EscondidoEscondido — Sandwiched between the football stadium and tennis courts at San Pasqual High School, a scientist with the J. Craig Venter Institute is working on a high-tech project that could one day provide millions of people with a way to sanitize polluted water in countries that can’t afford costly waste-water treatment systems.
The project starts with pig waste — tons of it — produced by 21 swine kept in chain-link pens at the Escondido campus. The pigs pack on a few pounds a day, and produce several pounds of waste daily that is collected in the name of research. Water polluted with the waste is cleaned and purified, primarily with technology that has been around for decades.
The focus of the “big poop project” is to make that technology— the BioElectrochemical Sanitation Technology, or BEST — more compact and affordable in poor and rural parts of the world, said Venter scientist Orianna Bretschger.
Bretschger has set up a beta test bed at San Pasqual where student interns perform alkalinity and PH tests on the contaminated water. The success of the project could have its greatest impact in parts of the world where sanitation is a problem, she said.
Roughly 2.4 billion people, or a third of the world’s population, don’t have access to flushing toilets or clean water, according to statistics published by the World Health Organization. Worldwide, about 1.7 million deaths a year — 90 percent of whom are children — are attributed to unsafe water and poor sanitation and hygiene, mainly through infectious diarrhea.
Access to a safe water supply and proper sanitation systems could save the lives of 1.5 million children a year, world health officials estimate.
“No one should suffer like this,” said Kristein Isham, an 11th grader at San Pasqual who is a paid intern on the research project. “Everyone should have access to clean water.”
Bretschger stumbled on San Pasqual’s agricultural program through a colleague at J. Craig Venter who had kids attending the school. The pig waste became a natural substitute for human waste to prove out the concept of the research, which is aimed at finding ways to shrink the BEST technology to the size of a container trailer, and get the cost down to roughly $500 per trailer, which could serve a community of about 2,500.
For research purposes, pig waste is a good substitute for human waste because it is far less hazardous and is produced much more quickly.
“The pigs put on 250 pounds in four months and are constantly growing, eating and pooping,” Bretschger said.
Operating the project isn’t rocket science. The waste is dried out, then shoveled and placed in a drain, while a slurry of corn and grain feed is hosed into the drain. The waste drains into an underground sump that holds 1,000 gallons of the smelly mixture.
The wastewater is then siphoned from the sump into a feeder bin that refines the waste, before it streams out to the heart of the system where microbial fuel cells remove the bacteria. The power created in the chemical process of removing the bacteria is enough to fire up a light bulb — one per fuel cell. Additional treatment systems, similar to those used in swimming pools, make the water safe enough to drink.
Each of the high-tech containers has about 50 fuel cells, each the size of a shoebox. The cells produce the power and clean water simultaneously as the pig sludge flows through them.
The Escondido Union High School District agreed to work with the J. Craig Venter Institute in 2013, after Bretschger received a $5 million grant from the Roddenberry Foundation, an Encino-based group that bears the name of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the original 1960’s television series, “Star Trek.”
Foundation officials remain excited about the potential of the project.
“I can’t wait to stick a hose at the end of a tap and drink it,” said Eugene “Rod” Roddenberry Jr., president and director of the foundation, and son of the legendary science fiction producer. “My long-term goal is to have one of these for each household, hut or mansion, with nothing going into the sewage system, and no more sewage treatment facilities.”
“It’s a hope, not a vision,” he added. “There’s still a lot of steps to get there. This isn’t something that will happen overnight.”
Construction of BEST at San Pasqual also was made possible through funding from local businesses, including Escondido-based Precision Concrete Construction Inc., and San Diego-based companies Geocon Inc., Rick Engineering Co., D4C Product Development Inc. and San Diego Pump Inc.
In the fall, the J. Craig Venter Institute and an international team that includes researchers from San Diego State University, University of California San Diego and the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California plan to pilot the technology in Tijuana, and a year later at a school in San Quintin, on the west coast of the Mexican state of Baja.
