Nanoscience and Water
Public Engagement at and Below the Surface
David M. Berube, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA
Potable water is a threatened resource for the developing world. As nanoscience contributes to the development of nanotechnologies with the potential to provide safe and inexpensive drinking water to developing countries, it is imperative that the public accepts and maintains the technology. Converting the public in developing countries into advocates can increase the probability of overall acceptance of exotic treatment technologies. Anchoring public sentiment positively will improve the options when resolving problems that predictably arise as new water technologies are implemented. Public engagement demands an approach both appropriate to the public and to the technology. A municipally based system will demand a different engagement approach than a point-of-use system. As such, a relevant case-specific strategy of engagement must be developed to coincide with the introduction of new water treatment technologies.
Keywords
Developing countries; public sentiment; public acceptance; potable water; inexpensive drinking water
38.1 Introduction
The subject of nanotechnology and water offers an opportunity to discuss some of the major societal issues associated with emerging technologies generally and nanotechnology specifically. Water is a staple and the subject of potable water is an emotional one. The public’s reaction to applications of nanoscience for producing drinkable water either in the developed or in the developing world should be very positive. The alternative is disease and sometimes death. Moreover, fear of death tends to skew opinion formation positively.
At the same time, however, most of the public generally feel decisions about drinking water are out of their control and any exposure to nanoparticles in drinking water will be considered an involuntary risk, a variable with a negative valence. For example, there have been few efforts to include the public in decisions about water treatment and purification. For most consumers, water is provided by large public and impersonal utilities. They hear from them monthly when they receive their bills, bills that are often bundled with trash collection and other community services.
In addition, it is likely that Western public reactions to nanotechnology producing clean water for non-Westerners will be gauged differently than for themselves. It is likely these reactions would differ if the treatment strategy is for a different racial or socioeconomic group within the West. This is due to the unfortunate tendency to discount morbidity and mortality values when the groups involved are different from us. Self-interests counterbalanced against altruism have always played powerful roles in deciding how public resources are expended and the values associated with public welfare projects.
Although there may not be any moral or ethical duty, requirement, or obligation for government and industry to engage the public before adopting and marketing a technology, there are many pragmatic reasons to do so. Research and development is expensive and time-consuming with multiple opportunity trade-off costs. Unless public resources are shifted to purchase, install, and maintain new public technologies such as water treatment, they can be cost prohibitive for many markets. In addition, public monies often track public sentiment. Finally, the public functions as consumers per se, shareholders of industries in the business of providing potable water. Public support for high-cost facilities involves public contracts and bonds. Neutral attitudes, if not palpable opposition, should be serious concerns to public service providers.
The following draws heavily from my graduate work studying the miscommunication between Amerindian Native American gens or tribes and the Departments of Interior and War during the late nineteenth century and an unpublished manuscript in preparation on events leading to the assassinations of Sitting Bull and Big Foot and the Wounded Knee Creek massacre. Cultural anthropologists have studied the interaction between deployments of Western technologies and developing cultures for many years. Simply foisting a Western technology on a non-Western culture regardless of its utility can be counterproductive if not a recipe for disaster [1].
38.2 Water and the public
WHO estimates that approximately 1 billion people do not have access to a reliable water supply and 3.4 million die annually from water-related diseases. This means 42,000 people die from diseases related to low-quality drinking water each week. Over 90% of diarrheal diseases in the developing world today occur in children under 5 years of age. In 2002, 230 million school-age children were without a reliable water supply [2]. There are 525 million small farms in the world with over 2.5 billion people living off the land. Whereas water availability increases by about 0.5% annually, the demand is increasing by 10.5% [3].
Extrapolating from population data, the demand for drinking water and water for agriculture and industrial uses is expected to increase by as much as 70% over the next 25 years in the United States alone. Richard Sustich from the Center of Advanced Materials for Purification of Water with Systems at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign warned that within the next decade, the suburbs of Chicago might find their supply running dry [4]. The drought in the Southeast during 2007 threatened many cities’ water use habits with reports of only a few months’ supply in some reservoirs.
