Water

00:00:03: Substance.

00:00:04: Stories about the stuff that shapes

00:00:07: our world.

00:00:09: I mean, if you look at water, we don't produce things without water.

00:00:13: We don't survive without water.

00:00:16: Countries are increasingly going to be fighting over water.

00:00:21: Our health is inextricably linked to access to clean water.

00:00:28: It's one of these things that just doesn't get enough attention and yet it underpins everything.

00:00:48: Water is the foundation of life on Earth.

00:00:52: Without water we wouldn't exist.

00:00:55: From the smallest microbe to the largest blue whale, no living thing could exist or evolve without it.

00:01:02: This little molecule is so important that when scientists go looking for extraterrestrial life, one of the main things they look for is water.

00:01:12: I don't think you can think of a single function, a single productive function that humans or just any life form has that doesn't require water.

00:01:22: And in a very real sense, as societies, everything that we do to help humans thrive and survive is underpinned by access to water.

00:01:38: I'm Joe Hansen, and this is Substance, a podcast about the discoveries and innovations in chemistry and beyond, helping us build a sustainable society for the future.

00:01:49: In short, we tell stories about stuff that shapes our world.

00:01:54: And in this episode, we are talking about water, why the water crisis affects us all, and how new technologies can help us preserve valuable clean drinking water.

00:02:05: We'll be looking at it from two different angles.

00:02:08: First, we'll learn about a company that invented a radically new version of an everyday product.

00:02:13: Their idea can help save millions of liters of water by providing a safe and sanitary toilet that functions without any water at all.

00:02:23: And in our second story, we're looking at an industry that consumes a stunning seventy percent of all the fresh water that we use.

00:02:31: Agriculture.

00:02:33: And we'll talk to a BASF scientist who's transforming how much water we use for growing the food we

00:02:39: eat.

00:02:43: The problem is that we're using our limited freshwater resources way too quickly, you know, with more velocity than it's being replenished.

00:02:55: So at some point, freshwater becomes too scarce and then we have to take the other sources of water which are either very salty or very dirty and convert that into usable water.

00:03:09: I think people think that when they turn on the faucet, water comes to them for free, but it actually doesn't.

00:03:15: It takes a lot of energy.

00:03:17: to essentially be able to provide usable water.

00:03:21: And then what we do to water after we've used it either also uses a lot of energy or emits a lot of greenhouse gases.

00:03:28: So our ability to find more sustainable ways to use and produce water is going to be critical for us as we become a planet of ten billion people.

00:03:40: This is Diana Yousef.

00:03:42: Diana Yousef is the founder and CEO of Change Water Labs.

00:03:47: When she founded the company, her vision was to change how we use water and how much of it we use.

00:03:54: Because while most people in Western countries have never experienced a water shortage, in other areas of the world, entire regions suffer from a lack of access to clean water.

00:04:06: In twenty twenty three, the World Health Organization estimated that around one quarter of the global population lacks access to safely managed drinking water.

00:04:16: That's two point.

00:04:17: one billion people.

00:04:20: And with climate change, these numbers are expected to rise.

00:04:23: By twenty fifty, estimates from the United Nations University say that three out of four people will be affected by drought.

00:04:31: That's a huge number.

00:04:33: Just let that sink in.

00:04:36: Water scarcity might become the new normal for almost everyone on Earth.

00:04:43: For Diana, these numbers weren't just abstract concepts on a spreadsheet.

00:04:48: Her family has experienced how hard life is when you lack access to safe drinking water.

00:04:55: My parents are from the Middle East.

00:04:57: I was born, grew up in the United States, but I have a very deep family connection to a region that is famously very water-strained.

00:05:07: And when you're in the Middle East, pretty much everything about how people can get on with their day-to-day is linked to the scarcity or availability of water.

00:05:20: And so I think it's just maybe in my bones that being able to appreciate that how critical access to water is.

00:05:30: Diana is a scientist by training.

00:05:33: She has a PhD in biochemistry and worked for many different companies, including NASA.

00:05:39: They had brought her in to look at technological options to address water recycling on space stations.

00:05:46: One of the ideas was a special membrane that can get water to separate itself from other materials like waste or contaminants.

