Reclaim Blog

Over many weeks, the USF Reclaim team of graduate students met, discussed, planned, filmed, and edited their next campaign video for submission to the Environmental Engineering Science Foundation (EESF)/Association of Environmental Engineers and Science Professor’s (AEESP) video contest. They decided to make a video to mimic other successful social media awareness and fundraising campaigns such as the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge and the 22-pushup challenge. Using informational clips and a challenge, the video seeks to inspire and challenge watchers to change their habits to #ChangeClimateChange and post their own videos to reach an even larger audience.

Now that you have watched the video, we challenge you to #ChangeClimateChange. Just make a simple 10 second video on your smart phone, post on Facebook/Twitter with the hash tag, and challenge your friends and family. Periodically we hope to create a compilation of the best videos submitted. We hope we can create even more of a global movement to address this grand challenge.

EPA SSWR Water Research Webinar

Wednesday, December 14 (2-3 p.m. East Coast Time)

 Systems View of Nutrient Management – Nutrient Recovery from Human Urine

Free registration link: (https://www.epa.gov/water-research/water-research-webinar-series).

Webinar Description.  Urine is the primary source of phosphorus and nitrogen in municipal wastewater.  Accordingly, it is important to consider for nutrient management. This webinar will cover new science on recovering nutrients from human urine.  This includes issues of source separation in buildings, use at the farm, review of health issues, and factors influencing the environmental sustainability of nutrient management strategies.   The webinar is an output of preliminary scientific research and demonstrations achieved from the EPA Science to Achieve Results (STAR) Centers for Water Research on National Priorities Related to a Systems View of Nutrient Management.

Agenda

1. Introduction: Dr. Colleen Naughton provides a brief introduction.
2. Building: Waterless urinals can serve a two-fold benefit of water conservation and implementation of urinesource separation system. However, due to urine’s composition and the presence of the urease enzyme that hydrolyzes urea, valuable nutrients readily precipitate in the urinal fixtures and pipes. This hinders both water conservation and nutrient recovery efforts because of maintenance problems. Dr. Treavor Boyer will review controlled laboratory experiments and a demonstration study that increases our understanding of the urea hydrolysis process in waterless urinals by mimicking and inhibiting urea hydrolysis so as to benefit water conservation and nutrient recovery.
3. Environmental Sustainability:Nutrients embedded in wastewater or stormwater can be managed via different technologies at different scales.   Dr. Qiong Zhang will discuss the factors influencing environmental sustainability ofnutrient management strategies including end applications, design configurations, implementation locations, and scale of implementations.
4. Health: Source separated urine typically contains pharmaceuticals and microorganisms.   Dr. Krista Wigginton will review the occurrence of pharmaceuticals and microorganisms in source separated urine as it is transformed into fertilizer products. Her project team has studied the impact of storage, struvite precipitation, and pasteurization on the levels and types of contaminants in urine.
5. Farm: Source separated urine has been shown to work well as a crop fertilizer.  Mr. Abraham Noe-Hays will discuss work on applying urine-derived fertilizer products to grow crops on a research farm in Vermont. Urine was collected from public toilets (>1,000 users) and turned into fertilizer. Lettuce and carrots were grown over two seasons in test field plots amended with urine, urine spiked with additional pharmaceuticals, urine-derived struvite, and synthetic fertilizer.
6. Questions

Presenters

 Colleen Naughton, University of South Florida, National Center for Reinventing Aging    Infrastructure for Nutrient Management.  Dr. Naughton is a postdoctoral research associate in Civil  and Environmental Engineering at the University of South Florida where she also serves as the  administrative assistant for the National Center for Reinventing Aging Infrastructure for Nutrient  Management.   Her research is focused around the food-water-energy nexus and coupling natural  and human systems, integrating environmental sustainability and ethnographic analyses with local  and global issues of sustainable development.

 Treavor Boyer, Arizona State University, National Center for Reinventing Aging Infrastructure for  Nutrient Management.  Dr. Boyer is an associate professor on the School of Sustainable Engineering  and the Built Environment at Arizona State University. Before joining ASU, he was an Associate  Professor in the Department of Environmental Engineering Sciences at the University of Florida.  His research is broadly focused on water sustainability, and spans drinking water and wastewater  treatment, and natural aquatic systems.

 Qiong Zhang, University of South Florida, National Center for Reinventing Aging  Infrastructure  for Nutrient Management. Dr. Zhang is an associate professor of Civil and  Environmental  Engineering at the University of South Florida. Prior to joining USF, she worked  as the operations  manager for the Sustainable Futures Institute at Michigan Tech. She has  sponsored research  projects in the areas of green engineering and sustainability, life cycle  assessment, waste-based  resource recovery, system modeling of environmental technology  adoption and critical  infrastructures resiliency, and carbon footprint accounting of water and  wastewater technologies  and strategies.

