Aging infrastructure, legacy pollution and emerging contaminants across the US are driving a growing urgency to do something about America’s water crisis. Read the article in the Guardian, for which Prof. David Sedlak was interviewed.
California resident Florencia Ramos has been purchasing drinking water for herself and her family for more than a decade. Photo credit: Gary Kazanjian/Ensia
A new student-lead collaboration, called the Climate and Impacts Research Hub will continue in Spring 2020. This semester, we heard from 9 different graduate students about their research and had a cross-disciplinary discussion and critique. This Hub is a start of campus-wide network for graduate students to collaborate on, learn about, and develop their climate-related research. See the website: to sign up for emails, see the past speakers, and contribute to the discussion now.
BWC affiliate and Wheeler Water Institute Director Michael Kiparsky talks to Wired about Desalination Is Booming as Cities Run out of Water.
Berkeley Water Center affiliate Holly Doremus talks to the LA times about How California is defying Trump’s environmental rollbacks.
Separately collected urine is an attractive potential fertilizer because of its high nutrient content, low cost, and inherent linkage of urban wastewater management and peri-urban agriculture. Urine from waterless urinals was applied to corn and lettuce plants to examine the impact of urine application rates and frequency on plant growth and soil parameters. In both corn and lettuce experiments, urine application significantly (p < 0.05) increased growth and leaf production relative to control plants. More frequent applications led to lower soil cation exchange capacities for corn and higher soil nitrogen content for both crops. Based on preliminary implementation calculations, waterless urinals at the University of São Paulo (USP), School of Arts, Sciences, and Humanities campus could lead to over 1,500 m3 of water saved and 360 m3 of urine produced on an annual basis. These experiments and modeling results are discussed in the context of scaling up urban urine collection, transport, and fertilization in São Paulo, Brazil.