Because issues about water tend to be emotional ones, the costs both financial and otherwise that might be associated with new technologies will tend to be overshadowed by the powerful claims of clean drinking water. However, we may be approaching a tipping point when it comes to public engagement. As science and technology continue to make inroads into the day-to-day operation of our lives, the public may be becoming more concerned about choices they make and those foisted upon them. Having observed the failure of government to protect public safety, citizens may be beginning to accept more responsibility when it comes to determining their own public safety.
Although an argument can be made, the public act more like sheep than wolves when it comes to being governed; history bespeaks there comes a time when the public has had enough and rises to challenge the regulators. Both the BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy or “mad cow disease”) and GMO (genetically modified organisms, esp. seeds) controversies in the United Kingdom and Western Europe offer powerful lessons. Once empowered having had their appetites whetted, the public tends to exercise prerogatives of engagement more regularly. This has clearly been the case in France, the United Kingdom, and some other developed countries. Environmental disasters in Seveso, Italy, and Bhopal, India, were aggravated due to the absence of a bona fide engagement strategy between industry and the public and both the Roche Group and Union Carbide have approached engagement as a necessary tool in doing business ever since. Nanotechnology may offer an instance when we can turn the tides of engagement to produce processes that benefit all stakeholders.
Since other chapters examine issues such as specific technologies and applications, environmental health and safety, and so forth, the following will concentrate on public engagement concerns as they may relate to treatment approaches. How can we best involve the public in the decision-making process to maximize the effectiveness of nano-based water treatment strategies?
The public interfaces with the adoption of new technologies of this sort in three ways: management, adoption, and maintenance. Communities of people need to purchase and install the technology, the people need to use it, and the technology needs to be maintained by people and this is especially true for point-of-use approaches.
38.3 Nanotechnology treatment strategies
Potable water comes primarily from surface- and groundwater. They are treated on-site by a community or municipal authority or at the point of use in the village or the home. Freedonia reported world demands for treatment will increase 6% per year through 2009 to more than $35 billion [5].
Indeed, when it comes to cleaning and filtering water in the traditional way, “we’ve gotten as far as we can go on the larger scale,” says Sustich [4]. “It’s not black and white” says Mamadou S. Diallo from Cal Tech’s Molecular Environmental Technology program. “No one wants to drink nanoparticles with their water” [4]. The perceived risks are especially problematic for this industry. As was somewhat evident from the Samsung washer issue, the water industry is typically conservative and risk adverse. Since most water companies are publicly owned, they aren’t allowed to make a profit. And if something went wrong, the water company could be held responsible for a public health crisis, says Sustich [4].
Various nanotechnologies are being studied including carbon nanotubes (CNTs), nanoclays and zeolites, dendrimers, nanoscale metals, nanofibers, and membranes. The following lists of applications and developments are meant to be neither comprehensive nor exhaustive. For a much more complete analysis, see the $5000 Frost & Sullivan report—“Impact of Nanotechnology in Water and Wastewater Treatment [6]—and the three free Meridian Institute reports—“Nanotechnology, Water & Development” [2], “Overview and Comparison of Conventional Water Treatment Technology-Nano-Based Treatment Technologies” [7], and “Workshop on Nanotechnology, Water & Development” [8].
In general, nanofilter technology takes advantages of the higher surface area and throughput and observers, especially from the industry, hail the superiority of nanofilters. It has been reported that nano-based filters are able to achieve 99.5% efficiency when compared with conventional technologies removing protozoan cysts, oocysts, and helminth ova, in some cases bacteria and viruses, and provide effective treatment of contaminants such as mercury, arsenic, and perchlorate [6].
