Science AMA Series: I'm Kartik Chandran and I’m working to transform wastewater into a valuable resource. My approaches involve treating waste with the goal of producing useful resources such as fertilizers, chemicals, energy sources, and clean water. AMA!

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Hi reddit!

I became interested in science because I grew up in India having access to clean water for only about a couple of hours each day, where we also had limited access to reliable power. Years later I realized that these were minor inconveniences compared to the ordeals faced by people in many parts of the world who travel many miles each day to get a few liters of clean water. In school I learned how to design large scale wastewater treatment systems to convert sewage into clean water, but then it dawned on me that such systems typical of the developed would not work very well for the majority of the developing world's population, which doesn't even have access to reliable electricity and power.

This gave rise to my work today as an environmental engineer and Associate Professor at Columbia University linking clean water and sanitation to the resources needed to achieve them, such as energy and chemicals. Today, my focus is to develop solutions and technologies to address even more global grand societal challenges of our time such as clean water, sanitation and nutrients for agriculture in conjunction and not in isolation.

My research has involved approaching wastewater treatment with the goal of producing useful resources such as fertilizers, chemicals, and energy sources, in addition to clean water, in a way that takes into account the climate, energy, and nutrient challenges we face today. Me and my teams have tried to tailor solutions to be appropriate for the places we’re working in. For example, we’ve worked in rural Ghana to develop source-separation toilets to both provide sanitation and recover nutrients for use in agriculture. Recently, I have been collaborating with research groups in Brazil focused on facilitating energy efficient wastewater treatment there. Through our approach, sewage treatment plants can discharge better water quality to receiving water bodies such as Guanabara Bay, where sailing events for the 2016 Olympic Games will be held. Our technology, which involved using bioprocess technologies to enhance the capacity of the Alegria sewage treatment plant, was prototyped at Columbia University and demonstrated in Rio de Janeiro.

I’ll be back at 4 pm EST (1 pm PST, 9 pm UTC) to answer your questions, ask me anything!

">Science AMA Series: I'm Kartik Chandran and I’m working to transform wastewater into a valuable resource. My approaches involve treating waste with the goal of producing useful resources such as fertilizers, chemicals, energy sources, and clean water. AMA!