A packed room with 500 people cheering and clapping hands in front of the stage. Walls covered with photos of rock icons like Bowie, Rolling Stones and Joni Mitchell. Am I really at a conference on small scale water and sanitation?
Yes – the conference organisers had the good taste of staging the VAK2019 conference on circular water and sanitation solutions in the Tylösand hotel whose proprietor Per Gessle (Roxette) has turned the establishment into a permanent rock and pop art collection. For two days, these rock and pop culture giants look down at us from their passe-partouts, peeking out from behind the sales materials and pop-up stores of mini-sewage treatment plants, filters, tanks and toilet seats. And it feels… just right.
David Bowie, photographed by Mick Rock. Rebel rebel!Rock icons peeking out behind sales screens.
Come on. Why should there the be even the faintest connection between rock ’n roll and something as unsexy as water and sanitation, you ask?
Because there’s a revolution coming in water and sanitation. The emerging shift to a circular water economy is an outright revolt against age-old principles and norms. A new generation of professionals and consumers are taking up a fight against the burden of history, breaking out of traditions, and charting a new and independent path. If that isn’t Rock ’n Roll, then nothing is.
Maybe I’m getting carried away by the atmosphere in the company of like-minded. So let’s do a recap.
Essentially, most of our so called ”modern” water systems are based on principles of linear transport, which hail from the Middle East and Meditteranean great cultures. The flush toilet is more than 3000 years old. Although the Roman Empire went down their technology, organization and water legislation lived on and was picked up as an ideal in Europe’s 19th century modernisation processes. ”I will turn Paris into a Rome of today” said Baron von Haussmann, as he led the cleaning up of the city and built an extensive sewer network (Reid 1991). The ”Modern Infrastructure Ideal” of networked water and sewerage systems that still dominate the cities of the world are not modern. Essentially, they are antique.
“Les Egouts” of the Parisian sewers. Photo in the US public domain.
But the global water regime is now under pressure of a magnitude it has not seen since the collapse of the Roman Empire. Why? Due to its inherent logic requiring unrestrained and stable supply of raw water. But worldwide, water scarcity and climate change are now very real.
This transformative pressure has already led to change. Waste water is reused in Spain, Portugal, Israel, Greece, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, the United States and China. Especially for irrigation purposes in agriculture. At 60% of all irrigated agricultural land in Israel, recycled wastewater is used. Also so-called “urban re-use” is on the rise, e.g. flushing, cleaning, golf courses etc. And it is economically beneficial. A study in Hong Kong showed that investment in treatment and reuse of gray water for toilet flushing at property level is profitable already after five years of operation.
But Australia and Hong Kong is very far away. Is re-use of wastewater realistic in Sweden? Two things are clearly pushing us in this direction: the hunt for water and the hunt for energy.
Water is already in short supply in parts of Sweden. We are repeatedly affected by drought, especially during the summer months. More than half of Sweden’s municipalities reported water shortages 2018 and 85 of them issued irrigation bans or other restrictions. Last year Värmdö municipality terminated the service agreement with one of the golf clubs in the municipality. No more tap water for the fairways and greens.
So why not look for opportunities to use the freshwater once more? A number of researchers and students from KTH now investigate precisely this on seven islands in the Swedish, Finnish and Åland archipelago. Within the Circular Water Challenge, as the project is called, we work with the local people, the business community, the municipalities and county councils, and with other experts. Lessons learned on these micro-systems will benefit many others. Together with IVL, KTH also runs Hammarby Sjöstadsverk where we investigate how we can improve costs and performance of circular technology.
Secondly, new requirements for energy efficiency in buildings drive property owners to recover the heat in the wastewater. Some property owners are now thinking about the next step. They investigate the possibilities of reusing the actual hot water. Why not spin around the hot water for showers and basins? This is already happening and in a FORMAS-funded project we investigate what this can mean in the long run.
Yes, but this is only marginal, you might say, what would a few islands or isolated properties matter? The thing is that this is always how technology shifts begin. They start in the margin, in so-called “niches”. We already see municipalities that are planning for entire districts based on a circular principle, such as in Helsingborg. And then things start to happen with the large systems.
So when is the revolution coming? It might come sooner than we think. As I wrote in a blog over a year ago we could face a future where network consumers use both less water and energy. And this may trigger a spiral that make the systems change unexpectedly fast. Surely, we are just in the beginning of the revolution and much work remains.
But I say like Bob Dylan: ”I know a change is gonna come, oh yes it will.”
