 Think Tech Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Welcome to Likeable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen. Joining me today via Skype is Dr. James A. Smith, the Henry L. McNair Professor of Environmental Engineering at the University of Virginia. Welcome, Jim. Thank you, Ethan. I appreciate you having me. Nice to have you back here. Jim is joining us via Zoom from Virginia, actually, and we've had Jim Allen before, about what, two years ago. He came on when he was just developing a really fascinating product called the Matty Drop. And this grew out of his research that he has been doing for years. Jim has studied fluid flow and solute transport and microbial transport in porous media. He used to do, I guess, ceramic filters for water, right? That's correct, yeah. And then some years ago came up with this interesting idea of rather than trying to push the water through the filter and realize that there was a sort of better way to do it, right? Exactly, exactly. Yeah, I mean, we're, you know, and just sort of backing up a little bit, of course, what we're really trying to solve an issue that's a global problem. You know, I mean, you know, probably, you know, in at least here in the United States and most of the United States, we have great water. We have great water treatment plants that are centralized and purify the water, send it out through complicated distribution networks, and it's on 24-7. It's got a chlorine residual to prevent any pathogen growth, and it's highly regulated. But if you flip up picture number one, in most of the world, this is sort of what people are dealing with. And this is a picture I snapped myself in a rural part of South Africa, and we had just installed a borehole, and within about an hour after we had an operational, this woman showed up with water storage containers in a wheelbarrow, and she fills up these containers and brings them back to her house because they don't have a regular supply of water. There's no taps coming into their home, water, even when they have a standpipe nearby it may be intermittent. So what they do is they store their water in their home, and even if the water starts out clean, which it may not be, it may be untreated water, but even if it starts out clean, when it sits around for a long period of time, when kids are dipping their cups in storage containers and their hands are touching the water, it becomes contaminated over time. So the World Health Organization has said, probably the best way to deal with this problem, that the resources aren't there to build great water treatment plants and distribution systems, but if people can treat their water in their home right before they consume it, that's a way that we can potentially get some help for people in these developing world settings. And that's sort of what our goal of our MaudiDrop technology is. It's a point of use water treatment technology. If you take a look at slide number two, basically what the MaudiDrop is, it's just a ceramic tablet. So it's made from clay, natural material, and we assemble the clay in a specific way and fire it in a kiln at a high temperature, and we also apply silver in a very specific way. And we end up getting this ceramic tablet, and what you do is you just put this in a 10 to 20 liter water storage container, and you fill that container up at night, and the next morning the water is safe to drink. And basically the MaudiDrop releases ionic silver into the water at a very controlled wet rate, and silver is a remarkable antimicrobial agent or disinfectant for water-borne pathogens. It disinfects a broad spectrum of pathogens. And if you look at the third picture, basically once someone is using the MaudiDrop, it all they need to do is just keep refilling their water storage container every day. Every night they fill it back up, and the water is safe to drink the next day, and it works the same way day after day, and then the next day they can just open the spigot and collect their water for drinking water, and it provides them with safe drinking water that doesn't change the taste, it doesn't change the odor of the water, it still tastes the same, yet those antimicrobial pathogens, E. coli, chigella, cryptosporidium, rotavirus, adenovirus, they're all disinfected, so you're not going to get sick from those microbial pathogens. Yeah, it's a really beautiful technology, and so very appropriate to the uses in places like you were saying there in rural South Africa. I was doing work several years ago out in some of the more remote islands out in the South Pacific, and ran into the same kind of situations where a lot of people were gathering rainwater off their catchment systems to use as their sole source of drinking water. Even in places where they have a centralized system like in Majro, that centralized water system is pressurized and running only for a few hours per week really, a few hours per day, two or three days per week, and particularly because it's not pressurized much of the time and people have illegally tapped into it. What you get out of that tap, you don't want to drink anyhow because it's not safe basically, the whole system has basically been contaminated. So I saw the Matty Drops as being a tremendously valuable option there, a tool for people to use, and even veteran Jim didn't mention this, but Matty Drops cost five dollars a piece basically, right, and they'll last for a year. Yeah, so we've been continuing to evolve the Matty Drop design, and basically the original Matty Drop would treat about 10 liters of water per day and would last for six months. We just are about to introduce the Matty Drop Plus, and in fact we actually just shipped out our first order of a thousand Matty Drop Pluses today. The Matty Drop Plus will treat 20 liters of water per day for 12 months, so basically it's quadrupling the