Unsurprisingly, CNTs are receiving a lot of attention. Because of their high flow rates and high selectivity to filter out very small impurities and other organic materials, carbon membranes offer much promise and research is ongoing. A Meridian Report noted CNT filters could remove 25-nm-sized polio viruses from water as well as larger pathogens such as Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus bacteria [2]. For example, a team, led by Olgica Bakajin from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (see Chapter 11), has developed a CNT membrane with high selectivity and high flow rate. Based in principle on aquaporins, the water channels in cells, this team has reported promising results [9,10]. Seldon Laboratories has developed its nanomesh filter media. They claim to be able to remove more than 99.99% of bacteria, viruses, cysts, molds, coliform, parasites, and fungi and also significantly reduce lead and arsenic [7].
CNT membrane technologies are in advanced stages of development. For example, the Pacific Northwest National Lab developed a polypyrrole–CNT nanocomposite. This membrane is made with a thin film of absorbent polymer called polypyrrole on a matrix of CNTs. Other researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute may have solved for the hydrophobic nature of CNT arrays such that CNT membranes become practical [11]. Membrane nanotechnologies are undergoing varied tests. For example, Nanyang Technological University and the Public Utilities Board in Singapore announced the results of tests that they describe as promising. A pilot plant at Chua Chu Kang Waterworks using nanotechnology to remove dissolved salts and chemical compounds will be up in 2 years [12].
Nanoporous ceramics have garnered a lot of press as well. For example, Porous Ceramic Shapes acquired by MetaMateria Partners offers a line of lightweight ceramic products with controlled porosity called Cell-Pore™. Their ceramic filter hosts aerobic bacteria that convert different pollutants into nontoxic substances [7]. NanoDynamics has introduced cell-pore ceramic filters with highly absorbent nanocrystals [5]. Nanovation AG has its Nanopore® ceramic membrane filters made from ceramic nanopowders on a support material such as alumina. Nanovation claims they effectively remove bacteria, viruses, and fungi from water [7]. Argonide’s NanoCeram uses aluminum oxide nanofibers on a glass filter substrate and claims over 99.99% effectiveness over viruses, bacteria, parasites, natural organic matter and 99.9% of salt, radioactive materials, and heavy metals such as chromium, arsenic, and lead [7]. Finally, Steward Environmental Solutions is bringing to market the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory SAMMS™ technology made from ceramic materials with nanoscale pores to which a monolayer of molecules can be attached. Both the monolayer and the mesoporous support can be functionalized to remove specific pollutants including mercury, lead, chromium, arsenic, radionuclides, cadmium, and other metal toxins [7].
38.4 Modalities
There are at least two primary modes by which nanotechnologies used for water purification will interface with the public. They include large-scale centralized community treatment plants as well as diffused treatment facilities and point-of use including end-of-faucet or spigot applications. In addition, there are targeted remediation treatment technologies that can be used across both these modalities.
38.4.1 Municipal systems
Major municipal water treatment technologies need large capital investments, management systems, and governance structures. As the worldwide market for water will exceed $400 billion by 2010, many entrants are likely. As such, the market seems to be getting increasingly global as well as increasingly consolidated. “Large companies like GE, Pentair, and ITT are pursuing both industrial and residential/commercial sectors throughout the world” [13]. Furthermore, there are dozens of start-ups. For example, in the San Francisco area alone, Novazone, Pionetics, and Hydropoint are raising venture capital (VC) funding for their novel technologies [14].
Although water utilities tend to be slow-moving leviathans, there are a few interesting large-scale applications. For example, there is a pilot effort by Ondeo, which has installed an ultrapurification system involving pores of 0.1 µm size in one of its plants outside Paris [15]. Generale des Eaux is collaborating with the Dow Chemical subsidiary Filmtec to produce a nanofiltration system as well. Finally, the Long Beach Water Department in Long Beach, CA, has installed and tested a pilot-scale, dual-stage nanofiltration process (see Chapter 13).