00:05:55: In a nutshell, this is how it works.

00:05:58: Water is sucked through the membrane while the other components can't pass through.

00:06:03: So

00:06:04: it

00:06:04: sparked a light bulb for me where I thought, oh, I wonder if this approach of using materials that have this property of getting water to separate itself away from contaminants, can that be an approach that we don't just have to implement in space, which obviously is the ultimate off-grid location.

00:06:25: But there are lots of off-grid communities and circumstances on Earth.

00:06:30: Could we apply those to benefit people who lack access to reliable water infrastructure?

00:06:37: Diana didn't act on her idea right away.

00:06:40: She thought it over for a couple of years.

00:06:43: I didn't really have the bravery to kind of take the leap and say, that's it.

00:06:48: This is all I'm going to do until I'm the mom of three girls.

00:06:52: And when I first became a mom, I don't know if this is universal around the world or just where I am.

00:06:58: Apparently when a woman has a child, her brain falls out of her head and suddenly she has no career value.

00:07:05: So I just decided, you know, at some point I was realizing like I'm trying to reboot my career as a new mom and it's not working.

00:07:14: If I'm going to be underpaid, trying to work for other people, why don't I just try to be really underpaid and work for myself and figure out if I can take, you know, something and make that my sort of like the mission that I focus the next phase of my life on.

00:07:31: And the only idea that I had was that idea from my NASA stint.

00:07:36: And I said, OK, why don't I see if I can figure this out and make it a thing.

00:07:44: At first, Diana considered using this technology to generate clean drinking water from polluted water.

00:07:50: But she soon realized that it's probably better suited to a totally different problem, making water evaporate.

00:07:58: Now, what kind of problems could that solve?

00:08:01: Diana quickly landed on sanitation.

00:08:04: Her magical NASA membrane, she concluded, could be a key factor in inventing an entirely new toilet that works without having access to water to flush the waste away.

00:08:16: At the time when I was thinking about this, we were sort of dealing or we were seeing in the news all of the images from these mass human migrations due to the Syrian conflict and the residual of the Iraqi conflict.

00:08:30: And this is my home region where there's these mass migrations of humanity being displaced from their homes and having to live on really marginal circumstances.

00:08:42: And one of the things that I was educating myself on was just how dire the lack of access to sanitation is for these populations and just generally for other populations.

00:08:56: Diana also had a very personal motivation to invent a new toilet.

00:09:00: I

00:09:01: am the mom of three girls and

00:09:03: the

00:09:03: access to a safe clean toilet also has a disproportional impact on women and girls around the world and we can get into that.

00:09:11: But it just had such a huge gender aspect to it.

00:09:15: And as the mom of three girls, I have the responsibility to make the world a better, more equal playing field for women and girls as well.

00:09:26: How often have you gone to the bathroom today?

00:09:29: A few times probably.

00:09:31: And if you're listening to this podcast from the comfort of your house, your toilet probably wasn't more than a few steps away.

00:09:38: You pressed a lever and fresh water flushed everything in the toilet bowl away.

00:09:43: A lot of water, by the way.

00:09:45: The Environmental Protection Agency says that toilets are the single largest use of fresh water in the average U.S.

00:09:51: household.

00:09:52: They count for almost a third of the average home's indoor water consumption.

00:09:57: It's

00:09:58: pretty crazy.

00:09:58: I've calculated that for, you know, on average a healthy let's say American or European produces about a liter and a half, you know, Coke bottles worth of waste in a given day.

00:10:13: To flush away that waste, we use about a half a bathtub's worth of clean water, just as a mode of transportation to get rid of a Coke bottle of waste.

00:10:24: It's crazy.

00:10:25: It's unsustainable.

00:10:27: After you flood your toilet, the mix of fresh water and waste products goes into a big pipe that leads to a sewage treatment plant.

00:10:35: There, the water is cleaned before it's returned to the environment.

00:10:40: If this story sounds familiar to you, you can consider yourself lucky.

00:10:44: Because for many people, this is not their reality.

00:10:48: And girls and women tend to suffer the most.

00:10:51: So essentially, in places where women and girls do not have access, to a private safe toilet in or near their homes, they have to go do their most private function which is on average three to five times a day in a public place.

