LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) – Here in Clark County, we recycle 99 percent of the water we use indoors via several treatment facilities—but plants like that are a luxury few rural communities can afford. So, what will people there do if the drought gets so bad the pipes run dry?
Graduate students in UNLV’s School of Engineering may be close to finding an answer.
As the Western US enters its 23rd year of drought, communities that rely on Colorado River water have had to get creative.
“It’s just a paradigm shift, we used to think of wastewater as something dirty, something we need to get rid of, but now we have to look at wastewater as a possible source of water supply. ”
Here in the Las Vegas Valley, we already recycle almost all of the water we use indoors, but that infrastructure is too expensive for smaller towns.
“We are finding ways to make water affordable for our rural communities.”
Dr. Eakalak Kahn and his team of grad students at the Howard Hughes College of Engineering at UNLV think they’ve found a small-scale solution to a much larger problem. It’s a new way to clean water.
“So this is Biochar one of the major filtration media that we’re going to use in our treatment, and Biochar is less expensive than most media for water and base water treatment,” he says.
Dr. Kahn tells us Biochar is cheap and easy to produce – they just burn agricultural waste, like corn and rice husks, at extremely high temperatures. The end product is not only ultra-absorbent but also good for the water.
“And that’s the job of the Biochar, is to remove major contaminants. Also, it can recover nutrients, one of the major components in wastewater is nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous, and we want to recover these nutrients.”
Biochar’s just one piece of the engineering puzzle. The UNLV engineering team has also developed has a sustainable, solar-powered distillation unit to use it.
They hope to begin lab testing next year, followed by field testing down in Cal-Neva-Ari.
Dr. Khan tells FOX5, they plan to start testing with just a couple of homes, and then expand to multiple units.
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