the Greenway Wastewater Treatment Plant, the largest of six WWTP’s in London Ontario. During the tour our team was able to pitch our project to the operations staff and receive feedback on how to optimize our project.
During the tour our team was told our technology would only be valuable to a WWTP if it is able to remove an array of emerging contaminants and fit into the current infrastructure of the plant easily. For the dry lab this information along with guidance from plant supervisors informed the team of where the most realistic location throughout the wastewater process our technology could be utilized. The need for our project to be versatile also led the wet lab team to change constructs from an enzyme that can remove a very specific subset of emerging contaminants to incorporating enzymes that can remove a broad scope of pharmaceuticals and microplastics into our platform in order to provide value to the WWTP’s.
Speaking with a Wastewater Expert
For further understanding into the applicability of our project the human practices team had a meeting with Gary Burrows, Supervisor of Operations at the City of London’s Wastewater Treatment Division and President of the Water Environment Association of Ontario. During this meeting our team pitched our emerging contaminant removing technology to Gary who provided us critique and feedback as to how we can make our project ready for real world application. Gary told our team to further invest our time into ensuring the sensitivity of our platform is strong enough and the retention time needed for our biofilm to work within treatment plants is short enough to prevent hindrance of the necessary fast paced flow of water through a plant. This led our team to investigate different prototypes that could provide the sensitivity and speed needed for WWTP feasibility.
Gary also provided our team with insight into how the regulatory landscape of emerging contaminants will affect the implementation of our project. Although there is a growing body of evidence supporting emerging contaminants as a threat to freshwater sources in Canada, it is very uncommon for municipalities to test or regulate these substances. According to Gary this is because most Environment Compliance Approvals (ECA’s) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO's) for wastewater substances are implemented retrospectively after harm has been proven. Gary supported our Human Practices team initiative to urge our local municipality to begin testing for pharmaceuticals in the City’s wastewater effluent before aquatic and human harm occurred. In relation to our project, if there are no regulations in place, our technology would be overlooked and deemed “unnecessary”. This information led the Human Practices team to create our Letter to the City Campaign..
Academic and Community Integration
Ethical Approach to Synthetic Biology
Our team met with Western University Professors Kathleen Hill and Bogumil Karas to talk about synthetic biology and the public perception of our project. These two professors take an interdisciplinary approach to synthetic biology research, have genetics and philosophy backgrounds and support the use of ethical considerations in science at Western University.
The main takeaway from our discussion was that it is not always easy for the general public to understand and appreciate genetically engineered products. There is a stigmatization surrounding genetically engineered platforms and forcing them upon the public without their knowledge. Since our technology would be implemented by the municipal government, this discussion created an awareness within our team about the necessity to be transparent with the implementation of our project. We began to acknowledge even though our project is scientifically appropriate, citizens may be hesitant to accept something that has the potential to directly influence the state of the City’s fresh water sources (that end up back in drinking water processes as well). This led our team to critically evaluate the education and marketing of our project to the public to foster positive responses of a synthetic biology approach to cleaning the City of London’s Water. To see more of how our team collaborated with the City of London to produce clear lines of communication and education to the public about our project click here.
Pharmacist – Pharmaceutical Disposal Impact
During the development of our public engagement initiative to educate individuals about ways they can reduce their wastewater contamination footprint we had a conversation with Shoppers Drug Mart Pharmacist Stacy Brennan about our technology and project. Stacy suggested that because a large amount of pharmaceutical pollution is created through large company run-offs, retrofitting our prototype to also fit into pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities could be valuable as well. After further discussion of the drug disposal impact on water pollution and research review done by us, we had notes to bring back to our dry lab team. This new consideration gave confirmation to the dry lab teams design to use PVA beads instead of a predefined filter size to provide the possibility of versatility within implementation not only in WWTP but also to private pharmaceutical companies.
Government Influence
Our team spoke with Scott Mathers, Director of Water for the City of London to discuss the municipal government’s involvement and feedback on our project. Scott believes with our technology the City of London can become a trailblazer in the wastewater industry and set precedent for other municipalities to follow suit. The number one concern Scott expressed was cost of implementation. Wastewater treatment is paid for with tax-payer dollars and every decision costing the city money needs to have a comprehensive risk-benefit analysis. Because of this our team is now in discussion with the City officials to create a comprehensive risk and cost-benefit analysis for our technology to provide the City of London.
References
1.Sauvé, S. & Desrosiers, M. A review of what is an emerging contaminant. Chem. CEnt 8 15 (2017).
Anderson, J.C., Park, B.J, and Palace, V.P. Microplastics in aquatic environments:Implications for Canadian ecosystems. Environ. Eviron.Pollut. 218 69-80 (2016).