00:11:09: And

00:11:10: unfortunately in many areas that attracts unwanted attention.

00:11:16: that often leads to the risk of sexual assault.

00:11:20: It's something called sanitation related gender-based violence and it goes under reported but it's a shocking statistic, I think, and it's a shocking occurrence.

00:11:32: It's not something that, you know, every time I tell this to people who are not aware of it, they're just shocked that it's happening, but it's very common.

00:11:40: It's equally shocking that about

00:11:43: half the world's

00:11:44: schools do not have proper toilet facilities, which makes life very difficult for their students.

00:11:51: So girls, especially, have to figure out how to get through a day of school by managing their urge to go.

00:11:58: And this means that they take all sorts of measures.

00:12:01: where they don't eat, they don't drink, they're trying to get through a day of school with no sort of nutritional input, which essentially affects their performance and their ability to concentrate their stamina.

00:12:15: But then on top of that, by the time they hit puberty, most of them are staying home for a week out of a month.

00:12:22: because they don't have access to toilets or sanitary products.

00:12:27: So Diana had identified an urgent

00:12:29: problem.

00:12:30: Billions of people worldwide don't have access to a sanitary toilet.

00:12:35: And she had the miraculous NASA membrane that evaporates water.

00:12:40: She put one and one together and invented a radically different toilet.

00:12:45: Let's hear how she explains the idea.

00:12:48: So our toilet uses no water.

00:12:51: it in fact converts the majority of human waste back into pure molecular water.

00:12:58: So it's doing the opposite.

00:12:59: It's not using or polluting water.

00:13:02: It's actually converting waste back into pure water.

00:13:06: Diana calls her toilet the i-throne.

00:13:10: Essentially, it looks like a regular toilet, albeit a bit bigger and bulkier.

00:13:16: There is a seat to sit on, but no water tank.

00:13:20: And anything that goes into the toilet ends up in a bag made of the special NASA membrane.

00:13:26: The i-throne has two bags inside of it.

00:13:31: One is a bag that collects the solid, one is a bag that collects the waste.

00:13:35: These bags are made out of our proprietary technology, which is a breathable evaporative material that we call shrink wrap for crap.

00:13:45: It's all about the marketing.

00:13:48: Anyway, these bags of shrink wrap or crap

00:13:51: have

00:13:52: the property of essentially sucking up the liquid water content of both the solid and the liquid waste.

00:14:00: The liquid waste is essentially almost a hundred percent water.

00:14:03: The solid waste is actually eighty-five percent water.

00:14:07: On average, our human waste output on a daily basis is ninety-five percent water.

00:14:15: bags soak up the liquid water content from the waste and then by pulling it through this material convert the liquid into pure molecular water vapor essentially.

00:14:29: So it almost makes it look like the waste is disappearing.

00:14:32: but it's phase changing from liquid to gas by traversing across the membrane.

00:14:39: Diana and her company have already set up two pilots of the i-throne.

00:14:43: The first one was installed in twenty twenty in Uganda right next to a women's hospital.

00:14:49: The feedback from the community was overwhelmingly positive.

00:14:52: Women didn't have to spend ten minutes walking to a dirty pit toilet anymore.

00:14:58: But soon after the i-throne was installed, COVID hit and shut the country down.

00:15:04: Diana's company was only able to get about

00:15:06: four

00:15:07: weeks of data out of it.

00:15:09: The second round of ithrones were installed in homes in Panama City that previously didn't have bathrooms.

00:15:17: There they used a modified version of the ithrone with a sit-down toilet on one side and a urinal on the other side.

00:15:24: And these toilets have been running there for over two years already.

00:15:28: We've gotten something between sixteen thousand and eighteen thousand uses out of them.

00:15:34: they have proven despite the high humidity in this this is in Panama City despite the high humidity in Panama City where we thought that would kill like this essentially you know passive process of having liquid go from the wetter side to the drier side.

00:15:51: If the other side, the air is already wet, we thought it would kill our efficiency.

00:15:56: But actually, we're seeing ninety-seven percent waste elimination on a daily basis in those eye-thrown toilets,

00:16:03: and

00:16:04: they're keeping the waste a hundred percent contained.