performance of the original Matty Drop. The pricing, it's variable, if you just want to go to our website and buy one Matty Drop, it's $15, but if you're interested in buying in bulk in large quantities, we can sell the Matty Drop down at around $6 per Matty Drop, and basically when you do the math, 20 liters a day for a year, one Matty Drop treats over 7,000 liters of water. So really that makes it the least expensive water treatment technology available today. There's nothing that's cheaper. Even chlorine drops are more expensive than the Matty Drop. Yeah, and the beauty of it too is that basically once you've set it in your carboy or your dispenser, your water dispenser, you can basically forget about it, then you're saying now for a year, not even just six months, I mean you don't have to do anything else. So it's not like you've got to be putting it in like with chlorine every day basically, but you just leave this in place and keep popping off your water container. Yeah, Ethan, and that's a great point. So in my experience, I've been working now in Mexico, Guatemala, and South Africa for the last 12 years or so, and what I think, when you think about a point of use water treatment technology, it's actually got very difficult design criteria. First, it's got to of course be technologically effective, right? It's got to kill the kill or remove the pathogens. It's got to though be really cheap, and the Matty Drop certainly is the cheapest. It's got to be really easy to use, and that I think is again a remarkable advantage of the Matty Drop is as you say, once you put it in your water container that first time, you don't do anything different. All you just got to do is fill up your water container every night and then the next morning it's safe to drink. And of course it's got to be socially acceptable, and that can be tricky too, right, if it changes the taste or the odor or the color of the water, that's going to be a big problem. Chlorine, which the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta for a long time were really been pushing their safe water system, which is basically a little bottle of concentrated chlorine solution, and you add the chlorine each day to your water. Well, they've had detailed studies of that in developing nations, and what they find is they go into a community and they distribute everybody, they give them all safe water storage containers, they give them free chlorine bottles, they instruct them on the importance of health and hygiene and why they need the chlorine, and then they come back a year later, and only about 20% of the water containers have any chlorine in them. So 80% just stop using it, and why it's the inconvenience, right, you got to do it every single day, it's the change in taste, so I think technologically effective is of course important, but maybe more important and more challenging is that social acceptability, and getting people to be willing and interested and continue to use the product, and I think that's again the mighty drop, it's arguably the number one product in that regard in terms of ease of use and social acceptance. Absolutely, and I mean, I saw a similar thing in YAP. YAP actually has three municipal water systems that cover basically all of YAP proper, and really actually deliver good, high quality drinking water to something like 95% of the homes in YAP, and they get their water from fairly deep wells, they treat it very effectively, their EPA actually looks at it very carefully, and people don't like it, people that won't drink it, literally people will still go and collect the rainwater and drink their sometimes untreated rainwater rather than drinking this treated water because they don't like the taste of the chlorine, and it was really a stunning thing for me to run into when I was trying to get people to sort of have better habits with the drinking water, I was stunned to run into this, that they had this access to perfectly healthy water but wouldn't use it, and so again the mighty drop came out upon as a perfect thing for people there, because yes, and then they could use it with their rainwater that they got, they didn't have to boil the rainwater to treat it, they could just collect it as they've always done, and didn't add any taste to it, and so they were very happy with it, you know. Yeah, it's remarkable, I think people just don't, they sort of know about water and water quality but they don't know, and when something, even as little as the taste of the water changes, they'd rather not use that technology and just take their chances with the untreated water, because they, you know, to some extent they say, well, it's probably not safe but I've been drinking all my life, everybody drinks it, you know, it's not a big deal, and that's a tough thing to overcome. But you know, what's neat about the mighty drop, you know, I feel it's a very disruptive technology because there's really nothing like it, you know, if you think about what's on the current point of use, water treatment market, there's the traditional technologies, you know, things like boiling and maybe things like Moringa olifera that's added ground up seeds of the Moringa tree that are added to water. And of course, those are free, but they're actually relatively ineffective or their expense, you know, boiling is actually remarkably expensive, the cost of labor to gather firewood, the cost to help problems with breathing in particulates from indoor fires. And then there's a group that's like the one time use and that might be things like procter and gambles, pure sachets or aquatabs. And they're very expensive. You know, aquatabs to treat 7,000 liters of water cost about $15, right? So it's, it's, you know, triple the cost of a mighty drop. Excuse me, I'm sorry, $50, it's 10 times the cost of a mighty drop. And then you get the high end units. Now, those