New water innovations are needed to secure freshwater supply for human use, even in the Nordics that are typically perceived as water secure nations. Cryo-desalination, also known as freeze-melt desalination or freeze-thaw desalination, allows to obtain fresh water by freezing seawater. Is that even possible, how energy efficient is it and why is it not implemented yet?
In pursuit of new methods to obtain freshwater
Global availability of clean water is one of the Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations for 2030. The rise of global temperatures due to climate change is a major problem impacting every continent and threatening the ability to secure SDG 6. In many parts of the world the water footprint has already exceeded sustainable levels, whereas due to the global dimension of water consumption, many countries have significant impact on water consumption and pollution elsewhere. Looking into the future, it is important to think creatively about the types of innovations that will form tomorrow’s toolbox for securing not only water but also the health of ecosystems. Desalination is a very attractive nature inspired solution for obtaining fresh water from the seawater, which comprises 97% of the water in the world and yet has a marginal role in human water consumption. Traditional desalination processes (e.g. thermal evaporation, membrane processes) despite having improved performance over the years, they still lack sustainability and have systemic problems (e.g. linked to pollutants and membrane fouling).
The sustainability potential of cryo-desalination as opposed to traditional desalination is higher if we consider energy demand over the entire process. As the melting of ice takes approximately 7 times less energy than boiling water, cryo-desalination has the potential to be more energy efficient. In addition, since this approach does not rely on any filters in it can be fully sustainable form the perspective of new materials usage as well.
What is cryo-desalination? Cryo-desalination, the separation of water and salt upon freezing, utilizes the natural tendency of water to push out salt upon freezing. In practice, one utilizes energy to cool water and form ice. As ice is forming it expels most of the salt, resulting to the so called brine, which is very highly concentrated saltwater. Then the ice and brine are separated followed by the warming up of the remaining ice in order to obtain the fresh water.
Most of the energy required for the freezing and melting of ice can be recovered by an external thermal bath and coupling to a process that has excess cold energy such as liquid natural gas. Thereby, this technology can be applied equally to both cold and warm climates. The ice-brine separation is the critical step that defines the amount of seawater that can be obtained. There is a difficulty here though since during freezing salt and water mix down to microscopic level forming small brine pockets inside the ice. Understanding the water-salt separation mechanism could therefore be an important part of creating better technological solutions for cryo-desalination.
A schematic describing the steps in cryo-desalination (also known as freeze-melt desalination). Most of the energy required of the cooling and heating can be recycled, whereas the ice-brine separation limits the amount of fresh water that can be obtained.
From water molecules to societal mainstreaming
There is no doubt that cryo-desalination is an expanding field of innovation with potential to address challenges of water insecurity. Nevertheless, few initiatives bridge this fundamental understanding of water with implications of the technology for market and societal mainstreaming.
Importantly, we find that a more broadly defined interdisciplinary approach could be beneficial for advancing cryo-desalination. It could for example combine basic research at the molecular level, with engineering and the social sciences, and thereby attempt to explore new connections across different fields of knowledge, with water as the common element. How might a molecular study of water become combined with insights from a social study of key water players in a growing city such as Stockholm to deepen insights about its feasibility?
A combination of field observations and interviews with water experts, energy and water utility companies but also business actors could provide a better insight into whether decisions about future investments in different water innovation portfolios can include more radical solutions. We know that insights from basic research such as from theoretical physics are crucial for solving complex water questions at the molecular level, but how could we further couple these investigations with other important fields of study?
Creating a safe space for new partnerships
Entering the recent Skolar Award competition which took place in Finland has been an incentive to push ourselves to think outside the box.
As water researchers ourselves (from theoretical physics and the social sciences), we have entered what might at times feel like an uncomfortable partnership. Because of the distance, we sometimes feel between our own disciplines. Moving forward however, we are excited to explore how this new partnership around cryo-desalination could provide a platform for asking a different set of questions around water that joins insights from molecular and societal perspectives.
Foivos Perakis
Assistant Professor at Stockholm University. Timos Kaprouzoglou
Researcher, Division of History, Science, Technology and Environment, KTH.
Research coordinator of the WaterCentre@KTH.
Every year around this time we do the accounts. What have we done in the past year? We look back to discern things that happened which distinguishes this year from other years. We search for things that stand out as a deviation from routine. Maybe it has to do with modern Western view on life as a linear journey with a distinct beginning and a definitive end. Maybe in other cultures, where life and death are just stages in the perpetual cycle of generations, this obsession of progress is less marked. In fact, most of our lives is about repetition anyway. But an end-of-year blog summing up things that have remainedexactly the same will not be very interesting reading. So let me first give you the accounts. Then I’ll return to why life in the future might be more circular.
