By summer student Nargis Kholmamatova >
Remember the money that you spend to pay water bills: do you know where it goes? While it is different from country to country, the general distribution process should be the same. First, a portion of your money is spent to pretreat the river water to make it safe to drink for you. Second, it covers post-treatment of your wastewater to safely return it to the environment. Lastly, the rest of your bills are spent for the maintenance of all of the equipment that is used to keep the whole water treatment system running.
The water itself, as a resource, is actually free for you to use, since every person on the planet has a right to it. Thus, the amount of your water bills depends to a large extent on how well your country can treat your water, or, to be more exact, how well your country’s engineers can treat it.
The research that I am currently doing at HZB is chasing a similar aim. However, instead of the water that comes from your kitchen and bath, I concentrate on the water that was used to dye clothes and prepare medicine.Just like the water you drink, the water used in these industries needs to be cleaned before it can be released back into the environment. The cost of this treatment is part of what you pay when you buy clothes or medicine. So, in a way, the work I’m doing now could influence how much you’ll spend to stay healthy and stylish in the future.
Is this research hard? Maybe, but it is certainly not boring! For example, did you know that there is a way to treat coloured textile water using soap bubbles? Yes, the same kind of bubbles you played with as a kid. Crazy, isn’t it? But it works! The method is simple: the dye molecules in wastewater are actually positive or negative dye ions. If you use a specific soap bubble that has an opposite charge, your dye ion will just stick to the surface of this bubble (in science we call it adsorption) and travel with it to the surface of the water. Once it is there, it is an easy job to scrap it off.
Is it really possible? I don’t know for sure, but I believe it is. In the beginning of my writing I mentioned the financial benefit of my research, but I have a more important reason that drives me forward. In one of the pictures you can see the Salar river and what industrial wastewater mismanagement has done to it. I am sad and concerned since many other rivers from my country and world overall share the same fate. I am sad, but at times my humor takes over and funny thoughts came to my mind: “One can save the-number-one vital resource for humanity with tiny little soap bubbles;)“
On the author: Nargis Kholmamatova is from Uzbekistan and just started her bachelor programme.