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CAN SHE LAY THE BUILDING BLOCKS TO HELP THE WORLD’S SEWAGE PAY OFF?

By Nick Dall

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WHY YOU SHOULD CARE

Because if wastewater treatment pays for itself, it would be a revolution.

This OZY series reveals what some of academia’s biggest brains are up to. This
original OZY series reveals what some of academia’s biggest brains are up to.






Most bioprocess engineers wear crisp lab coats and work in ultra-clean
stainless-steel reactors. While professor Sue Harrison, from the University of
Cape Town’s chemical engineering department, is familiar with this sterile
world, she’s increasingly drawn to muckier, less controlled environments. For
the past 15 years, her focus has been on mimicking nature to challenge the very
definition of waste.

Harrison is a pioneer of both bioprocess engineering (putting nature, often in
the form of algae or bacteria, to work in industry, cities, businesses and
elsewhere) and transdisciplinarity (she’s worked at the interface of chemistry,
engineering and the life sciences for more than 30 years). Now, as the director
of the Future Water Institute, UCT’s interdisciplinary research center, she is
taking both obsessions to their logical extremes in a quest to improve the
prognosis for water-starved South Africa, a country that, according to doomsday
predictions, could run out of water by 2030.








“In the past, we have considered natural capital as a free good,” she says.
Today more and more individuals, politicians and industries are coming to see
the flaws in this approach. (One example: Cape Town’s new water strategy refers
to significant quantities of reused water being included by 2023.) While it must
be tempting to say “I told you so,” the 56-year-old prefers to take advantage of
the shift in attitudes to make lasting changes to the way South Africa — and,
hopefully, other developing countries — interact with water.

> Wastewater actually “contains plenty of value,” Harrison insists.

A primary focus for Harrison and her colleagues, both at the Centre for
Bioprocess Engineering Research (a research group she founded in 2001) and at
Future Water, is the development of so-called wastewater biorefineries (WWBRs),
complex systems that rely on a web of bioprocesses to extract maximum value from
wastewater, while at the same time producing clean water. If done correctly, the
value obtained from the byproducts (one of her UCT colleagues is making
construction bricks from urine) pays for the water treatment — a stark change
from the status quo where wastewater is viewed as an “end-of-pipe cost,” she
explains, “something which needs to be treated” or else. Au contraire, she
insists: Wastewater actually “contains plenty of value,” she says, citing a
study she worked on suggesting that municipal wastewater contains enough
embedded energy to produce 7 percent of South Africa’s electricity needs through
anaerobic digestion and related processes. The catch? No one’s built a fully
functioning biorefinery yet.

 
        

Sue Harrison tackles South Africa’s water crisis one test tube at a time.

Source Courtesy of Candice Lowin

“If anyone can pull it off,” says Kirsty Carden, research coordinator at Future
Water, “Sue can.” The youngest in a family of scientists and engineers, Harrison
remembers being fascinated by her chemist-slash-biologist dad’s dinner table
chats, which leaped from chemistry to farming to sailing. Her parents encouraged
her to study something other than science, but the die had been cast. After
completing a degree in chemistry and microbiology at UCT, she took a job at
AECI, a leading South African chemicals company looking to advance its
biotechnology division.

After several years in the industry, she stepped out to earn a Ph.D. in chemical
engineering at Cambridge, where she got to work on a groundbreaking group of new
biodegradable plastics, known as PHAs. While back in Cape Town on holiday, she
was lured back to UCT — her home for 28 years and counting. Staying in the same
place for that long, she says, would be her “worst nightmare,” except that her
tenure has been anything but routine. She has worked with “fresh” and waste
ingredients in myriad locations (she was in a different country each of the
three times we spoke) and applications (biomining, mineral leaching, mine waste
and rehabilitation, algal biotechnology, wastewater treatment and more).




Her biorefineries could go a long way toward easing the world’s water scarcity
and improving how we use our natural resources, but she’s still figuring out how
to make them work.

To take the example of organic wastewater (whether from food processing, the
paper pulp industry or people’s homes), Harrison’s first move would be to
extract the carbon from the water and repurpose it, most likely as some sort of
plastic and/or soil conditioner. Then she’d put the nitrogen and phosphorous
through a microalgal reactor (a pond containing microscopic algae) that would
create biomass for energy while also taking up carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere (good for carbon credits). The “leftover” nutrients could then be
used to produce electricity. By this stage the water would be “pretty clean,”
Harrison says, though she might grow plants on it “to give it a final polish.”

All well in theory, but finding a middle ground between the sterile lab
conditions that bioprocess engineers are accustomed to and the grimy reality of
wastewater treatment plants will be “the really interesting part,” says
Harrison, “because these two worlds have been so separate; there is no
rulebook.”

And that’s before anyone tackles the legislative (are we even allowed to do this
to wastewater?) and social science hurdles (will subsistence communities care
whether or not their water is compliant?). Not to mention the feeling in some
quarters that — as Mike Muller, former director-general of South Africa’s
Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, puts it — “poor management and
governance are the real challenge [to South Africa’s water problems]. Until that
is fixed, technologies and methodologies are of little assistance.”



But rather than let herself be cowed, Harrison is confident that initiatives
like hers can push the country forward. In addition to her scientific
achievements, says Faizal Bux, director of the Institute for Water and
Wastewater Technology at the Durban University of Technology, Harrison has the
social skills to keep her multidisciplinary team fighting for a common cause.
“Sue’s a straight talker, but she’s very diplomatic,” says Carden — an
assessment based on Harrison’s deft handling of interactions among the highly
opinionated crew that make up Future Water.

While Bux, Carden and Harrison agree that large-scale application of wastewater
biorefineries is far off, the alternative — having insufficient natural
resources to sustain the global population — is too dire to entertain. The
concept “is not rocket science,” Harrison says modestly. “It’s just a new way of
doing things.”

And that is her stock-in-trade.

OZY’S 5 QUESTIONS WITH SUE HARRISON

 * What book do you really value and like to share? Dr. Seuss’ Oh, the Places
   You’ll Go — lots of truth and inspiration. I started reading it to my
   children, and now it is a firm favorite gift for my Ph.D. graduates.
 * What do you worry about?Worry needs to be kept under control, as it is not
   always positive. … But I do spend a lot of mind space on how to contribute
   toward transitioning our world into one where we work jointly for our success
   and the greater good of our communities, cities and fellow travelers.
 * What’s the one thing you can’t live without? My family — a truly
   inspirational set who keep me grounded and inspired at the same time.
 * Who’s your hero? My father. He inspired me on my path between the disciplines
   of engineering, chemistry, microbiology and biochemistry; set an example of
   entrepreneurship, integrity and aiming to contribute; and he nurtured me
   along the way.
 * What’s one item on your bucket list? As an academic: to see one of my new
   processes through to full implementation. As a fellow citizen: to see a more
   just economic order. As an explorer: to see the northern lights.

Read more: He’s creating a new fuel out of thin air — for 85 cents a gallon.

 * Nick Dall, OZY Author Contact Nick Dall




The Daily Dose March 26, 2019

TOPICS

 * AFRICA
 * Bioengineering
 * Chemistry
 * Engineering
 * Environment
 * SCIENCE
 * South Africa
 * Universities


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