are great. And they work really well. Yeah, I'm talking about more complex filtration systems that might have activated carbon, it may have ceramic candle filters. The problem with that is they're just they're inaccessible to the global poor. They're just too expensive. Those units are often 50, 100, $150. And then you have to buy replacement filters. So that's just sort of out of reach of the people we're trying to help. So the mighty drop doesn't fit in any of those classifications, right? It's not a one time point of one time use product, right? One mighty drop works for 12 months. And it doesn't involve it's not expensive like a filtration unit. And it's not ineffective like many of the traditional methods. So I think, in that regard, there's really nothing like it currently on the market. Absolutely. And we're going to explore it some more of its advantages when we come back right now, we're going to take a one minute break. You're listening to Dr. Jim Smith and me, your host Ethan Allen here on think tech Hawaii and likable science. We'll be back in a one minute. Do you want to be cool? If so, watch my show on Tuesdays at one called out of the comfort zone. I sang this song to you because I think you either are cool or have the potential to be seriously cool. 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I'm your host Ethan Allen with me today joining us in the obvious zoom meeting in the think tech studios is Dr. James Smith from the University of Virginia Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. And we've been talking about matty drops. These are a silver infused porous ceramic tablet that make a beautiful point of use decontamination water decontamination system. And we were talking earlier about about how they sort of what they were made of and why they had so they've enjoyed such popularity why why they're really a very appropriate technology for so many uses. But what's really amazing is is in some sense the chemistry of them. I actually introduce them as part of my Water for Life program out in the Pacific Islands here. And was amazing sort of the educational potential because they use silver and Jim maybe you can tell us a little more about how that silver is is put into the matty drops and what you had to do to sort of get the recipe just right as it were. Yeah. And certainly we continue to improve it. But basically the idea behind the matty drop technology is we apply we basically by applying silver to the ceramics the porous ceramic substrate. We can create what we call silver nanopatches throughout this porous ceramic tablet. And basically these silver nanopatches if you put up the fourth. Sure. We've actually characterized them. We've gone in and looked with a transmission electron microscope and we can see the patches of metallic silver little solid silver patches on the ceramic surface. And we can go around and basically measure the diameter of each patch. And then we confirm it's silver with something called energy dispersive spectroscopy. But by measuring each of the individual patches we can actually get a histogram of the size of the nanopatches. So the picture that's up on the screen shows that we see sort of a range of diameters but typically a mean of around three and a half to four nanometers. So what happens now when you put the matty drop in the water. Oxygen in the water reacts at the water silver interface and oxidizes some of this zero valent metallic silver and produces silver ions that then diffuse through a tortuous path out of the ceramic tablet and into the bulk solution. And then those silver ions are what then go ahead and disinfect the microbial pathogens. And of course we designed it. We're targeting this typical water storage container. So we targeted so we produce enough silver in the water to disinfect the pathogens. But we're well below the EPA and World Health Organization drinking water standards for silver. Silver is actually really non toxic. You know the only known condition is Algeria where if you drink double the drinking water standard for 70 years for all your water you start to get some skin discoloration. Other than that there are no known toxic effects of silver. But of course we even still we keep it well below the drinking water standard with our design and that's plenty enough silver to effectively this can disinfect the waterborne pathogens. And basically if you go to the fifth picture you know this just sort of shows sort of our evolution of our design over many years now. You know we started out with sort of a red art clay that we use this big hunky cylinder. For a while we were looking at smaller cubes that would increase the surface area and increase the rate of release of the silver. And then we moved to sort of a soap bar size tablet. And what we found was people were still having a little trouble in some of their water storage containers. It was still too wide to fit in. So we moved to even a more slimmer design. And we recently have improved our application of silver. So that's why we now have the 12 month lifespan and we're able to treat 20 liters of water per day. So we've gone through a lot of design modifications. You know we published a lot of our work in the scientific literature. But in the end we've ended up with this I guess the next picture is number six on the current product which is our 12 month muddy drop plus. We want we felt it was such a big advance the change from from 10 to 20 and six to 12 months that we wanted to even give it a new name. So we call it the muddy drop plus. Super yeah. That's really wonderful that you did that. And it's a great lesson too for people who develop technologies that it's not you don't just hit on something and go with it. You have to keep pushing it and tweaking it to make it really work the way you want. And again the way the way it works actually very intriguing. It's