00:16:07: We haven't had any odor on site.

00:16:09: And they actually are running for up to four months before we have to do anything to remove the dry residual from inside.

00:16:18: Because while most of the waste is water, some residue is left behind.

00:16:24: The bag that collects the liquid waste would stay relatively empty with the exception of some precipitated salts and solutes from the urine.

00:16:34: The solid bag, though, would eventually fill up with fibrous dried waste and It needs to be swapped

00:16:40: out.

00:16:41: So essentially in its current iteration, that would be done by a trained servicer who essentially would just come in, essentially with like a rolling, you know, container that you can, a sealable container, put that, you know, in position, pull the bags out of the back of the toilet and you know, the bags come up over this container and then they just drop the bag.

00:17:07: I mean, we're trying to keep it simple.

00:17:08: We don't want anybody carrying these bags or handling them.

00:17:12: We just want them to just get into a container and be sort of removed.

00:17:17: Most of what comes out of the toilet is actually organic.

00:17:20: So where this is allowed, that waste can be either composted or converted into some kind of bio value output like energy or fertilizer.

00:17:31: So, you know, this has the ability to feed into circular sanitation systems, which we're pretty excited about.

00:17:40: And there's already a third project underway, this time not in a country in the global south, but in the United States.

00:17:49: The current deployment that we're doing is in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where it's meant to be part of a homeless housing project where they could not figure out how to essentially economically and like within a reasonable time frame get bathrooms installed for these sort of modular homes that they're building as transitional houses.

00:18:12: So we're starting with a smaller deployment to deploy portable toilet versions of the i-throne.

00:18:20: Diana is hopeful that very soon her i-throne toilet will be ready to enter the mass market.

00:18:28: So we want to launch.

00:18:29: The idea is that within twelve to eighteen months have this product launched to the market at scale.

00:18:34: We think that within five years we would have the ability to be improving the lives of thirty two million people through either improved access to sanitation or reduced disease exposure in communities.

00:18:49: We also want to be able to prove out this model that If you develop a product that delivers social and environmental good, you could also be commercially successful and profitable.

00:19:01: And we think we can get there.

00:19:08: Diana's story is inspiring.

00:19:11: But as we started this episode, I promised you a second innovation that can help save water.

00:19:17: This time, it is all about farming and how we grow our

00:19:21: food.

00:19:22: My expert for this topic is Ligia Azevedo.

00:19:25: She studied agriculture in Brazil and now work as a senior sustainability manager at the Agricultural Solutions Division of BASF.

00:19:33: I work in the sustainability team and in the team I'm responsible for what we call the carbon trials, but I'm also responsible for overseeing the activities that we do with rice.

00:19:45: Rice is, together with wheat and corn, one of the world's staple foods, especially in Asia.

00:19:52: People eat rice every day for almost every meal.

00:19:56: And the slender white grains have a big fan base on other continents as well.

00:20:01: Ligia is from Brazil and knows a lot about rice, how it's grown, and how the farming practices for rice differ from those other cereal crops.

00:20:11: I am Brazilian, so we eat mainly white rice.

00:20:14: And it's basically the loose type of rice.

00:20:17: And when it gets old, when it's in the fridge too long and you're thinking of getting rid of it, we don't.

00:20:24: So we take the old rice and we add sugar and milk and cinnamon.

00:20:30: And we make a dessert dish that I think, yeah, in English, the translation would be sweet

00:20:36: rice.

00:20:38: And it's... Absolutely delicious.

00:20:39: So my favorite dish is done with old rice, really.

00:20:43: Lidia knows a lot about rice, how it's grown and how the farming practices for rice differ from those other cereal crops.

00:20:53: We've been growing rice for thousands of years and we've always done it in the same way.

00:20:59: So we cultivate them underwater in small fields.

00:21:03: We call them paddies.

00:21:05: And

00:21:05: that conventional rice that we usually speak about is the fact that we're growing rice underwater.

00:21:12: And that's highly unusual.

00:21:13: That's not typically how you do agriculture.

00:21:16: But for rice, this is the conventional way.

00:21:18: This conventional way of growing rice needs tons of water.

