Wastewater is an asset, not a liability

          Historically, wastewater treatment started as risk reduction for human health and welfare, migrated to environmental risk reduction, and has now matured into resource recovery and revenue generation. Technology and common practices are in place to treat water as a sustainable resource; we simply can no longer afford to use it once and "throw it in the ocean" nor can we afford the liability of not treating water to our best abilities to protect human health and the environment.

             Specifics, metrics, and detailed examples, not generalizations and platitudes, about recovery of the "water" from wastewater, profitably. It comes down to dollars and cents, a little math, and common sense, and usually much more the first than the last of those. Note: This is a live webinar delivered via WebEx. Session instructions will be emailed to you 24-48 hours prior to the webinar and the morning of the webinar. Webinars are live and interactive and students will have the ability to directly interact with and ask questions of the presenter.

              By 2020 I predict that a new class of distributed systems, powered by advances in our ability to use biotechnology to extract resources, such as energy, from waste, and the dropping cost of industrial automation, will begin to change our approach to managing water globally. Rather than a liability, wastewater will be viewed as an environmental resource, providing energy and clean water to communities and industry, and ushering in a truly sustainable and economical approach to managing our water resources.

China's "Great City" is fully built

               The architects behind the Kingdom Tower -- planned to be the world's first building to reach 1km in height -- have been chosen to build a completely new suburban city from scratch on the outskirts of Chengdu in southwest China. The "Great City" is effectively an entirely new municipality, designed as one whole instead of the chaotic and environmentally inefficient alternative of urban sprawl. The designers -- Adrian Smith +  Gordin Gill Architecture, based in Chicago -- have marked out a 1.3km2 circle surrounded by 1.9km2 of farmland and parks, where residents won't need cars because everything is within a 15-minute walk of the city centre.

         If the model is successful, the Great City will be copied on the edges of China's other megalopolises and their populations continue to boom -- putting pressure on housing, infrastructure and the environment. The 80,000 people expected to live in the Great City would give it a population density of 61,538 people per square kilometre. In London, the most densely populated boroughs in the inner city have a density of around 10,000 people per square kilometre.

           The entire Great City complex -- urban circle and surrounding open park/farmland -- is roughly the same size as Hampsted Heath.The Great City will offer an inner-city experience for residents on the edge of an existing conurbation, rather than something semi-rural that we might recognise -- a good thing, too, as postwar suburban sprawl is a hugely inefficient way of living.

New cures from the bacteria that live in the human body

         In life sciences, we’ll have greater understanding of the dynamics of how our microbiome – the tiny organisms, including bacteria, that live in the human body – influences multiple systems in our body, including our immune systems, metabolic processes and other areas. This will result in seminal discoveries related to a variety of conditions, including autoimmune diseases, pre-term birth and how our metabolism is regulated. Regenerative medicine approaches to creating new tissues and organs from progenitor cells will expand significantly.

       The use of bacteria can be a more gentle, biological and thus also more sustainable alternative. The use of synthetic drugs has been likened to the use of herbicides to get rid of weeds in a lawn. Depending on its intensity, bacterial therapy would be equivalent in this analogy to replanting the lawn or laying down turf. One of the first major breakthroughs in bacteria research was achieved back in the nineteenth century by Robert Koch from Germany.

        The level of training in Germany is very good, as is the research infrastructure. If these excellent framework conditions are used for well-organized and long-term studies, Germany can remain at the forefront of world-class research. Today spectacular breakthroughs are no longer made by individual groups, let alone individual researchers. This is why international cooperation is essential in this field of research.