To communicate some of the cool KTH water research, we produced the exhibition ”Get Wet” for the KTH library which has thousands of visitors every day! Another new feature was the Water Expert Portal aimed at making it easier to find relevant water experts at KTH.
Speaking of experts. The visit of this year’s Stockholm Water Prize Laureates; Mark van Loosdrecht and Bruce Rittmann, was another highlight. These superstar experts spent a whole morning at KTH talking with students and staff about their water research.
Mark van Loosdrecht and Bruce Rittmann, Stockholm Water Prize Laureates 2018 visiting KTH
In May, KTH signed a new partnership agreement with Värmdö Municipality. This partnership is already a very lively one, with project courses by master students, field trials of more sustainable desalination technology, and preparation of a new testbed for small-scale water supply.
Deshira Flankör, Mayor of Värmdö, and Muriel Beser Hugosson, Head of ABE school, at partnership dialogue in May
Our collaboration with IVL, SEI and City of Stockholm has also deepened in the course of the year. Through our collaboration initiatives, we have been able to catalyse several new research projects.
In the MISTRA InfraMaint programme, old networks for piped water and transport meets the digital age. How can sensors and artificial intelligence change the way we manage infrastructure? KTH contributes knowledge from structural engineering, environmental economics and industrial management, in close collaboration with the city of Stockholm. The programme runs for 4 + 4 years and comprises a broad range of actors, coordinated by RISE.
In a new Formas-funded project, a KTH team with competence in energy, water and innovation studies collaborate with ten private and public organisations to understand the system effects of on-property technology for water and heat recovery. A year ago I wrote a blog post about this phenomenon, and its fantastic that we now can learn more about it together with other actors.
We also congratulate our new colleague Dr Timos Karpouzoglou for managing to secure a grant from Formas to compare informal water provision systems in low-income areas of the metro regions of Nairobi and Delhi. These new projects, including a generous contribution from the city of Stockholm, means 25 fresh millions (kronor) to KTH. Not bad.
In this not so distant future we will need new ways of managing water. The key will be to go from linear flows to circular. Every kid in elementary school knows the hydrological cycle. Yet, all our technical systems for water in human settlements have adopted a linear approach. In the linear approach, water is just a transport medium for carrying human waste. Cheap and easy. But it depends on nature’s moderation of the hydrological cycle, and a cycle turn-around fast enough for our ever-growing demand.
During 2018 we launched the ”Circular Water Challenge”. In the coming year, we will work with communities and students on eight islands in the Baltic Sea to look for solutions for water scarcity, where re-use of water will be at the centre stage. If you are interested in this project please contact Christian Pleijel at KTH Executive School.
Kick-off for Circular Water Challenge, at Artipelag on Värmdö, in Nov 2018
Moreover, we have begun building a wide coalition for circular water solutions. What started as an attempt to write a Vinnova application will hopefully grow into a national knowledge network for circular water technologies, including actors from municipalities and public agencies, private sector and academia. Curious? Drop us a line!
Changing from the linear to the circular will require not just a shift of knowledge and practices. It also requires a shift of attitude. We need to challenge our own ideas about what wastewater is and can be used for. Take the example of Pu:Rest, a beer produced in 2018 by our partner IVL and the Carnegie Breweries. A crisp nice lager made out of wastewater from the Hammarby Sjöstadsverk, the experimental treatment plant co-owned by KTH and IVL. Kudos to IVL and Carnegie for that!
Beer brewed on wastewater from Hammarby Sjöstadsverk
In the future perhaps ”recycled” beer will be the standard drink at our monthly WaterPubs. Quite naturally, circular water approaches will become more common as water becomes more scarce. Since water is life, maybe our lives will also be more circular.
Happy New Year!
David Nilsson
Director of the WaterCentre@KTH
Associate Professor in History of Science, Technology and Environment
I fjol fick jag tillfället att medverka som samtalsledare på MRF – en filmfestival för mänskliga rättigheter. Filmen ”There will be water” kopplade till det 6:e globala hållbarhetsmålet ”Säkerställa tillgång och hållbar vatten- och sanitetsförvaltning för alla”.
