Newswise — ITHACA, N.Y. – It’s simple and sustainable: Cornell University’s AguaClara drinking water treatment program – which has created electricity-free, gravity-powered drinking water treatment plant designs – has won the Intel Environment Tech Award.
Cornell and Honduran nonprofit Agua Para el Pueblo, founding members of the AguaClara network, will be honored as Intel Environment Tech Award Laureates during The Tech Awards annual gala, Oct. 20, in Santa Clara, Calif. The Tech Awards are a program of the San Jose-based Tech Museum and honor innovators around the world who are “applying technology to benefit humanity.”
AguaClara-at-Cornell is directed by Cornell senior lecturer Monroe Weber-Shirk, and the treatment plants now serve 25,000 people in Honduras who would otherwise have no access to safe drinking water.Weber-Shirks says that diarrheal diseases – from unclean water – kills 5,000 children every day around the world. Access to safe drinking water reduces this death toll dramatically.
The AguaClara-at-Cornell team has created a free open-source automated Web service to distribute customized treatment plant designs tailored to the size and needs of individual communities. AguaClara emphasizes community involvement and scalability for their plants; the Cornell team doesn’t build plants, but instead designs them and relies on partner organizations to work with local communities to construct them using local labor and materials, organizers say.
The collaboration between AguaClara at Cornell and their partner, Agua Para el Pueblo, has generated yearly advances in eco-friendly and cost-efficient drinking water technologies and has provided a new model for sustainable community-owned-and-operated drinking water treatment facilities.
It is all too often the case, says Weber-Shirk, that poorly engineered “high tech” water treatment plants operating far from their normal supply chains and maintenance technicians are abandoned after a component failure or are shut down because of unaffordable operating costs.
Four years of field results have shown that AguaClara plants avoid this problem. AguaClara plants’ have exceptional reliability, low operating costs, and high-quality water. Community members are willing to pay more for safe drinking water and community water boards are thus able to cover plant operation costs and invest in their water supply infrastructure.
Weber-Shirk says The Tech Award is a well-deserved honor for the hundreds of dedicated students, AguaClara engineers, and the staff and leadership of Agua Para el Pueblo. Together they have proven that simple is beautiful, that safe drinking water at the municipal scale is attainable and sustainable, and that Cornell students will seize an opportunity to make the world a better place.Says Weber-Shirk: “We will celebrate for a day and then return to our goal of further improving the AguaClara technologies. We will continue to provide the most economical, lowest carbon footprint, and most reliable water treatment technologies and we will develop new technologies to meet the highest drinking water quality standards.”
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