GMU people study prizes, sponsor prizes and we win some also! Must be something in the water.
A George Mason University chemistry professor has won a $1 million
engineering prize for developing a simple and inexpensive means of
filtering arsenic from well water, an advance that is already
preventing serious health problems in hundreds of thousands of people
in his native Bangladesh and could help millions of others around the
world.The 2007 Grainger Challenge Prize for Sustainability,
administered by the National Academy of Engineering, will go to Abul
Hussam of Centreville, academy officials announced yesterday…His final creation — an easy-to-make, maintenance-free, two-tiered
system that uses sand, charcoal, bits of brick and shards of a widely
available kind of cast iron — removes virtually every trace of arsenic
from well water. It wowed an independent panel of engineering academy
judges who, under the rules of the prize, were looking for an
affordable, reliable, socially acceptable and environmentally friendly
solution to the arsenic problem that did not require electricity.Prize
rules also required that the product be proven in field conditions, not
just in a lab….The 2007 sustainability prize is the first in a series to be funded by
the Grainger Foundation of Lake Forest, Ill., created in 1949 by an
electrical engineer.
Thanks to Nitpicker for the pointer.
As the story reveals, it is not because of something in the water at GMU, it is the water he drank as a kid. Still congrats to GMU, Professor Hasham and to Bangladesh.
Too bad it wasn’t 6 years ago w/the arsenic brouhaha bringing the levels down.
If this is cheaper, this would still be useful in large parts of the American Midwest and West. After all, there are large parts of this country where the water table is naturally contaiminated with arsenic. (Various arsenic alloys surrounding the water.)
Reducing the arsenic levels in most of the country is cheap and generally worth it, because it’s a pollution issue that can be dealt with at the emission point. However, in the parts of the country where it occurs naturally, the separation process has previously been quite expensive, and is still necessary. It’s something that got lost in the debate over arsenic levels– a uniform national requirement is probably not a good idea, since it’s so much more expensive to remove arsenic in those parts of the country than to prevent its introduction elsewhere. (At least up to now.) The legal limit should be lower in some areas than others.
Note that Bangladesh’s contaimination is also because of naturally occuring arsenic in the surrounding rocks.
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