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Wasting less wastewater

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Ultra-pure water is essential for multiple industries, for example semiconductors, batteries, and pharmaceuticals, as well as food and beverage companies.  Such water is produced by various processes including desalination plants that use reverse osmosis.  The byproduct of the processing is industrial brine:  salty wastewater.

The brine produced by desalination is generally dumped into the ocean if the desalination plant is located at the seashore, but if the plant is inland, such as in places like Arizona, that isn’t an option.

Nestle runs a water desalinating plant near Phoenix that generates more than 50,000 gallons of brine every day.  Concentrated brines must be carefully managed and disposed of. 

Researchers at Arizona State University are developing a mobile, closed-loop water recovery demonstration system that aims to recover 50%-90% of previously unusable water from industrial brine and reduce the remainder to solid salt. 

The team’s approach involves pretreating Nestle’s brine to remove larger particles.  It then goes through a reverse osmosis process that results in a stream of high-quality water and a salty concentrate.  The salty concentrate goes through a special membrane that recovers even more pure water.  The highly concentrated brine is then dried and crystalized into a solid salt product.  Atmospheric water harvesters capture any remaining water vapor during the drying process.

In places like Arizona where freshwater is a scarce commodity, finding sustainable ways to separate water from salt is both a scientific challenge and an economic necessity.

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Squeezing every last drop out of wastewater

Photo courtesy of the Global Center for Water Technology.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

New Nutrition Labels

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Food and beverage packaging in this country has included a Nutrition Facts panel for nearly 25 years.  Over 700,000 products have the labels which provide consumers with information like serving sizes, calories per serving, ingredients, and nutritional content.

Surveys indicate that 77 percent of all U.S. adults claim to use the labels at least some of the time.  Whether the labels are actually useful is somewhat debatable.  A couple of years ago, the FDA released a proposal to update the labels to make them more useful and to reflect more recent nutritional research.  The new labels are finally going to be implemented and food manufacturers with annual sales exceeding $10 million have until January of 2020 to update their packaging with the new labels.

One of the biggest changes is that the “serving size” section of the label will be changed to more accurately reflect the actual portions consumed by the typical American.  For example, a 20-ounce soft drink will now be labeled as a single serving because most people will drink the whole bottle in one sitting.

The new labels will no long list the amounts of Vitamin A and C, because recent research shows most Americans are not deficient in these nutrients.  Instead, the amount of Vitamin D and potassium will be listed, two nutrients lacking in many diets.  New labels will also show amounts of “added sugars”, defined as caloric sweeteners with no nutritional value. The new labels will also display the calories per serving in much large type making that piece of information far more noticeable.

There is surely more to be done to make food labeling more transparent and useful for consumers, but the new changes at least seem to be in the right direction.

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Nutrition Labels Get a Makeover: Will It Make a Difference?

Photo, posted September 9, 2014, courtesy of Mike Mozart via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

The Bitter Truth About Caffeine

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Black coffee has a bitter taste. Bitterness evolved as a natural warning system to protect the body from harmful substances.  By the logic of evolution, we should therefore want to spit coffee out, but obviously it doesn’t work that way.

Caffeine itself has a particularly bitter taste.  Surprisingly, a new study at Northwestern University has found that the more sensitive people are to the bitter taste of caffeine, the more coffee they drink. That sensitivity is actually a genetic variant.

So, one would think that people who are especially sensitive to the bitter taste of caffeine would drink less coffee.  The counter intuitive result suggests that coffee consumers acquire a taste or an ability to detect caffeine as a result of the learned positive reinforcement (in other words, the buzz) elicited by caffeine.  People with a heightened ability to taste coffee’s bitterness learn to associate good things with it.

The study also found in contrast that people sensitive to the bitter flavor of a different compound called 6-n-propylthiouracil (known as PROP)avoided coffee as well as red wine.

The study made use of applied Mendelian randomization, a technique commonly used in disease epidemiology, to test the causal relationship between bitter taste and beverage consumption in more than 400,000 men and women in the United Kingdom.

These results shed some light on the disdain many coffee drinkers have for decaf coffee.  It may not be just the lack of buzz that turns them off.  Some of them with the right genes may be missing that extra bit of bitterness that alerts them that something good is about to happen.

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Why we shouldn’t like coffee, but we do

Photo, posted May 22, 2009, courtesy of Olle Svensson via Flickr.  

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

WAMC Northeast Public Radio

WAMC/Northeast Public Radio is a regional public radio network serving parts of seven northeastern states (more...)