00:21:23: The International Rice Research Institute estimates that you need about one thousand four hundred and thirty two liters of water to produce just one kilogram of rice.

00:21:33: Rice receives more than a third of the world's irrigation

00:21:37: water.

00:21:38: There is so much water spent on rice.

00:21:41: So, you know, imagine one by one meter of field flooded a few centimeters.

00:21:48: That is several hundred kilos of water.

00:21:51: Yeah, because, you know, one kilo of water is about one liter.

00:21:54: So if you do the math, you see there are tons of liters of water in agricultural rice paddy.

00:22:03: If there is a technology that allows us to use less fresh water, this is already super, super helpful.

00:22:09: Maybe you've been on vacation in a rice producing country like China, India, or Thailand, and you've seen rice patties with your own eyes.

00:22:19: The entire plot is flooded with water.

00:22:22: You never see this with corn or wheat or really any other crop.

00:22:27: So why do we flood rice patties then?

00:22:30: Of course, there is a reason behind it.

00:22:32: The reason for the water has less to do with the water that the plant needs is actually to do with the fact that it's really hard to control the weeds of rice.

00:22:44: So rice is a grass and it's difficult to control these weeds.

00:22:48: So the way that we control them is by flooding the field with water because the rice survives just fine to that and the weeds don't.

00:22:57: When plants are submerged in water.

00:23:00: Their metabolism is disrupted in multiple ways.

00:23:03: So let's look at a few of them.

00:23:05: First, if a plant is underwater, it gets less light.

00:23:09: This is a huge problem because light is the plant's primary source of energy.

00:23:14: Secondly, the water prevents the roots from taking up oxygen, which they need for their metabolism to run.

00:23:20: You could say that the plants are suffocating underwater just like humans would.

00:23:25: But rice is sort of an exception.

00:23:28: It does miraculously well in submerged conditions, much, much better than weeds at least.

00:23:34: In traditional rice farming, rice paddies are flooded several times throughout the growing season.

00:23:40: That practice needs a lot of water, Ligia told me.

00:23:44: you need a lot of water because imagine it's a little bit like having a leaky swimming pool, a very leaky swimming pool.

00:23:52: If the swimming pool is constantly losing water, you have to replenish it, otherwise the water level drops.

00:23:58: So there's a lot of water that is lost, so it's quite an inefficient system that typically needs a lot of water.

00:24:06: And of course that water is fresh, so we call it fresh water, it's not salty water, and this is the way that we've been growing rice.

00:24:14: since the start of agriculture.

00:24:17: And while flooding rice fields is very effective for controlling weeds, it comes with other downsides.

00:24:23: In this oxygen or environment, a special kind of bacteria thrives.

00:24:28: They're called methanogenic bacteria because they produce methane, a very potent greenhouse gas.

00:24:36: Methane is said to have more than eighty times the warming power of carbon dioxide over the first twenty years after it's been

00:24:43: released.

00:24:45: While the effects of carbon dioxide last longer, methane has a strong immediate impact on global warming.

00:24:53: Reducing the amount of methane emitted from rice paddies could make a significant contribution to slowing down the greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector, and at the same time, could save valuable freshwater.

00:25:07: So can we grow rice a different way while still getting the same yield from it?

00:25:13: Yes, we need to reduce freshwater use in agriculture, but by no means there should be a detrimental impact to the revenue of the farmer.

00:25:25: Most of the times that means the yield.

00:25:28: This is their livelihood.

00:25:30: This is how they are contributing financially to the family and to the farm.

00:25:35: So yes, we need to reduce water.

00:25:37: We need to find intelligent ways to do this without compromising the yield.

00:25:42: That's what we're here for.

00:25:45: BASF believes this can be achieved, that we can reduce water consumption, reduce methane emissions, and keep the yield up.

00:25:55: The goal they set for themselves was to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from rice paddies by thirty percent by the year twenty thirty.

00:26:03: BSF is an R&D company and we're trying to introduce technologies to the agricultural sector that make the sector better.

00:26:12: Yeah.

00:26:12: So I mean we need to be efficient.

00:26:14: We need to efficiently grow our food.

00:26:17: But we need to respect the environment and we need to respect the environmental laws of each country.

