Sign in Subscribe
7 min read

Past, present, future: ancient water filtration, best 2024 water innovations, and our plastic PFAS future

Past, present, future: ancient water filtration, best 2024 water innovations, and our plastic PFAS future

We're back from Autodesk University and we've dug up a lot of great links for our very valued subscribers, along with a roll-up of all the best new articles from the One Water Blog. Got an interesting link you want us to share next time? Tag us LinkedIn.

Time's 2024 water innovations

A straw filter, a PFAS destruction engine, goo that cleans PFAs, and water generators.
  • Totally tubular: The LifeStraw Sip is a reusable water filter made of stainless steel with a microfilter membrane with 0.2-micron pores that lasts for 1,000 liters of personal hydration. They claim it blocks out 99.999999% of bacteria, 99.999% of parasites, and 99.999% of microplastics. We're dying to know what that other 001% is.
  • Forever chemicals forevergone? We've said it before: Finding ways to remove PFA forever chemicals from water will become a growth industry and make the people who can solve this problem pretty rich. The latest contender is ForeverGone, which injects billions of microbubbles into water to break PFAS away from water molecules and then zaps and destroys them. “It’s complete destruction," says their CEO.
  • Ground control: SourceStop offers colloidal activated carbon (CAC), available in both solid and liquid form, to spread onto polluted soil to stop PFAS from leaching into groundwater.
  • Our moisture farming future? Aquaria Atmospheric Water Generators are large-scale heat exchange systems that suck air in and pass it through filters, condensing humidity out of the air and turning it into water, which is then purified.

What does Gen Z think about water?

The Walton Family Foundation and Gallup have been asking Gen Z questions about water:

  • 31% of them believe their generation will probably or definitely not have enough clean water in the future to live.
  • A whopping 88% agree that local and national politicians and governments should be responsible for improving the quality of our water resources
  • 73% think the US is definitely or probably not doing enough to protect water.

What else do they think? Read Climate Spotlight: Gen Z on Water Issues.

Before Brita: Water filtration through the ages

Because of PFA pollution, the focus has turned to the future of water filtration, but do you know its history? Hippocrates wrote a whole treatise about it. Read JSTOR's Before Brita: A Brief History of Water Filtration.

How animals are adapting to plastic

Octopii have been observed using plastic to disguise the entrances to their homes. Birds and bees are incorporating refuse into their nests and hives. Hermit crabs are taking up residence inside pieces of plastic. Read Shells to surfboards: how wildlife has adapted to plastic.

The Moscow poo-nami

A 180-foot fountain of feces erupted from a Moscow sewer. [Insert your own 💩 joke here.]

Grab bag of water stories

World map of the tides

Cartographer Dave Taylor used FES2014 data to create this interesting map that displays maximum tidal ranges around the world in an ocean-centric Spilhaus projection.

Public-facing water data in the UK

The UK water industry has been slowly drifting into crisis mode over the past few years, with water company debt spiralling out of control and CSO spills polluting rivers. (We recently wrote a white paper about it.) Public confidence is about as low as it can go, particularly in England and Wales, which is why it's nice to see this open-data initiative. DiscoverWater.co.uk is a dashboard for consumers that brings together key information about water companies and water quality in England and Wales. Transparency is good.

From the One Water Blog

That's it for the link drops. On to our latest blog content...

How collaborative is your water engineering software?

As an engineer, are you working in parallel or in series? Because one of these ways of working is way more efficient.

Were you in the workforce or studying when Office 2010 was released? Toby Bourke was and he has some thoughts about how radically better life is now that most businesses have long-since adopted co-authoring tools. But it begs the question: Why do the same engineering-services companies whose businesses have thrived in direct response to the adoption of co-authoring software for document creation and numbers analysis still accept file-based, single-editor engineering software? The gloves are off as Toby weighs the benefits of Isolation vs collaboration: why we should expect parallel workflow capabilities in water engineering software.

The latest product news

AU2024 on-demand sessions: watch now

Did you miss Autodesk University in San Diego? We’ve curated a few lists of on-demand sessions that have been uploaded for viewing on the AU site:

Want more? Follow us on LinkedIn. We'll be posting more as they are available in different areas of water management.

Water Drops: can't stop, won't stop

Our water drop worfkow videos dried out last month because the crew was too busy getting ready for Autodesk University. But the drought is over. Tim Meadearis and his workflow-highlighting crew are back on the blog with a New batch of Water Drops: Using LIDs/SUDs, soakwell/drywell design, culvert analysis. They've now made over 50 of these videos. That's seriously impressive! This time around they tackle:

We read a lot of official city drainage manuals. Here's something we learned.

Can you use your favorite tool? We found 3 distinct ways drainage design manuals typically decide which tools are acceptable.

InfoDrainage was recently approved by the City of Raleigh (NC) and is now in their Stormwater Design Manual, which joins a growing list of approving authorities recognizing the capabilities of InfoDrainage. But can you only use InfoDrainage on public projects where it’s been explicitly listed? What do most manuals say about tool choice? Trevor English found three types of use cases in his quest to answer the question: Can you use InfoDrainage? What to do when an official drainage design manual doesn’t specify.

Get our new 'Spotlight on Water' report

We wanted to know more about how water professionals use software to convert their data into insights, so we took survey data from Autodesk’s 2024 State of Design & Make report and gathered together members of the Autodesk Water Executive Council (WXC) to delve deeper into the subject. The 11 water industry leaders we spoke to had differing points of view, which we captured in conversation. Want to hear what else they think? Grab your copy of the New report: Spotlight on data and digitalization in the water industry.

💡
Read our blog. Talk to us on LinkedIn. Follow us on YouTube.
Doing our best to make every link matter.