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Water expert vies for more fluid, sustainable water management

If the water looks clear and smells fine, most North Americans assume it’s ready for cooking, cleaning or drinking. But they probably don’t realize that same sparkling tap water could still carry pathogens from within our seemingly “secure” plumbing systems.

Most of today’s water decontamination is focused on controlling sewage pollutants and fecal matter with “old Roman” methods and infrastructures that were developed 30 years ago, University of Alberta School of Public Health Professor and water expert Nicholas Ashbolt said. But while illnesses such as cholera and typhoid can be prevented, fickle contamination and pathogens, such as Legionella pneumophila that can lead to pneumonia, still develop within our treated and managed water systems.

“These pathogens cause a greater burden of disease to our society today,” Ashbolt said. “We haven’t caught up to a newer understanding of these pathogens to control our exposures to water.”
Traditional thinking and “dogmatic” practices in water management need to be changed to restrain bacteria such as Legionella pneumphila, Ashbolt said, and the U of A’s Water Week encourages individuals to immerse themselves in water education from March 17 to 22. Water Week provides base knowledge in water conservation and its reuse for students and attendees, Ashbolt said.

Ashbolt will be delivering a public keynote lecture this Water Week entitled, “The Water Revolution: Reimagining our water systems.” It will touch on what’s wrong with current water practices and management systems around the world, what more sustainable water practices could look like and how this generation can get there.

Society’s “arcane” water system utilizes pipes that require upwards of $40 billion a year to maintain worldwide, which isn’t economically viable in the current political climate, Ashbolt said. His answer lies in recovering energy in water through residual resources such as nutrients. Hidden water management infrastructures such as pipes in the ground are expensive, but can be converted and re-engineered into energy recovery pipelines where communities can recover electrons for electricity and heat, and nutrients for agriculture.

While technology is always advancing, the difficulty is in keeping up with population growth, Ashbolt said.

“We’re going backwards because of the higher density of people living in cities and using these old Roman technologies in managing water and waste services that are actually degrading our water more rapidly than 15 or 20 years ago,” he said.

After Ashbolt earned a PhD in Agricultural Science from Australia’s University of Tasmania in 1985, he committed his life to convincing others that next-generation municipal water services and resource recovery for improved ecohealth is a worthwhile endeavour.

Ashbolt has been working with students, professionals and consultants to make next-generation municipal water services move forward for 30 years, but added that change requires a group of different skillsets to make that transition happen — and those skillsets could be reached at Water Week.

With those skillsets, Ashbolt said he hopes to create a proactive strategy in water treatment, as opposed to reactive. The Alberta government has employed a unique Drinking Water Safety Plan assessment tool, which outlines sources of water, how drinking water is treated and how it is stored and distributed. Proactive programs like this could help prevent illnesses caused by Legionella pneumphila and potentially stop diseases such as cholera from resurfacing in our taps and showers.

“We should be more proactive in the way we need to be managing water,” Ashbolt said. “We need to work together and have a political will otherwise we’re going to be responding to more disasters in a very inefficient way.

“These changes can take decades to build, so we need to start today.”

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