Chemists Without Borders

Health and safety testing

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Loeffler) — Wed, 01 May 2013 17:50:00 +0000

Chemistry affects the public’s health and safety numerous times a day. Every product you use, drink, eat, take, touch, and smell has a chemical component to it. Public health and safety testing companies like NSF International, play a vital role to keep the public safer. They test things like faucets, mechanical plumbing & piping, water treatment chemicals, bottled water, water filters, recreational water products, food, seafood, food equipment, dietary supplements, sport supplements, wastewater treatment units, biosafety cabinetry, automotive parts, flushability, home products, kitchen products, sustainability products, and so much more. Go to www.nsf.org to learn more.

Running dry: Water and sanitation crisis threatens Syrian children

noreply@blogger.com (Josiah Bjorgaard) — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 19:56:00 +0000

From reliefweb:

"A UNICEF-led nationwide assessment – the first covering the water and sanitation sector since fighting began – reveals that in areas affected by conflict water supplies are only available at one-third of pre-crisis levels. Many people in such areas have only 25 litres of water a day, compared with 75 litres two years ago.
The assessment, carried out in cooperation with municipal water departments and local private contractors, identifies six most at-risk areas – Rural Damascus, Idlib, Der Ez-Zor, Homs, Aleppo and al-Raqqa – where people’s ability to access safe water has been most severely restricted.
For example in Der Ez-Zor in eastern Syria, an area where violence was particularly severe, water is being pumped at just 10 per cent of pre-crisis levels."

More at reliefweb...

This situation highlights the need for applicable emergency water purification technologies.

The UN Report is available here

Liberia outlines priorities for rebuilding water and sanitation sector

noreply@blogger.com (Josiah Bjorgaard) — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 18:10:00 +0000

via Global News Network: Liberia

Liberia today unveiled a five-year investment plan which outlines priorities for rebuilding the country’s water supply, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector that had been ravaged by decades of civil conflict. Access to water and sanitation services in Liberia is still low and many facilities are no longer functioning as Liberia recovers from years of war that ended in 2003.

Four out of every ten people still lack access to water, and only a third of the population have access to sanitation services. An estimated 35 percent of existing clinics and schools do not have adequate water and sanitation facilities. Solid waste management services are only available in Monrovia City, covering an estimated 55 percent of the solid waste in the capital.

More at Global News Network: Liberia.

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World AIDS Day, Boston, MA

noreply@blogger.com (Lois) — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 17:47:00 +0000

Rolande Hodel, a member of our Board of Directors, will give the keynote speech at the World AIDS Day event in Boston on November 30. We hope you can attend!

Conference Call

noreply@blogger.com (Lois) — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 16:37:00 +0000

Conference call August 2, 2012 On the call: Bego, Nazneen, Lois (partial notes, I had to leave half-way through) Discussion began about distribution of SONO filters in the areas of Bangladesh that still need them. Filter disposal is a problem? Perhaps due to arsenic but as soon as the contaminated water is removed from the ground there is that problem. Should someone drink the water; arsenic will be excreted and recontaminate the ground. The filters will contaminate in one specific place. Does SONO filter produce enough water per day for all the household uses? Maybe not. Bollywood actor hosted program on water on MagicTV. Suggested rainwater capture. Why is this not already a well-used solution in Bangladesh? It is being used in household and community systems in some places. Would mold or bacteria become a problem? There must be groups that have studies on this. At the Bangldesh Chemical Conference (2010?) there was discussion of the water hyacinth use to adsorb arsenic. Is our focus on the prize-winning focus OK? If our focus were to shift, perhaps that would simply be distracting from the goal of getting arsenic free water to prople who need it. Even if the SONO filters do best as a short term solution prior to getting a community system, how does the marketing get done? Would a distributed marketing system work in Bangladesh? How could we get this to mesh with Dr. Munir?

