Aqueous Solutions Drinking Water Sysytems

Looking for an opportunity to work internationally in water and sanitation?

Aqueous is seeking a qualified individual to serve as program coordinator for our projects in Thailand in the Burma border areas.

Click the link Project Coordinator – Thailand/Burma border areas to download a job desciption (pdf) and information on how to apply!

Additional opportunities to work with Aqueous Solutions’ research and field projects are listed on our Get Involved page.

Aqueous Solutions completes rainwater harvesting and filter systems for Safe Haven Children’s Home – an ethnic Karen community for displaced persons, widows and orphaned children on the Thai-Burma border.

See our photo galleries for images of the community and the water systems project. (Photography courtesy of Line Ramstad. For more about Safe Haven and Karen life see also Line’s blog.)

Whispering Seed Children’s Home

Aqueous Solutions has installed a rainwater harvesting system to supply Whispering Seed Children’s home with safe drinking water and is currently assessing possibilities for further augmentation of the home’s access to water resources.

Whispering Seed is a home for children who have been orphaned, abused, and neglected in the Thai-Burma border areas. The home focuses on creating a model of sustainable living which includes earthen building, seed saving, and agro-forestry. Children participate in a Montessori style educational curriculum and experiential learning opportunities. Whispering Seed’s aim is to share new models for sustainable living and learning while also supporting traditional wisdom and local knowledge systems.

Prior to this project, the home purchased large quantities of bottled water from the nearest town (approximately a one hour drive each way). The rainwater harvesting system will provide safe drinking water, decrease dependence on fossil fuels, and save much needed funds for the children.
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As the financial crisis exposes the instability of economic globalization, the work of building strong, self-reliant local communities becomes more urgent than ever before.

In towns across America families are struggling to pay the mortgage and gas up the car, while villagers in India and Thailand struggle with rising food prices and dangerously contaminated water supplies.

While bankers and corporate executives clamor for government bailouts that may total over one trillion dollars, others work to reduce our dependency on a system that is broken and corrupt.
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Johnson Memorial United Methodist Church in Huntington, WV recently hosted an alternative giving fair. The fair allowed church congregrants and members of the greater community to engage in socially responsible forms of giving this holiday season. Aqueous director of administration Sue Kearns presented a multimedia display of many of our ongoing projects for fairgoers.

The recently announced collaboration between Aqueous Solutions and the Belgian NGO Biochar Fund is featured in an article on the Global Climate Solutions website. This collaboration seeks to improve agricultural soils and crop yields, mitigate the effects of climate change, and provide rural developing communities with a source of safe drinking water – simultaneously.

Read more.

In collaboration with researchers at North Carolina State University and the University of California-Berkeley, Aqueous’ Josh Kearns established a research program to characterize a variety of charcoal and biochar materials and assess their capabilities as effective water filtration media.

So far, this research has indicated that some endogenous charcoals are indeed quite effective for the removal of particular pesticide contaminants from drinking water under laboratory conditions. Charcoal and biochar materials created in the field vary greatly in their physical and chemical properties – thus our team of researchers is working to identify the materials and synthesis conditions that result in the most effective chars for use in water filtration. Aqueous Solutions researcher and environmental engineer Lauren Wellborn is currently heading up these efforts in the lab at North Carolina State University.

Aqueous Solutions’ collaborators at NC State have also undertaken an electron microscopy study to investigate the surface morphologies of charcoals and biochars made from a variety of organic feedstocks and under a range of synthesis conditions. The scanning electron microscope image below, taken by Dr. Carl Saquing, shows charcoal made from longan wood – a common fruit tree species in Southeast Asia. (The grain in the upper left image is about 1 mm across.)

You can find more electron microscope images and results from our laboratory experiments on the Aqueous Solutions website, Resources page.

This winter Aqueous Solutions researchers Nathan Reents and Josh Kearns return to the Pun Pun Farm community in northern Thailand to continue the development and monitoring of a prototype charcoal water filtration system serving this community.

Also, while living with the community Reents and Kearns will be conducting workshops that address a variety of issues in the appropriate technologies domain – including specific projects in water purification, water delivery systems, and sanitation systems. Workshop participants include Pun Pun community members and neighbors, farmers from around the region, members of an agrarian sect of Thai Buddhist monks, and a variety of international peoples who come to the farm for trainings in sustainable and self-reliant living techniques.

Aqueous’ fieldwork in Thailand is greatly enhanced by our collaboration with Dr. Pakawadee Sutthivaiyakit of Kasetsart University in Bangkok. Dr. Sutthivaiyakit is a professor of chemistry at Kasetsart, and her laboratory group specializes in trace analysis of pesticide chemicals in environmental waters. Pakawadee’s lab will analyze samples from Pun Pun’s water filter system to assess its effectiveness for removal of any pesticide chemicals that appear in the source water. This will protect the community from ingestion of harmful chemicals and provide a very valuable quantitative assessment of the performance of Aqueous’ water systems in situ.

Follow along with Aqueous’ progress in the lab and field by checking our website frequently!