38.4.2 Point-of-use systems
It might be possible to build nanomembrane plants as portable units that can be assembled in the major centers and then transported to outlying areas where they are needed [2]. Point-of-use treatment technologies seem to be poised to make significant contributions to water use needs in developed and especially developing countries. For example, granular media filters using charged metal oxides and hydroxides of iron, aluminum, calcium, and magnesium are under development. Disk filters with colloidal silver are relatively inexpensive and up to 100% effective against bacteria [7]. Some are already on the market. IIT-Madras and Mumbai-based Eureka Forbes claim to have marketed the first nanotechnology-based filter with the first 1000 units in place. It uses silver nanoparticles to remove pesticides such as endosulfan, malathion, and chlorpyrifos from drinking water [3,16].
38.4.3 Targeted systems
Some developments target specific pollutants and other hazards. For example, Japan’s Royal Electric Co. released the RVK–Ni oxygen/ozone micro-nano bubble water sterilizer. It mixes ozone nano-bubbles with ozone/oxygen microbubbles and proved an effective treatment against the norovirus [17]. SolmeteX has ArsenX™, a resin made of hydrous iron oxide nanoparticles on a polymer substrate that has been shown to remove arsenic, vanadium, uranium, chromium, antimony and molybdenum [7]. Arsenic is receiving special attention. For example, Houston’s Rice University’s Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology has a nanorust project to clean arsenic from drinking water. Due to its simplicity and low cost, it offers hope for millions of people in developing countries where thousands of cases of arsenic poisoning each year are linked to contaminated wells [18]. As many as half the wells drilled in the late 1960s to counter Bangladesh’s severe surface water pollution have been found to be contaminated by arsenic [2]. Rice researcher Mason Tomson warns, however, “no one knows the risks of the arsenic residue being consumed by accident or leaching from landfills back into water supplies” [19].
38.5 Water and public engagement
Generally, the assumption held by the expert community has been “if we build it, they will buy it,” and for a large proportion of the population that may be valid. Indeed, given the exclusivity awarded to water utilities, there does not seem to be a realistic alternative for most of the consuming public. However, even those utility contracts need to be awarded and renewed and a poor record of public participation can make this process troublesome for a water provider.
In general, public participation broadens social development ideals enabling the public to participate fully in the decision-making process, and ordinary people experience fulfillment, which contributes to a heightened sense of community and a strengthening of community needs [20]. Beyond these more abstract values, there are advantages from engagement that can contribute to the overall success of a treatment strategy, especially in situations when public ownership is important to management and maintenance.
With nanotechnology poised to make significant inroads in water quality sensing as well as treatment technologies, public participation may become critical. Of course, the approach taken for a treatment strategy will affect the process of engagement. Adopting a strategy for a point-of-use system involves some different variables than would apply to a large municipal system.
Engagement takes many forms: public meetings, public hearings, open houses, workshops, citizen advisory committees, social surveys (such as consensus conferences), focus groups, newsletters, and reports. The forms of engagement to pursue are affected by the experience, if any, the public has with engagement, the amount of information the public has about the technology, how accurate this information may be, the level of comprehension the public possesses, and the context for the exercise. Meetings and hearings can be highly intimidating to the public who often have little experience with advocacy. Consensus conferences can be equally foreboding to some. One of the reasons election caucuses are attended by the same people cycle after cycle is simply a function of familiarity; newcomers confront a high entry barrier. Unfortunately, some of the more meaningful engagement exercises are the more active and demanding ones. An experience at a well-orchestrated public hearing is less easily discarded than a newsletter.
An understanding of how informed the public is about a new technology is challenging as well. Opining does not require information and survey data about advanced technologies is highly suspect. Many surveys of this ilk are closer to push polling than opinion sampling, often incorporating narratives or clever manipulation of phraseology and the order of questions in their technique. Nonetheless, we need some indication of what is known to decide how much time is spent educating and informing the public against time spent in more persuasive appeals.