Clean Water -“Ten million dogs can’t be wrong.” NYTimes

noreply@blogger.com (Lou) — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 18:52:00 +0000

Treated Wastewater Used for Drinking Supplies - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/science/earth/despite-yuck-factor-tre...

February 9, 2012
By FELICITY BARRINGER

SAN DIEGO — Almost hidden in the northern hills, the pilot water treatment plant here does not seem a harbinger of revolution. It cost $13 million, uses long-established technologies and produces a million gallons a day. But the plant’s very existence is a triumph over one of the most stubborn problems facing the nation’s water managers: if they make clean drinking water from wastewater, will the yuck factor keep people from accepting it?

With climate change threatening to diminish water supplies in the fast-growing Southwest, more cities are considering the potential of reclaimed water. A new report from the National Academy of Sciences said that if coastal communities used advanced treatment procedures on the effluent that is now sent out to sea, it could increase the amount of municipal water available by as much as 27 percent. San Diego’s success, 12 years after its City Council recoiled from the toilet-to-tap concept, offers a blueprint for other districts considering wastewater reuse.

For most of the four decades beginning in 1970, the arid West was the fastest-growing region in the country; the population of Nevada quintupled in that period while Arizona’s nearly quadrupled. Continued population growth, unmatched by growth in water storage capacity, makes this a “new era in water management in the United States,” the science group’s report said. “The pressures on water supplies are changing virtually every aspect of municipal, industrial, and agricultural water practice,” it said. Back in 1998, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Research Council, issued a study finding that supplementing stream flows or reservoirs with this water, a process called indirect potable reuse, was acceptable, although only as a last resort. Now, acceptance of reclaimed water for drinking is spreading, if slowly. Funneling reclaimed water into water supplies is being considered in a variety of communities like Miami and Denver (which has experimented with the technology), as well as in drought-ravaged municipalities in Texas like Big Spring. The tiny mountain resort town of Cloudcroft, N.M., mingles reclaimed water with local well water. In Northern Virginia, reclaimed water has flowed into the Occoquan Reservoir for three decades. Still, just one-tenth of 1 percent of municipal wastewater nationally was recycled into local supplies in 2010. Only a handful of systems replenish their reservoirs or groundwater basins with treated wastewater.

The largest is in Orange County, Calif., about 100 miles north of San Diego, where a four-year-old system replenishes the groundwater basin with 70 million gallons of treated effluent daily — about 20 percent of the content of the aquifer. Other sites include El Paso and some areas around Los Angeles. Edmund Archuleta, the president of El Paso Water Utilities, said in an interview that his city recycled all of its wastewater. Most is used for things like cooling industrial plants or watering playing fields, he said, but “it’s been accepted that we’re recharging some of that water into the aquifer” and into the Rio Grande. Globally, the largest population center to adopt the technology is Singapore, home to five million people. Officials say about 15 percent of its water originates from treated effluent, marketed as “NEWater.” Most is used for irrigation or manufacturing; some for drinking.

The original technology for recycling wastewater was developed in the 1950s — involving chemical disinfection, carbon-filtration treatment or both — and is in use on the International Space Station. The bulk of recycled water is used on lawns or golf courses, in factories or as an underground barrier against seawater intrusion. The newest iteration, in use in Orange County, is a three-step process involving fewer chemicals and more filtering. First, wastewater is filtered through string-like microfibers with holes smaller than bacteria and protozoa. Then it goes through reverse osmosis, an energy-intensive process forcing the water through plastic membranes that remove most molecules that are not water. Finally, it is dosed with
hydrogen peroxide and exposed to ultraviolet light, a double-disinfectant process. The result is roughly equivalent to distilled water, Orange County officials say. After touring the $481 million plant in Orange County, visitors are offered a glass of the water. Is it safe? The new National Academy analysis suggests that the risk from potable reuse “does not appear to be any higher, and may be orders of magnitude lower” than any risk from conventional treatment. There are currently no national standards for water reuse processes, only for drinking-water quality.