Globalt sett har utvecklingen gått framåt och milleniemålet att halvera antalet utan tillgång till rent vatten uppnåddes i flera länder. Men ca 844 miljoner människor saknar ändå tillgång till rent dricksvatten, och många fler saknar tillgång till de enklaste former av sanitet (toaletter). Det mesta avloppsvatten släpps ut orenat i miljön (WHO & UNICEF, 2017). Utmaningen är stor för att åstadkomma adekvat skydd av både miljö och människors hälsa.
Kvinnor och flickor blir särskilt missgynnade vid avsaknad av rent vatten, sanitet och bristande hygien. Förlorad tid, sjukdomar, och attityder och tabun associerade med mens leder till förlorade skoldagar och slutligen lägre utbildning och förlorade arbetstillfällen.
Dessutom är vatten inte bara en grundläggande förutsättning för mänsklig hälsa och välbefinnande, utan också en förutsättning för jordbruk och energiförsörjning.
Filmen som jag och skoleleverna såg handlade om en forskares till synes enkla men ambitiösa mål att skapa vatten, energi och mat i öknen, genom ett system med solenergi för avsaltning och matodlingar. Ett storslaget ingenjörsprojekt där medverkande kämpade under hård tidspress. Som lyckades… men sedan stötte på problem när finansiärerna drog sig ur. Fallgroparna är många, som eldsjälen i filmen fick erfara.
Utmaningarna inom vatten, sanitet, hygien, mat -och energiförsörjning är stora och komplexa. Även om man tycker sig ha den ultimata tekniska lösningen, kan det brista på grund av faktorer som kanske är svårare att påverka, t.ex. politik, samhällsstrukturer, finansiering, långsiktig hållbarhet, knyckfullt väder och förändrat klimat. Alltså både mänskliga, ekonomiska och miljömässiga faktorer, till synes utanför vår kontroll.
Att mötas och diskutera grundläggande frågor med nyfikna gymnasieungdomar är spännande och angeläget. I dessa dagar av ”fake news” och misstro mot fakta kanske det blir ännu viktigare att lämna de digitala forumen för att mötas i person. Dessutom får man raka och viktiga frågor, som kanske inte kan besvaras i en mening, men som vi alla gott kan fundera på, till exempel:
”Om det är så lätt att rena vatten och det är sån vattenbrist i tex mellanöstern, och om man är orolig över konflikter med brist på vatten som orsak – varför renar man helt enkelt inte vattnet?!”
”Är det inte lätt att bli frustrerad när inget görs?”
Vi har också här i Sverige anledning att fundera på hållbarhetsmålen, och mål 6 i ljuset av mänskliga rättigheter. Vi har människor som lever på samhällets marginaler som är särskilt utsatta och som bl.a. inte har regelbunden tillgång till vatten, sanitet och hygien (Davis & Ryan, 2017).
Dessutom har de tre senaste åren varit ovanligt torra, vilket ledde till vattenbrist på stora håll i Sverige, särskilt vid öar och kustområden. För enskilda brunnsägare, som kanske saknar kunskap och kapacitet att hantera vattenbrist och överhuvudtaget kontrollera eller åtgärda vattnets kvalitet, kan detta vara en stor utmaning, och något det svenska samhället kommer behöva planera för och hantera. I dagsläget saknas t.ex. en helhetlig kunskap baserad på systematiskt insamlade data om vattenkvaliteten hos hushåll med enskilda brunnar (SCB, 2017). Nyligen kom också betänkandet från den statliga utredningen ”Vägar till hållbara vattentjänster” som tittar just på småskaliga VA-lösningar. Utan tvekan kommer små och enskilda anläggningar bli en viktig fråga i Sverige framöver.
Det finns trots allt anledning att leva hoppfullt, att lära och att sträva mot förändring och förbättring. Utvecklingen har globalt sett gått framåt, och långt fler människor har tillgång till grundläggande rättigheter än vid millennieskiftet. Men kanske behöver vi tänka om, vara lyhörda och samarbeta med andra aktörer än de från vår egen bakgrund, ämnesområde, kultur och gärna över generationsgränser för att förverkliga den värld vi vill ha. VI har så oerhört mycket att vinna genom att mötas och lära av varandra.
Ett exempel av utbyte omkring vatten, sanitet, hygien och nutrition hittar ni här: WASHnut, vilket också porträtterats som del av UR skola, riktat mot gymnasieungdomar och förstagångsväljare.
Helfrid Schulte Herbrüggen Vattenexpert på Ecoloop AB, affilierad forskare vid KTH
Photo: Rymdstyrelsen/Copernicus Sentinel data 2017′ and 2018′ for Sentinel data/Google.
