CREATE Fellowship: Developing Transformative Membrane Filters
Billions of people drink contaminated water. This is one of the leading causes of severe water-borne diseases that lead to 502,000 deaths each year and heavily burden healthcare systems, accounting for up to 80% of all hospitalizations in some regions in the world. Therefore, clean, safe, and affordable drinking water is a critical resource for public health and environmental sustainability. In recent decades, an increasing number of world regions are suffering from water scarcity. Thus, developing new technologies that enable cheaper, more efficient water treatment and reuse are in great demand.
Membranes are expected to play a progressively more significant role in providing clean drinking water from natural resources such as surface water (lakes, rivers, streams) and ground water (wells, aquifers). Membrane filters are more economic, energy efficient, and produce higher quality and more reliable effluent than most other water purification methods. However, current commercial membranes are not equipped with the required properties to perform many of these separations in an effective and enduring manner. This is largely due to fouling, the accumulation of unwanted material on the membrane surface and pores, which leads to lower productivity, declining effectiveness, and shorter membrane life cycle.
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The World’s Most Potent Greenhouse Gas Has the Potential to be a Good News Story
The gas, known as SF6, is the most potent greenhouse gas (GHG) on earth. SF6 has 22,800 times CO2’s warming potential over a 100-year period, and it stays in the atmosphere for 3,200 years without degrading. SF6 is primarily used as an insulator in electrical equipment (70% of emissions come from the sector), entering the atmosphere when the equipment leaks or needs to be repaired. This presents a catch-22 for climate mitigation: the more electrical grids are expanded to accommodate renewable energy, the more SF6 will be emitted down the line. The EPA predicts that global SF6 emissions from electric power systems will increase 34% between 2015 and 2030.
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Don’t Forget the Ladies: The Gendered Aspects of the Climate Crisis
MALD candidate Eda Kosma discusses how climate change has a significant impact on women. This is the third blog post in the Women’s History Month blog series.
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Stoking the Imagination: Learning Climate Care from Indigenous Women
In his book The Great Derangement, author Amitav Ghosh argues that the climate crisis is a crisis of culture and imagination. He roots this argument in the explanation that the development of the carbon economy during the Industrial Revolution hinged on the very absence of its development in British colonies, where raw materials to sustain this revolution were procured. Therefore, the carbon economy was nurtured by the strategic and deliberate exclusion of those people from their share of the benefits of carbon-based economic growth. In his 2021 book A Nutmeg’s Curse, Ghosh presents one example of how colonisers were able to exploit natural resources in lands where people had lived for millennia. In 1621, under false pretexts, officials of the Dutch East Indies Company perpetrated massacres and forced relocation of the Bandanese people from Selamon, a small village located on one of the Banda islands in the eastern Indian Ocean, in present day Indonesia. On these islands, the Dutch had found the commercially viable nutmeg which they couldn’t trade freely with local presence and control over the island.
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Empowering Youth Voices with CIERP: A Reflection on My Path from Shanghai to Tufts
Shanghai’s air felt comparable to a dizzying combination of dirt, ultra-fine particles, and chemicals prophesizing and fueling the prelude to cataclysm. The daunting overcast backdropped severe pollution and traffic congestion as if people could keep living this way regardless of the cleanliness of the oxygen they breathed. Masking was a diurnal must. Incessant coughing noises from the pedestrians were truly a test of my patience. Fantasizing about pretty skyline sceneries while sitting dully in my first class, I found myself helplessly yearning for something that I had taken for granted. These sceneries of gloominess agitated me. “I wonder how my grandfather managed to get groceries today,” I whispered to myself, “I hope he stayed at home.”
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