University of California
Plant materials that would otherwise become trash may be the key to solving two big problems – diminishing freshwater supplies for farms and diminishing effectiveness of antibiotics.On average agriculture accounts for 70 percent of global freshwater use. In California, which produces about half of all U.S.-grown fruits, nuts and vegetables, that number increases to 80 percet.Food production will need to double by 2050, the United Nations estimates. But water supplies won’t increase accordingly. Due to climate change and drought water resources are quickly shrinking.One solution to the increasing need for farm water is to use treated municipal wastewater. There are about 16,000 wastewater-treatment plants in the United States. Each is capable of processing as many as 10 million gallons every day.
“It’s a huge amount of processed water that’s mostly clean and can be used again, but there’s a problem,” said Ananda Bhattacharjee, an assistant project scientist t the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Salinity Laboratory, based at the University of California-Riverside.
“This water can contain chemicals of emerging concern, like antibiotics, that are difficult to detect and treat without advanced and expensive instrumentation,” he said. “These instruments also require trained laboratory personnel to operate and maintain.”Once exposed to antibiotics in te water supply, soil bacteria start developing resistance to the drugs because they want to survive, he said.
“Bacteria are amazing biological sensors,” he said. “As the bacteria develop resistance, antibiotics stop working.”Once crops are irrigated with contaminated reclaimed water, plants that are harvested and consumed may contain residual antibiotics, resistance genes and resistant bacteria.To correct the issue Bhattacharjee is leading a $1 million project testing an inexpensive technology to make reclaimed water safer for agricultural re-use. Funded by the U.S. Department of Agricultue’s Agriculture and Food Research Initiative, the project will test how biochar made from various types of discarded plant materials can “polish” the water.
Biochar is a charcoal-like substance made by burning organic material. Burning any organic matter in limited-oxygen environments retains the mass of the burned substance. The remaining, charred substance is absorbent.
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“It’s like activated charcoal used in (high efficiency particulate air) filters and (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) systems,” he said. “Biochar works on the same principal. It adsorbs chemicals present in reclaimed water and allows only clean water to pass through.”Based on that principle Daniel Ashworth, a soil scientist at the Salinity Laboratory, first built a bench-scale filtration system with biochar to remove antibiotics in synthetic wastewater. The results were promising, with antibiotic-removal efficiency of as much as 98 perent.“Encouraged by Dr. Ashworth’s experiments, we’ll be designing the larger-scale biochar-based polishing systems for removing residual antibiotcs in reclaimed water,” Bhattacharjee said.
Biochar polishers could potentially remove the need to detect antibiotics in reclaimed water, assisting treatment plants that don’t have advanced detection or treatment technologies, and that can’t afford them.
Affordability is one of the best features of the biochar system.Scientists from UC-Riverside, the USDA and the U.S. Salinity Laboratory are collaborating to test biochar made from multiple kinds of plant materials left from agricultural field production.They’ll collect treated sewage sludge and plant materials such as pistachio shells and date-palm leaves which would otherwise be discard. The materials will be converted into biochar for designing filtration systems through which reclaimed water can pass.
Ultimately the team could develop a database of different, inexpensive biochar maerials that can be used for removing harmful compounds from reclaimed water for agricultural reuse.
If the costs remain inexpensive and the prcess is effective, growers could install biochar-based reclaimed-water-polishing systems on their farms.“That’s the major goal of the project, taking this from bench scale to full field scale,” Bhattacharjee said.
Field ecology is changing due to residual antibiotics in irrigation systems. Reclaimed water moves into the soil. Earthworms that feed on soil organic matter can develop antibiotic resistance in their guts. They may release resistance through their feces, making additional changes to soil microflora, which keeps the cycle of resistance going.
“We’re slowly spiking our agricultural fields with this resistance,” Bhattacharjee said. “Demonstrating the issue was our first project – Bacteria Wars: episode one. Now we have a technique to remove antibiotics and resistant bacteria, reducing antimicrobial-resistance spread in agriculture. hat’s our second episode Researchers Strike Back.”
Contact profiles.ucr.edu – search for “Ananda Bhattacharjee” – for more information.
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Ananda Bhattacharjee
Jules Bernstein is a senior public-information officer for the University of California-Riverside.
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