Of course, the treatment process is much more expensive than tapping local groundwater — in Southern California, about 60 percent more, and in El Paso about four times more. But to remain sustainable, groundwater must be used sparingly. Orange County’s reclaimed water costs $1.80 per thousand gallons when regional water subsidies are factored in. This is similar to what it pays to import either Colorado River water or water from Northern California. Without the benefit of subsidies, reclaimed water’s cost was just 14 percent less than desalinated water’s, which experts say requires 3 to 10 times the energy output.
The bigger hurdle to public acceptance may be psychological. Carol Nemeroff, a psychologist at the University of Southern Maine, said the notion of treated sewage “hooks into the intuitive concept of contagion” and contamination. To overcome this, she said, a city must “unhook the current water from its history.” That proved to be the case in 1998 in San Diego when the water department’s initiative was derided as “toilet to tap” during a bruising City Council campaign. Council members refused to allow further discussion of it.

A 2004 poll commissioned by the San Diego County Water Authority found that 63 percent of respondents opposed reuse. Then the water department began reaching out to customers with discussion groups and public meetings. Members of the Surfrider Foundation, an environmental group, reminded residents that almost every municipal wastewater plant practices water reuse anyway, since discharged treated wastewater is reused downstream. “It isn’t toilet to tap. It’s toilet to treatment to treatment to treatment to tap,” said Belinda Smith, a Surfrider volunteer. Water shortages and rationing, however, did the most to change attitudes. San Diego’s annual rainfall meets about 15 percent of its needs, and the city’s water managers grew worried that as California reeled from droughts, they could have trouble importing water.

In 2009, the third year of a severe drought, Mayor Jerry Sanders met with biotechnology industry executives who told him that water shortages posed a threat to their businesses. “They were talking about moving away from San Diego,” he said. So the mayor quietly switched sides, and the City Council fell into line. “If science is behind you and you can prove that, I think people are willing to listen,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview. “The public is worried about scarcity.”Some people are still put off. Virginia Soderberg, 91, president of the Convair Garden Club in San Diego, called reclaimed water “the end of the world. I wouldn’t even want my cat to drink it.”

But a 2011 poll by the utility showed that local opposition to reuse had dropped to 25 percent. The change of heart found voice on the editorial page of The San Diego Union-Tribune, a onetime opponent, in an editorial titled “The Yuck Factor: Get Over It.” That sentiment was echoed in a cartoon on a California public radio blog depicting a dog with its
nose in a toilet.

The caption? “Ten million dogs can’t be wrong.”

Interesting...

Lou

Un-Damn it!

noreply@blogger.com (Elmo) — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 12:50:00 +0000

Here is some good news for salmon...

Here is the live link:

http://www.video-monitoring.com/construction/olympic/js.htm

Chemists Without Borders in Bangladesh

noreply@blogger.com (Lois) — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 02:44:00 +0000

Chemists Without Borders representatives were invited to Bangladesh University by the Board of Trustees to offer ideas for consideration as the University inaugurates a program of environmental science degrees and the Center for Environmental Research and Development. Ms. Rachel Pokrandt, Co-Director of K-12 Curriculum and Training, Beyond Benign (a green chemistry education enterprise) and I (Professor Lois Ongley, Secretary, Chemists Without Borders and Professor at Unity College in Maine) arrived in Dhaka on March 3.

Dhaka is a city that is at the forefront of some environmental inititatives: most vehicles operate on compressed natural gas rather than gasoline, plastic bags seem to be banned for most shopping with paper or cloth being used by shop keepers if a bag is needed, each light bulb in my hotel room is CF and there is a switch into which you must place your key for the electrical power to be active.

Our hosts have been wonderful, sacrificing their weekend day off on Friday March 4 to show us the sites like the Pink Palace and Lalbagh Fort, the Language Martyrs Monument, and the Botanical Gardens. We got to see the opening moments of the Bangladesh/West Indes cricket match on TV during lunch. The outcome of the game was not what Bangladeshis had hoped for as the West Indes team won decisively.