Unfortunately, public information on advanced technologies is inaccurate, having been gleaned from popular culture and anecdotes. Inaccurate information needs to be debunked and expunged before accurate information is offered and that takes time and expertise. It is insufficient to present competing information. New competing information must be presented using the same or similar warrants that incorporated the original inaccurate information. Given the diversity of warrants a group of the public might have used, the challenge is learning why the inaccurate information was incorporated into their understanding.
The understandability factor is critical when designing an engagement exercise of any sort. For years, it was believed that by improving the science education of the public we could improve their opinions about technology. This deficit theory of scientific education has been a dismal failure. Although there are many benefits to improving science education, persuading the public that scientists are correct is not one of them. By and large, the public selected against an education in science as much as a scientist selected otherwise. Any engagement exercise must speak in a public argot and address issues without deferring to parochial metaphors.
Context is the last major variable. The public engages new information with notions and biases. Generally, the public prefers information consistent with previously held beliefs. In addition, the public searches for stories with a high level of fidelity (they need to ring true to the world around them). Context can modify these sensibilities. If all is generally well, then a new treatment technology is viewed as an expense. Under conditions of an outbreak of waterborne diseases, the new technology will be viewed as an opportunity. If the media has been amplifying fear mongering on the new technology, then the public will reflect apprehensiveness. On the other hand, if the media has been attenuating the same, then the public may be sanguine.
38.5.1 Municipal systems
A Meridian Institute report claims there are multiple requirements for implementing new technologies for water treatment, especially in rural communities; one of the most critical is worth repeating here. The community must be exposed to a comprehensive education program that will inform and educate them about the methodology and benefits of the water treatment project [2].
It is safe to assume there are few people who can summarize how their drinking water is treated. Indeed, most are unable to distinguish between water and waste treatment. This would seem to be true across cultures. As a result, if it weren’t for the expense involved, a utility might be willing to forego any engagement with the public altogether. As large systems of this sort are expensive and often involve budgetary trade-offs, municipalities should do what they can to educate the public about the treatment strategy as well as allaying as many of their apprehensions as practicable.
Indeed, in an atmosphere where the public knows little about nanotechnology and there have been no seriously amplified reports of environmental health and safety issues associated with nanotechnology, the claims of safe drinking water should trump reservations especially if the claims are linked to the prevention of waterborne diseases. However, retrofitting or upgrading an existing system or building a new system based on nanotechnologies might be troublesome under a different set of conditions.
The energy industry faces similar financial incentives and their approach has been to call public meetings to solicit public sentiment and support. Unfortunately, these public gatherings are often more proforma than anything else with the decision having already been made and with the gathering used to cement support rather than to engage in dialogue. As such, given a crisis situation, energy consumers become aggrieved antagonists rather than advocates of the industry.
Although nanotechnologies may make inroads into commercial treatment facilities, there seems to be more interests in point-of-use applications at this time and these demand a different engagement strategy altogether.
38.5.2 Point-of-use strategies
The previously mentioned Meridian Report added a second concern: The community must be involved at all stages of the project such as being trained in the operation and maintenance of the new technology to facilitate a sense of community ownership [2]. The same Meridian Report cited earlier suggested heightened community ownership can even reduce vandalism and theft though there are no examples cited in their report.
Nonetheless, it is very important to understand that Western conceptions of hierarchical governance may not be shared in many different cultural settings. Just as group opinion leaders in Western organizations are not necessarily the elected or appointed managers of the organizations, the leader in a non-Western setting might be a tribal leader or chief or a patriarch or matriarch of a clan rather than a government administrator. Getting the government representative to allow distribution of technologies to a community may simply be insufficient when the goals are use, maintenance, and ownership. For decades, if not centuries, clan members may have gathered at wells to get water and to share the news. Public spheres in developing cultures tend to be less formalized and less dependent on public structures or institutions, such as libraries and newspapers. Adding new technologies especially by a third party regardless of intentions risks contamination of a different sort altogether—damage to a public forum.