This was a summer to remember! Swedes are normally not spoilt with sunshine and we know how to complain about too much rain and too many mosquitoes. But this year most of us got more than we bargained for. July was extraordinarily hot and dry, it shows on satellite images. Major Tom agrees from his spaceship; Sweden has turned dry and brown.
The weather is always unpredictable, some may say, and next year we could find ourselves back in umbrella and long-john mode. This may be true in the short run. But this summer has shown us a glimpse, and a very hands-on experience, of the future. Climatologists, scientists and well-known weathermen like Pär Holmgren left no trace of a doubt: the stable ‘heat dome’ over Sweden (värmekupol) was linked to the ongoing process of global warming.
Very recently, researchers linked to the Stockholm Resilience Centre warned about the jittery behaviour of our climate. Some rather complex interactions between the atmosphere, the land masses and our oceans may create “tipping elements” in the planet’s temperature. We may therefore – the researchers suggest – be heading for a faster warming than earlier predicted; towards a permanent ”hot house” of 4-5 degrees above the pre-industrial mean temperature. As a matter of coincidence, this was exactly the temperature rise recorded in Sweden during the month of July, compared to the long-term average.
Mean temperature in July 2018, compared to long-term average. Source: SMHI, https://www.smhi.se/klimatdata/meteorologi/kartor/showImg.php?par=tmpAvvPrevMon
What we have seen this summer is most likely a first serving of what is to come. Thanks to this extreme summer, we can also start to grasp the consequences of a warmer world also in Sweden. And I’m not thinking about how to chill our bag-in-box-rosé on the beach.
Wild fires have spread across Sweden, at a scale never witnessed before. Tens of thousands of hectares of forest land have gone up in smoke, with inhabitants of entire villages having to flee. Our “arctic wildfires” made headlines all over the world. This said, ours were nothing compared to the massive wildfires still raging in California or the fires in Greece that left almost a hundred people dead.
The Swedish agriculture has taken a huge blow; with crops devastated in large parts of the country and livestock being sent to slaughter as the feed supply dries up. Swedish agriculture is largely rain fed with rather small acreage under irrigation. So when there is no rain, there is no crop. Farmers with irrigation installations have in some places been barred from using them due to water scarcity.
The groundwater levels in small reservoirs have been low or very low throughout Sweden which has not only created problems for the agriculture, but also for municipal drinking water supply. This year, over 100 municipalities introduced irrigation bans or other measures to save on the drinking water supplies. Even Stockholm, drawing water from the huge basin of Lake Mälaren, noted capacity problems as people were filling up their swimming pools and watering lawns in the early summer months. On the national level, the agency Livsmedelsverket has issued recommendations for water saving, and the drought has been a real test for national crisis coordination. As if this was not enough, the national food agency warned that the warm weather can increase the risk for cyanobacteria, adding water quality risks to the shortage of supply.
All these “new “ water-related problems of 2018 almost made me forget the “old” climate challenges. We still have to deal with increased flood events due to heavy rainstorms, and with the sea level rise.
All doom and gloom? At least we can give the Swedish Environmental Protection agency right. In a 2016 report, the agency predicted that climate change will pose serious challenges to our current conventional water infrastructure.
In some ways, we should be thankful for this summer. It was a wormhole in the time warp; an exclusive pre-screening of a not very distant future. It is also a necessary wake-up call. We need to get serious about reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. For water management, the summer of ’18 tells us that “business as usual” will not be an option. On the whole, water will become more rare, unpredictable and expensive, and our infrastructure will have to follow new design principles. Designs that are more resilient and less wasteful. Designs that promote the principles of reduce and re-use; designs that don’t presuppose that we mix our precious water with human faeces. Designs for a warm, but also sustainable, future society.
Author
New water innovations are needed to secure freshwater supply for human use, even in the Nordics that are typically perceived as water secure nations. Cryo-desalination, also known as freeze-melt desalination or freeze-thaw desalination, allows to obtain fresh water by freezing seawater. Is that even possible, how energy efficient is it and why is it not implemented yet?
Globalt sett har utvecklingen gått framåt och milleniemålet att halvera antalet utan tillgång till rent vatten uppnåddes i flera länder. Men ca 844 miljoner människor saknar ändå tillgång till rent dricksvatten, och många fler saknar tillgång till de enklaste former av sanitet (toaletter). Det mesta avloppsvatten släpps ut orenat i miljön (