Education on your mobile device

noreply@blogger.com (Lois) — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 18:47:00 +0000

The Chronicle on Higher Education had an interesting article about textbook manufacturers developing content for mobile phones.

McGraw-Hill to Provide English Instruction and Test Prep Through Cellphones in India
The mobile-phone platform could help teach millions of rural cellphone users who lack access to education, a company official said.

Speak with Conviction

noreply@blogger.com (Bego) — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 01:17:00 +0000

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

Typography Animation project for class

Poem by Taylor Mali (www.TaylorMali.com)

National Research Council Estimates Impact of Human-Caused Global Warming

noreply@blogger.com (Bego) — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 21:22:00 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

The NRC issued a report on July 16, 2010, entitled, "Near-Term Emissions Choices Could Lock in Climate Changes for Centuries to Millenia: Report Estimates Impacts from Various Levels of Warming." These data will inform policy decision-makers. Here are some of the main points, quoted directly:

Increased Confidence About Future Impacts

Although some important future effects of climate change are difficult to quantify, there is now increased confidence in how global warming of various levels would relate to several key impacts, says the report. It lists some of these impacts per degree Celsius (or per 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of global warming, for example (these apply for 1 C to 4 C of warming):

· 5 percent to 10 percent less total rain in southwest North America, the Mediterranean, and southern Africa per degree Celsius of warming.
· 5 percent to 10 percent less streamflow in some river basins, including the Arkansas and Rio Grande, per degree Celsius of warming.
· 5 percent to 15 percent lower yields of some crops, including U.S. and African corn and Indian wheat, per degree Celsius of warming.

What then must we do?

Good News! Clinical Trials of Rotavirus Vaccine Launched

noreply@blogger.com (Bego) — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 02:43:00 +0000

Rotavirus is a diarrheal disease that kills half a million children worldwide every year. Current vaccines do not reach all the children early enough. This new vaccine, which has taken decades of effort to develop, would allow administration at birth and ensure more babies be protected. This map from a CDC page, shows the estimated global distribution of the 800,000 annual deaths caused by rotavirus diarrhea. Read more about this important advance by clicking the title.

A new study shows 77 million Bangladeshis are being exposed to water containing arsenic. CNN's Dan Rivers reports. Jun 21, 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Bego) — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:49:00 +0000

Here's a short update on the arsenic problem in Bangladesh, and how the SONO filter alleviates the problem (click the title above to view the 2:51 minute video). With over 300,000 SONO filters already in place, that leaves some 75 million people in Bangladesh still in need of its benefits. Of course, there are many other countries (including developed countries) which need the same protection. Chemists Without Borders seeks contributions of people's time and money to expand manufacturing and distribution of this highly effective solution both within Bangladesh and elsewhere, so please share this need with your friends and colleagues and encourage their participation. Thanks for reading. [Pictures courtesy of Dr AKM Munir, Kushtia, Bangladesh.]

President Rene Preval Assesses Haiti's Quake Recovery

noreply@blogger.com (Bego) — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 07:01:00 +0000

PBS NewsHour's Ray Suarez talks with Haitian President Rene Preval about the recovery the country still faces, six months after a devastating earthquake. There are many lessons from this. One is that while NGOs' independent work is essential immediately after the disaster, their working in co-ordination with the government is essential as time passes. I recommend you watch this interview:

Martin Fisher (KickStart) Fighting Poverty in Kenya by Selling Water Pumps to Poor Farmers

noreply@blogger.com (Bego) — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 22:46:00 +0000

PBS's Spencer Michels reports on the story of how a California social entrepreneur sees the chance to increase access to clean water in Kenya through the use of foot-pumps. In this segment, there are many lessons for us on how to achieve our goals in the field. I recommend you watch this report:

2009: a great year for open access

noreply@blogger.com (Heather Morrison) — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 07:34:00 +0000

2009 has been a good year for open access; for details, see my December 11, 2009 Dramatic Growth of Open Access.