Point-of-use technologies will demand a more diffused or localized form of public engagement. Whereas in the West, filter technologies that can be used in the home are marketed just like any other product, commercial marketing may be wholly inappropriate for some developing cultures. It is likely advanced technologies for point-of-use water treatment will be perceived with some suspicion.
In addition to many of the variables mentioned earlier (experience, familiarity, comprehension, etc.), there are some special demands when the technology must be situated in a culturally important public setting such as a public well, and home use presents special demands as well. First and foremost, any new technology must be sufficiently well tested such that it not only meets the specific needs of the community but also will not need to be removed, upgraded, or retrofitted. One may get just one shot. Installing a technology that fails may damn subsequent attempts to adopt preferable technologies.
Any new technology introduced into the public sphere will need to be introduced by the public themselves. It has to be viewed as their technology and demands some level of ownership to the extent that it may be desirable to charge the public some costs whether pecuniary or in kind. The technology will need to accommodate both the safe drinking water needs of the community as well as their public sphere needs. Put simply, it must not disrupt the culturally significant activities associated with drawing water from a public well. A technology perceived as foreboding by some members of the community may dissuade them from going to the well altogether. Sending a different member from the clan, more traditional members may isolate themselves from a vibrant public experience, with both them and the community suffering as a result.
Bringing a new technology into the home may be even more challenging. The new technology would need to be introduced by a family member and the family must perceive a level of ownership. Installation and maintenance must be done by a family member as well; hence it must be simple enough that it can be done with minimal training. Point-of-use purification systems require maintenance and this task will need to be done by a family member as well.
Minimizing technological fixes is preferable as it simplifies the maintenance process for families. Durability and ease of use are critical variables. Any technology that disrupts the day-to-day operation of the family should be avoided. Less intrusion is always more desirable.
A serious and sustained educational campaign will need to be mounted. The group opinion leaders of the community should not only participate but also lead the campaign. There should be testimonials presented as narratives as well as demonstrations. Community members should have the opportunity to handle the new technology and participate in a mock installation as well as a mock maintenance exercise. They should name the technology and participate in a ritual whereby they contract for the technology in exchange for some expenses on their part and the expense needs to be meaningful.
Any outbreak of disease subsequent to installation of the treatment technology might be associated with the new technology notwithstanding its falsifiable cause. Responding to this type of misinformation is much easier with the trust that comes with an engagement plan already in place. Beginning a dialogue in the midst of a controversial and damaging event simply suffers from too much mistrust to be productive without a substantial expense on the part of the provider. Rumors can be as disruptive as the truth and they are more easily debunked if a dialogue is ongoing.
38.6 Conclusions
Engagement has intrinsic values, especially the heightened sense of community and a strengthening of community needs that it sustains. In addition, there are highly pragmatic reasons to engage the public in a meaningful way. The public become advocates, in a sense, for the providers and in situations of hazard the dialogic system with attendant trust is already in place. Since so much of the rhetoric over nanotechnology and water seems to address pollution faced by communities in developing economies, we may need to design models of engagement appropriate to the tasks at hand, and we may need to design them very soon.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, NSF 06-595, Nanotechnology Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT): Intuitive Toxicology and Public Engagement. All opinions expressed within are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of the National Science Foundation, the University of South Carolina, North Carolina State University (NCSU), and the International Council on Nanotechnology. NCSU communication student Nick Temple assisted in the final disposition of this chapter.
Notes
The Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCOST) Project was conceived at North Carolina State to design and evaluate efforts to improve the public communication of science and technology. It is an informal group, resides in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and includes faculty from different departments and schools on the NCSU campus in Raleigh, NC. In addition, PCOST includes a small number of associated members from non-NCSU campuses.