User talk:Fatima: Difference between revisions

Hi Fatima,

Welcome to the Appropedia wiki. Please make yourself at home! If you need a general wiki-tutorial, Wikieducator has some excellent ones.

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If you have a particular interest or project in mind, go ahead and start it! Feel free to leave me a note on my talk page if you have further questions, need help finding your way around, have a cool idea for a project, or just want to chat. You can also call, text, or email me anytime; contact information is on my user page.

Glad to have you here!

-CurtB

Arsenic

Hi Fatima

I thought you would find this interesting -- you might want to make it your final Appropedia project -- I have good contacts at the NCIIA that could get you in touch with BAAG.--Joshua 13:42, 4 September 2007 (PDT)

Members of the Berkeley Arsenic Alleviation Group (BAAG), supported by an NCIIA Advanced E-Team grant, traveled to Bangladesh this summer to conduct fieldwork in a village in Sonargaon District. They visited Neel Kanda, a small village of about 110 families, from July 2-5, and spent several days visiting professors at two Bangladeshi universities to develop in-country research collaborations.

The goal of the site visit was to better understand the chemical properties of ARUBA (Arsenic Removal Using Bottom Ash), developed by Principal Investigator Ashok Gadgil at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. ARUBA is a low-cost and easily scalable technology that removes arsenic from drinking water, developed specifically for use in Bangladesh where much of the groundwater is contaminated with high levels of arsenic. Though ARUBA has been extensively studied in the laboratory, its effective performance in Bangladeshi water was first verified on BAAG's first trip to Bangladesh in March 2007. At that time, ARUBA's arsenic removal efficiency (measured in grams of ARUBA per milligrams arsenic removed) was shown to be about ten times less than that in the lab. Though ARUBA is cost-competitive (about 8 cents per person per year), it requires a lot of material (about 45 grams per person per day).

Several alternative treatment protocols were developed and tested in the lab before arrival in Bangladesh. It was found that adding ARUBA in consecutive partial doses rather than a full dose all at once improved ARUBA's arsenic removal capacity and that collecting water, letting it sit for some time before treatment, and keeping it well oxygenated could increase total arsenic removal. Each new treatment protocol was tested in the field.

The team received assistance from BRAC (Bangladeshi Rural Advancement Committee), Bangladesh's largest NGO, which helped them identify an appropriate field site and introduced them to village leaders during their first site visit. The team collected water samples from the village and performed basic repeatability experiments at the Sonargaon District BRAC office and more complicated experiments in a make-shift laboratory in Dhaka. The bulk of the arsenic samples were brought to the U.S. for high accuracy Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS) analysis at a Berkeley lab.

The results are promising. ARUBA treatment proved to be repeatable and scalable (more laboratory experiments are necessary). The team demonstrated that ARUBA removes more than half of the arsenic from water within five minutes of treatment! Treatment is completed after approximately 1 hour.