Happy Holidays!

Irreversible Catastrophic Climate Destabilization

noreply@blogger.com (Bego) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 22:52:00 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

Last Friday's edition of NOW on PBS asks, "Is a coastal catastrophe approaching, and what should we be doing about it?" It specifically addresses the issue of flooding in Bangladesh, currently the 7th most populous country on the planet and one of the most densely populated (1063 per sq km). (The next most populous country is Russia with a mere 8.4 per sq km!) Featured is Dr A. Atiq Rahman, the Executive Director of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies (BCAS) and a Lead Author of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) Chapter-19 on “Assessing Key Vulnerabilities and the Risk from Climate Change”, co-winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Dr Rahman says terms like Global Warming and Climate Change are deceptively euphemistic, and says Irreversible Catastrophic Climate Destabilization is much more accurate and impactful. Where I come from, people might say, "It's time to get the finger out!"

You can watch the segment below. I recommend you view the NOW page also, as the comments are enlightening. For instance, commenter Forrest M. Mims III says,"... land subsidence alone may account for an elevation change of -30 cm over the past several decades," which for me is in the category of "things you never thought of".

''

California Water Policy

noreply@blogger.com (Elmo) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 06:04:00 +0000

I got this letter from my state legislator last week. Posted without comment.

Dear Mr. Xxxxxxxxx:

California’s lack of water could result in more than 800,000 acres of farmland going unplanted this year. And if the current water shortage doesn’t improve, the Central Valley could lose $1.8 billion in agricultural revenues by the end of the year.

But what many people don’t realize is that a large part of our water supply crisis is due to a man-made drought. In 2007, environmentalists persuaded a federal court to drastically cut back intake at the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta water pumps in order to protect a 3-inch fish known as the Delta smelt. These environmentalists argue that the pumps harm the smelt’s habitat and are therefore in violation of the Endangered Species Act.

And now the Delta pumps have been turned off. Officials are predicting that the Central Valley won’t receive any federal water this year and it will only get 15% of the normal supply of state water.

These Delta pumping restrictions must be lifted in order to save our region’s economy and reduce record unemployment. As your representative in the State Assembly, I am taking action to prioritize the economic needs of our region and stop this man-made drought.

If you have any questions about our water supply, or any other topic, please do not hesitate to contact me. It is an honor to serve you in the State Assembly.

Sincerely,

CONNIE CONWAY
Assemblymember, District 34

Nobel Peace Prize goes to US President Obama

noreply@blogger.com (Bego) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 21:06:00 +0000

Congratulations to Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States of America, who has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 2009 "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples". Here's what President Obama had to say:

Good News

noreply@blogger.com (Dr. Rolande) — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 18:58:00 +0000

Good news are a good place to blog.

First of all, winning the Astellas USA award for doing work that has an impact on global health we have written "drug production in Africa" into the history books!
We are pleased that the Astellas USA Foundation in conjunction with the American Cheical Society chose us for this recognition and the $30,000 that came with it.

Please read more about the award on our web site.

Secondly you have to read todays The Los Angeles Times story that I quote here:

Antibodies found that prevent HIV from causing severe AIDS
Scientists were able to isolate two antibodies responsible for resistance to the disease in an African patient. The discovery could be key to the development of a vaccine.

A team based at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla reports today in the journal Science that they have isolated two so-called broadly neutralizing antibodies that can block the action of many strains of HIV, the virus responsible for AIDS.

"This is opening up a whole new area of science," said Dr. Seth F. Berkley, president and chief executive of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, which funded and coordinated the research. Read more....

Medal of Freedom: President Barak Obama & Dr. Muhammad Yunus

noreply@blogger.com (Bego) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 19:35:00 +0000

Once again, Muhammad Yunus tells it like it is. See the abstract of his talk at the National Press Club the same day: http://www.press.org/wire/article.cfm?id=1282. I haven't found any more video yet, so please let me know if you find a link to that.