Krista Wigginton, University of Michigan, WE&RF’s National Research Center for  Resource Recovery and Nutrient Management.  Dr. Wigginton is an assistant professor of  Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Michigan. Prior to joining the  faculty at UM, she was an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her  research focuses on applications of environmental biotechnology in drinking water and  wastewater treatment. In particular, her research group develops new methods to detect and  analyze the fate of emerging pollutants in the environment.

Abraham Noe-Hays, Rich Earth Institute, WE&RF’s National Research Center for Resource  Recovery and Nutrient Management.  Mr. Noe-Hays is a founder of the Rich Earth Institute and has  been working with dry sanitation systems since 1990. He holds a BA in Human Ecology with  concentrations in agroecology and compost science from the College of the Atlantic, where his  interest  in recycling human manure led to an internship at Woods End Research Laboratory and his  thesis  project, “An Experiment in Thermophilic Composting.”

On November 4, the University of South Florida hosted the 2016 Kappe Lecturer.  The Kappe Lecture Series was inaugurated by the Academy of Environmental Engineers & Scientists in 1989 to share the knowledge of today’s practitioners with tomorrow’s environmental engineers and scientists. This year’s Kappe Lecturer was Dr. Sudhir Murthy who is the Innovations Chief at DC Water.

Dr. Murthy’s talk was on “Maximizing Process Intensification and Resource Recovery- from Theory to Practice.”  The stand-room audience consisted of students, faculty, and practitioners.  Dr. Murthy provided many examples in this talk about new approaches for process intensification that use or augment existing infrastructure in new ways. His presentation described the continuing research journey for developing an intensification and resource recovery program within existing infrastructure at DC Water, with little room to expand while meeting new stringent nutrient permits and managing combined sewer flows.  One point of his talk was that understanding and addressing process limitations is key to bring about intensification.

A pdf copy of Dr. Murthy’s November 4 presentation is located here: http://www.aaees.org/downloadcenter/presentations/2016Kappe-SudhirMurthy.pdf

Dr. Murthy visits Northwest Regional Water Reclamation Facility with Hillsborough County staff and students and faculty from the University of South Florida.

Dr. James Mihelcic introduces the 2016 Kappe Lecturer, Dr. Sudhir Murthy of DC Water

PDF of Flier Here

Washington, D.C. August 4, 2016 — Dr. Ryan Locicero of The University of South Florida has been awarded a AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowship with a placement at the National Science Foundation – Directorate for Computer Information Science and Engineering.

Dr. Locicero is among 266 scientists and engineers who will spend a year serving professionally in federal agencies and congressional offices. The U.S. government benefits from the contributions of AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellows who are highly trained scientists and engineers. Fellows, in turn, learn first-hand about policymaking and implementation at the federal level.

The fellowships are operated as part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) mandate to “advance science and serve society.” The aim is to foster evidence-based policy and practice by engaging scientists, social scientists, medical professionals, and engineers from a broad range of disciplines, backgrounds, and career stages to apply their knowledge and analytical skills for well-informed policies, regulations, and programs, and to build leadership capacity for a strong science and technology enterprise that benefits all people.

The 2016-17 class is comprised of 266 fellows sponsored by AAAS and partner societies. Of these, 35 fellows are serving in Congress, and 231 in the executive branch among 17 agencies or departments including overseas missions.

“We are excited to welcome another new class – the 44th – of fellows who are passionate about connecting science and technology with public policy,” said Cynthia Robinson, director of the AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowships (STPF) program. “The complex challenges facing society call for civic engagement of scientists and engineers, now perhaps more than ever.”

Since the program’s inception in 1973, over 3,300 fellows have supported congressional offices, executive branch agencies and departments, and the judicial branch seeding virtually every corner of Washington D.C. and beyond with a high caliber of scientific know-how. After the fellowship, some fellows return to their previous positions or institutions. Others remain in policy, working at the federal, state, regional, or international levels. Many pursue new careers in industry and nonprofit organizations. Those who return to academia teach and mentor new generations to understand the policy context for research and the importance of science communication.

“Alumni of the Science & Technology Policy Fellowship program are uniquely equipped with both policy know-how as well as advanced expertise in science and engineering. Fellows go on from the program to contribute to the welfare of the nation and citizens around the world,” said Robinson.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science (www.sciencemag.org) as well as Science Translational Medicine, Science Signaling, a digital, open-access journal, Science Advances, Science Immunology, and Science Robotics. AAAS was founded in 1848 and includes nearly 250 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals. Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world. The non-profit AAAS (www.aaas.org) is open to all and fulfills its mission to “advance science and serve society” through initiatives in science policy, international programs, science education, public engagement, and more. For the latest research news, log onto EurekAlert! (www.eurekalert.org), the premier science-news Web site, a service of AAAS. See www.aaas.org.

For more information on AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowships, visit www.aaas.org/stpf.