still a really I gather a matter of some some debate in the scientific community. Why? Why is it that they sort of know there's several roots that silver is interfering with microbes in their in their cell membranes and in their nuclear processes and various things. But it's very intriguing to people that silver is so very toxic to microbes and yet as you say so sort of completely non toxic to to us. Yeah at the higher level animals like us it's really not a problem. And yeah and it's you know it's what we're we're continuing to do research on different pathogens. We we just have my one of my PhD students just finished and she's getting ready to submit a paper on some work with adenovirus. And no one has ever looked at silver effects on adenovirus and we're for the first time we're showing a pretty good disinfection effect of silver on adenovirus. So a very common waterborne pathogen and it actually looks like that the muddy drop in silver works well. We've also done recent work with cryptosporidia and Giardia. These are now crypto and Giardia you know chlorine just doesn't work at all on them. So we're finding that the muddy drop does result in about a 10 to 15 fold reduction in Giardia and crypto concentrations. So that was really exciting for us. It actually works better than chlorine. And the other thing that's really interesting we are actually now we have data showing that the muddy drop when placed in a word water storage container will kill mosquito larvae. So oftentimes in household water in warm environments mosquitoes will lay their eggs in water storage containers. So we actually tested it against the Zika mosquito adis egypti and the malaria mosquito anopheles. And in both cases we saw a 100 percent die off of the mosquito larvae over a 24 hour period. So this could be another tool in the battle against you know mosquito borne diseases like malaria and the Zika virus. Well that's that's that's amazing because yeah malaria is still a huge killer out there and Zika is a concern. I wonder a little local concern here is the so called rat lungworm and the eggs and larva of that little little thing. I wonder if the muddy drop works against them. That would be interesting to find out. Yeah we haven't tested against that. I'm not I wasn't aware of that problem but you know I you know the decent chance at well because those lower order organisms it seems to work really well on. Yeah which is great. Yeah. The other the other thing Ethan we I wanted to mention to we we currently are having a pretty significant study going on in Limpopo province South Africa. We actually have four hundred families involved in the study. And we divided them into four groups. One group is control. We don't give any intervention to that group. One group is has a safe water storage container basically a plastic container with a spigot and a cover. One group has the storage container with a muddy drop. And the last group has a storage container with a pot shaped ceramic water filter. And we basically measure the water quality going into those interventions. And then we look at the water quality coming out. And if you look at the I think it's figure the figure. It's the box and whisker plot one. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry for seven the seventh one. And the this the two graphs the top graph these are box and whisker plots that show the range of coliform bacteria in the water. And the top graph is all the untreated water for each intervention. And the bottom graph is the treated water. Now if you look at group D. The top graph in the bottom graph of the same because that's the control group. Right. So they're not getting any treatment. Right. Group C is the just the safe storage container. And as you can see it's maybe helping a little bit but not any measurable amount. Group B is the muddy drop. So if you look at the top graph for group B there's loads of coliform bacteria. You look at the bottom group that treated water with the muddy drop everything with zero. And then group A is the ceramic filter which also works well but actually doesn't work as well as the muddy drop. Right. So we're very excited about these results that the muddy drop in a large controlled field study randomized controlled field study is performing so well with real users and real natural water conditions. Yeah. That's that's very impressive to see and that's so wonderful to hear because I think you've really got a truly an appropriate technology for a lot of the areas in the world where drinking water is an issue. We're so spoiled here in the US that we virtually everyone in the US as you say has access to great water virtually everyone just will turn on a tap anywhere they and fill up a glass and drink from it without without giving it a second thought. But in so many places that's not true. So much of the world that just simply is not not the not the case and they can't you don't want to do that. So anyhow before we go out I have just one completely off the wall question for you Jim utterly has nothing to do with with with matty drops. If you could have the superpower of either flying or being invisible which would you choose and why. Boy I don't know that's a tough one. I think invisibility might be sort of cool. If you know if you just want to get out of the way and get people not see where you're going that's a good way to do it. Cool. Excellent. I just just have fun with that question. Anyhow thank you so much for being here Jim. I really have learned a lot it's great to hear them of many drops moving along and having developed so so much over the last several years. I look forward to seeing you later on this summer too and you're going to be out here and I hope you are viewing audience will come join us again next week for another episode of likeable science. I'm your host Ethan Allen signing off till then.