00:26:23: So I mean this balancing act.

00:26:26: takes a lot of time and learning.

00:26:30: To figure out how this can be done, BASF started collaborating with the International Rice Research Institute, or IRRI, in the Philippines.

00:26:40: It was late or mid- Twenty-Twenty-Three.

00:26:43: We started to speak to them and we said, hey, you know, we want to do research on that.

00:26:48: We have a few technologies that we wanted to test, they actually had some of the capabilities that BSF did not have at the time.

00:26:56: So what ED does that it's quite special is measurements on gas fluxes.

00:27:01: So that actually means measuring how much methane is being produced in rice.

00:27:06: And we wanted to partner with them to actually measure how much this is actually happening and find creative ways to reduce that methane production.

00:27:15: To reduce the methane production, you have to reduce the growth of methanogenic bacteria.

00:27:21: And to reduce these bacteria, you have to stop flooding the rice fields.

00:27:26: But when you completely stop flooding the fields, weeds quickly take over and the yield goes down.

00:27:33: To overcome this dilemma, BASF offers new rice varieties with special traits.

00:27:39: Traits that give them the upper hand in a field that is not constantly underwater.

00:27:45: There are certain traits that happen in rice that we call it herbicide tolerant traits.

00:27:51: That means that when you apply herbicide to rice, they will not be suppressed as a normal weed.

00:27:57: So they are tolerant to a herbicide.

00:28:02: That means that now we have a second way, a better way to manage weeds.

00:28:07: So rather than having all that water used, we can.

00:28:11: We do still use of water and control the weeds in a different way.

00:28:16: So let's recap this.

00:28:17: These new rice varieties can tolerate specific herbicides, enabling targeted weed control while the rice remains unaffected.

00:28:26: And if there are fewer weeds to control, yields are not impacted.

00:28:30: And it means you don't need to use all this water to constantly flood the rice paddies anymore.

00:28:36: The approach is called alternate wetting and drying, or AWD.

00:28:41: When you're close to harvest, you drain the field anyways because you need to remove the water to be able to harvest it.

00:28:46: But throughout the season, you keep on playing with the water level up and down, that's why we call it alternate wetting and drying, to constantly suppress the population of these methanogenic bacteria.

00:29:00: This

00:29:01: approach of letting the rice fields sit dry for long stretches of the growing season could save about a third of the water that's currently being used for growing rice.

00:29:11: It could also drastically reduce the amount of methane that's emitted from the bacteria in the flooded fields, and thereby help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

00:29:21: BASF's goal of reducing the greenhouse gas intensity by thirty percent per ton of harvested crop seems very, very achievable.

00:29:30: One of the things that we're doing is have carbon trials where we test and learn and make mistakes and try again, where we check whether the thirty percent can be achieved.

00:29:43: And in rice it's clear it can.

00:29:46: So if you manage the water properly, still being able to control the weeds, the thirty percent reduction in greenhouse gas intensity can be achieved.

00:29:57: Ligia is excited to be part of this transformation that's going on in the agricultural sector.

00:30:03: She hopes that in the future, we'll have new technologies available worldwide.

00:30:08: What I wish for in my future and for my children, I would like to see food production a much more balanced way where we produce higher quality food to in a way that does not harm the environment, in a way that allows for fairness across the food value chain of how much water we're using in agriculture.

00:30:36: Access to clean water touches more of our life than we realize.

00:30:41: Toilets

00:30:42: impact access to education.

00:30:45: One of the world's most basic food staples might help reverse climate change.

00:30:50: A future where everyone has access to clean drinking water?

00:30:53: is within reach.

00:30:55: If we stop flushing it away without thinking and start treating it for what it is, the key to life itself.

00:31:04: That's it for today's episode of Substance.

00:31:07: Hope you enjoyed it.

00:31:08: Until next month.

00:31:09: This has been Substance.

00:31:13: Stories about the stuff that shapes our world.

00:31:17: Substance is a podcast by BASF, produced by Territory Agency, in collaboration with Wake Word and me, Joe Hansen.

00:31:27: Research and scripting by Daniel Sedbrook, Claudia Doyle, Hardy Röder, and Joe Hansen.