NEW DATE - CEH session with Barth Smets – “Water Conversation: Towards the 50 L home. What’s keeping us from reducing household use?”

NB: Please note new date for this event.

In this session, Barth Smets from the AU Department of Biological and Chemical Engineering invites ARTS researchers to join in the ‘water conversation’ – an AU interdisciplinary exchange on the most fundamental building block of any human civilization as well as of any living being on Earth: water. In this initial conversation, Barth will provide a sneak-peak into the world of water technology studies with the aim to foster dialogue and push the water agenda beyond disciplinary and faculty divides.

Abstract

With dwindling water resources and increasing costs, we are all aware that we should behave smarter in our water consumption. Today, water of drinking water quality is used in our homes to prepare food, wash clothes, scrub floors, rinse bodies, flush toilets, and yes … also to drink. The urge to reduce our water footprint calls these practices into question. Is it necessary to have water of drinking quality for all these uses? Are we smart in ‘flushing’ our urine and faeces down the toilet with drinking water? A current ambition is to achieve households where each person uses only 50 liters of water per day. Technical solutions, e.g. to separate and reuse our greywater, are available, but poorly implemented. Also, technologies to source-separate and recover nutrients from urine are available. Professor Barth Smets from the AU Department of Biological and Chemical Engineering will review some technological advances while also asking for help in considering the following questions: Why are we unable to move faster in the world-wide adoption of these technologies?  And what will it take to get to the 50 L home?

Please sign up for the event by emaling us at: dfsk@edu.au.dk