Screeching success

The winner of the DFJ Mercury First Prize in the inaugural RCEL Screech Competition was Jonathon Brame, graduate student in civil and environmental engineering. Here’s his winning screech:

Jonathon Brame

Water, water everywhere, but nary a safe drop to drink!

In a world of intense use and increasing pollution of our limited freshwater resources, this ancient rhyme may become a modern reality.

Let me briefly tell you about several water-related facts relating to the number nine:

Ninety percent of the flow of the Trinity River, which is Houston’s main source of drinking water, is actually wastewater from the city of Dallas. This wastewater includes many pharmaceutical compounds — such as Tylenol, Oxycontin and birth control — that pass right through current wastewater treatment systems. Chances are, if you drink a glass of water in Houston, you’re drinking somebody else’s birth control.

Ninety-nine percent of many of these pharmaceutical compounds can be removed from water using the technology I’m researching called photocatalysis. A photocatalyst is a material that takes the incoming energy from light — such as the lights in this room or the light from the sun — and converts it into chemical energy that can be used to oxidize and remove these compounds from the water.

I’ve developed a portable photoreactor system that can be taken to any wastewater treatment plant and used as a proof-of-concept to test this technology.

Furthermore, what we’ve learned in this research can also help in the developing world, where 900 million people still lack access to safe drinking water.

To put that number in perspective: Every 90 seconds — the length of these talks tonight — five children die in the developing world from water-related diseases that could be prevented using this technology.

Thank you.