By Robert Kutter
This year, we want to make The Sustainability Review (TSR) more accessible and reach a wider audience. We’ve made changes to TSR’s format to help meet these goals. But before talking about these changes, I’d like to briefly explain why I think engaging a wide audience is so important in sustainability.
By R.F. “Rick” Shangraw, Jr.
If you’ve ever wondered why sustainability is so difficult to achieve, consider the Thanksgiving dinner. Each year in homes across our nation, many hours of preparation go into making a big meal that is consumed in a fraction of that time, followed by a lengthy cleanup effort and several days of leftovers. While overly simplistic, it’s an example of the inherent difficulties in balancing production and consumption while also managing their byproducts of waste and surplus.
Whether the goal is wise use of natural resources or economic stability, achieving stasis—the state of optimal balance—is a highly dynamic process that requires timely intervention to keep systems in check. Many experts agree that a variety of factors, including exponential population growth, are increasing the frequency and severity of change in many previously “stable” ecosystems.
As a result, there is an urgent need for more rapid innovation in response to changes in our natural and societal ecosystems in order to sustain or improve living standards and protect our planet. Research universities can play an important role in catalyzing this innovation, but only if they learn to accelerate the pace of discovery and improve the mechanisms for quickly driving these discoveries into the marketplace. In particular, we desperately need innovations that enable society to identify and correct imbalances earlier to prevent cascading effects.
by Morgan Levy, UC Berkeley, Energy & Resources Group
This is one part of a joint Art & Research entry. See the corresponding art piece here.
Hormones, antidepressants, antibiotics, and chemicals from personal care products have been founds in waterways nationwide (1). Most wastewater treatment plants are not equipped to filter pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) from treated wastewater and existing treatment processes do so with varying levels of success (2). Thus contaminants not removed during treatment can enter water systems such as freshwater streams and rivers, canals, lakes and reservoirs, groundwater aquifers, estuaries, and oceans (2, 3). Active pharmaceutical compounds are robust and persist in the environment. Pharmaceuticals are specifically made to withstand digestion processes in human (and animal) bodies, and some drug compounds will leave sewage plants at concentrations that are just as strong as when the water entered the sewer system (4, 5).
Two studies from the South San Francisco Bay (“South Bay”) in northern California demonstrate a geographically specific, yet nationally representative example of how PPCP contaminants enter and persist in our linked natural and human environment.
This is one part of a joint Art & Research entry. See the corresponding research piece here.
In the spirit of cure-alls and tonics of a less-regulated medical era, Alviso’s Medicinal All-Salt harvests the bounty of a unique yet-unregulated pharmaceutical disposal industry, combining two popular commodities, sea salt and recycled pharmaceuticals, to produce a mock-medicinal salt product: “All-Salt.” There are no laws that require industry or government to test, monitor, or control the levels of pharmaceutical content in water, or understand impacts on humans and the environment.
The Alviso’s Medicinal All-Salt project involved rigorous research and synthesis of available environmental water quality and wastewater treatment information, and then humorous presentation of that material so as to engage a general audience on water quality/wastewater issues. It was completed in September, 2010 in San Jose California as a part of the Zer01 San Jose new media arts festival; it involved construction of model salt-evaporation ponds, salt product samples, tours of the San Francisco Bay ‘harvesting waters’ and old industrial salt ponds, and production of a formal report on the drugs found in the South San Francisco Bay.
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