How do you take the temperature of an entire community? Rolf Halden PhD, professor at the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University, is doing just that, by taking a close look somewhere unexpected: our sewage.
On Monday, Nov. 9, at 6:30pm, Dr. Halden will speak at Parsons School of Design in a lecture titled “Urban Metabolism Metrology: Measuring the Chemical Burden of Cities,” an event that is open to the public and hosted by Parsons Healthy Materials Lab.
“Centralized wastewater treatment plants can serve as a currently underutilized diagnostic tool to assess the chemical exposures, behavior, and health status of rural and urban communities,” Dr. Halden said over email. The ongoing study, which started a decade ago, takes sewage samples from more than 160 communities across America, both before and after they pass through the local wastewater treatment plant.
Among those substances that persist through processing and end up in the biomass—a sludge byproduct of wastewater treatment—are “brominated flame retardants, polychlorinated antimicrobials, and perfluorinated consumer chemicals and their industrial precursors,” said Halden. “The problem with these substances is that their chemical structure is mostly foreign to nature, leaving existing natural breakdown mechanisms and enzymes [used in wastewater cleansing] ineffective in destroying them.”
And these chemicals find their way into the bodies of community citizens, according to Dr. Halden. “In the built environment, it is us, the creators and inhabitants, who store the non-green, recalcitrant chemistry in our body, mostly in adipose tissue and in women, breast milk,” he said.
The study is based in the Biodesign Institute’s Center for Environmental Security at ASU, where Rolf Halden is the Founding Director. Currently about 10 percent of the nation’s population has been tested, giving researchers unique insight into everything from chemical biomarkers that have worked their way through the human body to “elemental signatures in wastewater coming from the earth’s crust.”
“Characterizing and interpreting the chemical and biological markers in wastewater is a new science that holds great promise for assessing and managing population health,” Dr. Halden said. “It can be done on differing scales, from buildings, to city blocks, neighborhoods or the nation as whole.”
To RSVP for Rolf Halden’s lecture on Monday, Nov. 9, at Parsons in New York City, click here.
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