Fresh urban water
If you’re concerned with water quality and are curious about how chemistry can help improve it, then this episode is for you. Dr. Jessica Ray is using creative thinking along with her full chemistry and chemical engineering skill set to develop and use new composite materials, as well as repurposing common materials, to remediate and clean up urban wastewater and storm water. This is yet another episode that touches on how chemistry can help our environment while moving us from a linear to a more sustainable circular economy.
Bringing Chemistry to Life · Jessica Ray, Paolo Braiuca
Show Notes
Great scientists look at the world around them, identify problems and think about how their area of expertise can provide a solution. This is what Jessica Ray does. In her native St. Louis, she experienced regular urban flooding and grew up familiar with the problem of managing urban wastewater. When, later in life, her studies took her to California, she experienced the opposite problem of severe droughts. This is how she became interested in urban water and started applying her chemical engineering skills to deal with the problem of contaminants, such as PFAS, in urban waste waters.
The theme of the unsustainability of our linear economy – where things are made, used and discarded - returns to the podcast. This episode explores Jessica’s disruptive work on the development of cost-efficient methods for the treatment of storm water and other urban water wastes. It’s a surprising discovery of a smart combination of everyday materials and clever chemistry that promises to bring us one step closer to a more sustainable circular economy.
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