Local engineer combats arsenic-contaminated water

Most people who invent, discover or develop a new process are quick to patent and profit from it.

Not so in the case of local resident Jeremiah (Jerry) Jackson.

Jackson, an environmental and civil engineer, has developed an inexpensive arsenic filtration system using aquatic plants to improve the lives of millions affected by poisonous, arsenic-contaminated drinking water in more than 20 nations, including India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Mexico and some rural areas of the U.S.

He only hopes that governments and nonprofits will spread the word and that people will adopt and construct the homemade system to reduce poisonous arsenic levels in their ground-water drinking supplies.

He’s also hoping that his nomination for a World Technology Award at the World Technology Network’s summit meeting in New York City on July 15-16 will focus attention on the new treatment process that Jackson perfected in a child’s plastic wading pool on his patio in 2006.

Jackson’s philosophy is simple: “You gotta’ live life. Do as much as you can.”

Jackson, 59, earned his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in environmental engineering from the University of California, Irvine; and a Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He has been a faculty member at six universities in the U.S. and overseas. He currently teaches at UCSD and is a professor of business at John Paul Catholic University in San Diego.

His involvement with combating arsenic-contaminated drinking water started back in 2002.

His brother John, a journalist, told Jackson he’d been reading about arsenic-contaminated water in eastern India and Bangladesh. I

“[John] said back 20 or 30 years ago, the government, under a United Nations program, came in and tried to get people to stop drinking the surface water because it was contaminated with water-borne pathogens,” Jackson said. “They put in these small-diameter shallow pipe wells into the aquifer to tap the ground water.”

Jackson said the ground water, however, was naturally contaminated with arsenic. Unbeknownst to the consumers, the water had six times the world-recommended safe maximum amount of arsenic per liter of water.

Check out SDNN’s San Diego Water Crisis coverage.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency describes arsenic as a semi-metal element in the periodic table that is odorless and tasteless. Because it occurs naturally in rocks, soil, water, air, plants and animals and as a by-product of some agricultural and industrial activities, it can enter drinking water through the ground or as runoff into surface water sources.

“In India, it chronically shortened people’s life spans to 55 years, which is about 35 years less than what we have; and primarily that’s attributed to the arsenic poisoning,” Jackson said. “It’s a terrible way to live and die. You eventually get cancer and it affects a whole series of organs in your body.”

“My brother said, ‘You’re an engineer. Can’t you think of a way to fix that?’ …. I sort of blew him off and said if I think of something I’d let him know.”

That evening, while in bed, Jackson remembered that, while doing work on his doctorate, he learned about certain aquatic plants that remove some metals from water.

“And I thought, ‘Gee, arsenic is a quasi-metal. Maybe it could be absorbed by a plant.’

“I called my brother the next morning and said, ‘I think maybe aquatic weeds might be useful in removing the arsenic. Maybe a common water weed like cattail, found all over the world, might work. Beyond that, I don’t know.’”

It was one of the last conversations Jackson had with his brother who, a couple of weeks later, died in his sleep of a heart attack.

Busy with various projects and his work as a senior principal engineer with Kleinfelder, Inc., an engineering and project management firm in San Diego, Jackson was not able to revisit his idea until March 2005.

“I finally had some free time to really think about how the process could work. And I thought it would be a good way to honor my brother who brought the issue to my attention.”

He started out by researching any scientific literature on the subject and discovered there was virtually nothing about arsenic removal by cattails or any other type of aquatic weeds.

So, as a private project, he set up a batch-testing experiment on his patio where he planted cattails in sand in several five gallon plastic buckets filled with water. Some buckets he left untreated and others he dosed with various concentrations of arsenic to test the hypothesis: Would the cattails remove or reduce the arsenic from the water?

“The idea was you take samples of the water over a period of time to see if there was any change in the arsenic concentrations … and sure enough, it showed that the cultures that had the cattail in it reduced the arsenic concentrations while the untreated cultures did not.

“With the data, I was then able to calculate what rate was being removed per area of cattail. The next step was to build a prototype that a family of five in India could easily and cheaply construct to treat their average water consumption of 50 liters per day - reducing the arsenic level in the water from the current 300 micrograms per liter to the World Health Organization’s recognized safe standard of 50 micrograms per liter. And that was my goal.

“Along with that I decided I didn’t want to have any moving parts. I didn’t want to have any electricity. I didn’t want to have any requirements for measurement and maintenance. And I wanted it to be able to be easily constructed by a layperson.

“So that was my walking-in concept: ‘Keep it as simple as possible. Keep it as cheap as possible.’”

The resulting prototype was constructed in a plastic kiddy wading pool about 18 inches deep and about 3.5 feet in diameter or about 12 square feet of surface area accommodating about 12 cattails; “And that was enough, based on my bucket experiment, to give it [the water] enough detention time to remove the arsenic.”

Twice a day, he deposited water laced with 300 micrograms of arsenic into a hole-punctured, gravel-filled container in one section of the pool, channeled the water through the cattails and eventually into another container at the other end from which he extracted the treated water with a $3 hand pump.

“I ran the experiment for about six weeks. I ran it in the summer and the winter and found no operational differences. And I tested it daily and found that it resulted in an 89 percent removal of the arsenic to about 37 micrograms per liter which is below the world health standard of 50 micrograms per liter.

“I was flabbergasted,” he said. “It worked way beyond my expectations.”

“The cattail actually thinks the arsenic is a nutrient,” he concluded. “It absorbs it as if were a nutrient, a fertilizer. And I found the plants actually flourished.”

He said cattails also remove other pollutants, “but I designed this with a focus on arsenic.”

If you amortize the cost of a hand pump and plastic sheeting to construct something similar to the kiddy wading pool, he estimated, it would cost a family about 21 cents per 1,000 gallons of treated water and that compares to traditional, more complex technologies costing from $50 to $300 per 1,000 gallons of treated water.

Jackson calculates the cattails can absorb the arsenic for as long as 50 years. “But I suggest they just decommission the device every decade,” he said.

In 2006, Jackson travelled to New Delhi, India, to present his findings to a scientific conference in a paper entitled, Treatment of Arsenic Contaminated Water Using Aquatic Macrophytes.

“It was extremely well received,” he said.

Indian government officials asked if the system could be expanded to protect rice crops from arsenic contamination.

“I said what you do is simply line your canal that conveys water to the rice paddies with cattails. So the process is easily scalable [to larger scale domestic and agricultural applications]. And it’s simple.”

He said he spoke to a representative of the Indian Institute of Technology six months ago. “And he said, they’re pushing it and trying to implement it.”

The American Society of Civil Engineers published Jackson’s findings in the April 2007 issue of its Civil Engineering Magazine in a special section devoted to the Arsenic Crisis.

Jackson said he just hopes the word gets out about a process he believes can improve the health of millions around the world.

Arthur Lightbourn is a reporter for our media partner, Rancho Santa Fe Review, where this story was originally published.

Tags: arsenic, cattails, contaminated water, Jeremiah Jackson, SDNN, Water, World Technology Award

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