Team:WLC-Milwaukee/HP/Silver
Ethics and Impacts
We feel it is vital that we educate ourselves and others about the context, ethics, and safety of our work. Consequently, we endeavored to examine some of these issues both before and during, our work on this year’s project.
Ethical Considerations
Water is an immensely powerful natural resource making it a heavily contested subject both ethically and legally. Over 1 billion people in the world live without consistent access to clean water, over 2.6 billion people live without access to basic sanitation, and many areas of the world are utilizing the water supplies they do have at unsustainable rates (for example the American Southwest and California).
But water is more than just a resource for consumption or to be used in irrigation; it serves as the basis of the web of life on our planet, and carries heavy symbolism and meaning in nearly every culture or religion. These needs, beliefs, and environmental factors are all dynamics that should be considered when creating a product designed for use in water management. One of the most significant recurring themes we encountered in various cultural beliefs and needs was the importance of reducing plastic and environmental pollution. What is the point of creating a system to evaluate water pollution, when the test itself pollutes the very environment it was designed to help protect?
In our own work, we endeavored to create a product that was sustainable, safe, and respectful of the beliefs and needs of various target communities. We purposefully considered how we could reduce the possible waste byproducts of our test kit by reducing the number of components and researching environmentally friendly kit components, or kit components that are easily recycled and non-toxic such as glass substrate shipping vials, biodegradable filter papers, and recyclable syringes. Additionally, all biological components of the kit are non-infective and quickly degrade in the natural environment, further reducing the potential negative impacts of our system on bodies of water.
While there are certainly other considerations that must be analyzed, we believe our kit design ethically and sustainably fulfills a need for faster, easier fecal coliform testing.
Product Applications
While we initially envisioned our product being primarily used in the realm of public health or biological research, our view on the various possible applications of our kit quickly expanded to include private industry and use in both developing and developed communities worldwide.
Industry
Based on our investigations into various water management strategies, companies, and areas of water management we thought it important to consider how our product may be applied to private industry. Through our interviews with Mr. Mark Wickam of the Lodi Water Treatment plant, we learned about the concerns that municipalities and private companies consider when drilling wells or using lakes and reservoirs for their water supplies, or when returning effluent to the environment. Although a quick test kit may not be definitive enough to influence the choice of water supply in a city or municipality, a quick test kit such as ours could be used by companies as a first step method for monitoring their effluent such as in animal processing facilities, large scale farming operations, or aquaculture facilities. Additionally, Mr. Wickam asked us to consider the private well industry or the use of our product by individuals using wells that may be compromised or contaminated.
Public Health
Through our interview with Dr. Bhattacharyya of Milwaukee Public Health, we gained a much better grasp of the potential applications of our product in the realm of public health, for more information on that interview see: Integrated Human Practices. The potential application of our kit in public health are numerous, but include testing of beaches and recreational water sources for safety, determining when or if municipal water processing equipment is fouled, providing initial information on the safety of consuming various aquatic organisms from a body of water, tracking or determining if a body of water experiences non-point sewer contamination, testing municipal effluent before return to the environment, and quickly testing taps and water supplies for their purity before consumption by the public.
Developed and Developing Countries
The use of our kit by members of the public both in developed and developing countries was one of the largest application areas that we investigated.
In developed areas, we foresaw our kit being used by concerned citizens that wish to test or confirm that a pond, stream, or source of water is safe to use, or when municipal facilities and abilities are limited. Additionally, as a result of the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico, the use of our test kit during natural disaster was brought up at a meeting. During large scale crisis it is often difficult to determine whether a water source is safe unless it is sterilized, or bottled, both of which are often expensive or completely unattainable. As such, we envisioned our kit being used to test wells or reservoirs for possible contamination and compromise to the system when conventional testing methods are impossible.
In developing areas, contrary to our initial beliefs, the applications of our project seemed more limited after interviewing a member of a humanitarian outreach team. This is due to other needs of the community that must first be met (see Integrated Human Practices). We were forced to consider how we might subsidize the cost of our kit for developing communities, along with educating these communities on the importance of clean water and use of testing. As a result of our interview we began looking into working with donors and humanitarian outreach programs to send our kits to communities in need and educate these communities on test operation. See Integrated Human Practices for more information.
