Work on two Chemists Without Borders projects will be described. The first project has the objective of providing clean drinking water to residents of Teriail High School District, near Chittagong, Bangladesh, who are currently drinking water contaminated with arsenic. We have tested all 320 wells in the school district for arsenic and mapped the results. 65% of the wells were found to be contaminated with arsenic. However, we found that 35% were safe (at or below the Bangladesh limit for arsenic of 50ppb). We are therefore working on a program wherein the residents with safe wells can share their water with neighbors who have contaminated wells. Since no new well construction or delivery service is required, we believe this to be a low cost solution to the arsenic problem that could be replicated across Bangladesh. The second project is our approach to combat climate change. Most efforts to combat global warming and climate change have been focused on trying to reduce the burning of fossil fuels, which emit CO2 into the atmosphere, which in turn traps heat from the sun and causes global warming and climate change. Another approach is possible. All the plants on Earth capture CO2 from the atmosphere during their lifetimes but give it back when they die and decay. However, we can interrupt this cycle by processing dead plants to extract their carbon in a form called biochar, keeping the carbon from returning to the atmosphere as CO2. The biochar can, in turn, be used in agriculture to increase the fertility of the soil. This technology is well known to the researchers in the field but not to many farmers. Our contribution is to build up a global army of volunteers who will pass on this information to farmers everywhere, thus increasing the demand for and production of biochar. Every pound of carbon that is sequestered in our soils is a pound of carbon that does not return to the atmosphere as CO2.

Bangladesh arsenic and climate change projects

2019 Fall National Meeting

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