Welfare for wild horses

noreply@blogger.com (Elmo) — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 02:49:00 +0000

This isn't necessarily a chemistry-related subject, but irony abounds, as the band I am in started working on the song 'Wild Horses' just last Sunday... I used to love to ride when I was younger, and I thought the Mustang was an icon of power and freedom....

Sad.

Click on the title for the link.

ELMO

Quote of the day re: OPEC

noreply@blogger.com (Elmo) — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 02:39:00 +0000

I thought this was well said:

...But what the bloc's members seem to keep forgetting, he said, is that "the Stone Age didn't end because the world ran out of stones, but because there were viable alternatives."

Click the title for the link to the story.

ELMO

Chemists Without Borders has moved!

noreply@blogger.com (Bego) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 05:03:00 +0000

Hi, Everybody,

Sorry to have been gone for so long. Chemists Without Borders has a new mailing address and phone numbers, shown near the top of the left column under the Donate button (which, of course, we encourage you to use often).

Peace,

Bego

Biomass Chemicals: From Green Plants to Chemistry, by Mitch Jacoby

noreply@blogger.com (Bego) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 03:45:00 +0000

July 6, 2009

Chemicals from the Garden: Advances in Biomass Chemistry transform plant matter to valuable chemicals. I recommend this 3-page update on an important area of development.

Another aspect of importance here is emphasized in Mr Jacoby's opening sentence: "Sound scientific ideas sometimes lie in limbo for decades until some event, discovery or urgent need triggers a wave of research." Once again, the Information Age allows us to solve a common problem: saving and storing ideas, etc., with effective retrieval at a later date by people unseen. Inexpensive storage and efficient hypertext search engines make this possible in ways that Dbase, Rbase, etc., never could.

Picture this: Your walking down the company corridor, empty coffee cup in hand, going for a refill. Walking towards you is a colleague with filled coffee cup in hand. You stop and chat to each other about an issue facing you, the company, colleagues, etc. Being the thoughtful, inventive folks that you are, you come up with some relevant ideas. "Oops, got to get back to my office," and you both part ways. The ideas are left hanging in the ether in the corridor like a transient ghost, never to be heard from again. Lost opportunity, lost intellectual property.

It is important for organizations to have systems in place where such ideas can be saved, much like a suggestion box. A wiki or blog is more than adequate to the task because searching is so easy, although more sophisticated tools may be even better. To quote Neil Larson, creator of the award-winning MaxThink and other tools, "The value of information is in how it is organized."

Chemists Without Borders

Health and safety testing

Running dry: Water and sanitation crisis threatens Syrian children

Liberia outlines priorities for rebuilding water and sanitation sector

via Global News Network: Liberia

World AIDS Day, Boston, MA

Conference Call

Clean Water -“Ten million dogs can’t be wrong.” NYTimes

Un-Damn it!

Chemists Without Borders in Bangladesh

Education on your mobile device

Speak with Conviction

National Research Council Estimates Impact of Human-Caused Global Warming

Related articles by Zemanta

Good News! Clinical Trials of Rotavirus Vaccine Launched

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A new study shows 77 million Bangladeshis are being exposed to water containing arsenic. CNN's Dan Rivers reports. Jun 21, 2010

Related articles by Zemanta

President Rene Preval Assesses Haiti's Quake Recovery

Martin Fisher (KickStart) Fighting Poverty in Kenya by Selling Water Pumps to Poor Farmers

2009: a great year for open access

Irreversible Catastrophic Climate Destabilization

California Water Policy

Nobel Peace Prize goes to US President Obama

Good News

Medal of Freedom: President Barak Obama & Dr. Muhammad Yunus

Welfare for wild horses

Quote of the day re: OPEC

Chemists Without Borders has moved!

Biomass Chemicals: From Green Plants to Chemistry, by Mitch Jacoby