 Hi, and welcome back to another episode of A Likeable Science on Fink Tech Hawaii, where each week we explore more things to like about science. I'm your host Ethan Allen, and today we're going to discuss an amazing, ambitious and admirable project, Club H2O, that distributes an innovative water filter to places around the world that lack access to clean water. We're honored to have with us today one of the board members of Club H2O, Mr. Terry Lam. Welcome, Terry. Good to have you on the show. Thank you for having me here. Nice to have you here. You're able to get here. So let me just jump right on in and, Terry, you're an undergraduate systems major. I'm an industrial systems engineer at U.S.C., right? Right, yeah. Excellent, excellent. And so how did you sort of get involved with this Club H2O? So one of my friends approached me. I'm on the U.S.C. surf team there, and one of our founders for this club, or the president right now, approached me and asked me to join, and I heard about his ideas, and I was very intrigued, and I was very excited to be a part of his team. Yeah, okay. And so tell us a little bit about what Club H2O is and what it does. Great. Club H2O is a small club at the University of Southern California, where we distribute water filters to rural and third world countries that are facing a clean water crisis. And a lot of the times clean water is one of the biggest causes of waterborne diseases, obviously, and one of the problems that these rural communities are facing is that they don't have, not necessarily they don't have access to clean water, no, our access to water is access to clean water. Right, right. Yeah, indeed. In my own work, as you might know, I work out in the Pacific Islands, and a lot of the areas there have got to rely on rainwater catchment to get their drinking water, and a lot of the rainwater catchment tanks, if they are not properly maintained, and the rules aren't clean, then the gutters aren't clean, they get contamination, organic debris builds up, bacterial populations start to flourish, and pretty soon you've got really very heavily contaminated drinking water, and it's really just simply the bacterial contamination is really the huge issue in a lot of cases. It's not heavy metals, it's not pesticides, you know, not chemical additives. It's simply bacterial contamination for organic debris, and these filters knock out 99.99% of all bacteria. Right, right. It's something incredible. Yeah, no, they're amazing. I was looking at them, they look like they're highly efficient, so, and some, wouldn't your fellow USC students develop these? Right, so one of our founders, Kevin Cassell, he's a senior now at the University of California, developed these water filters. Originally how our club started was we were buying water filters from a different company or manufacturer, but they're charging way too much, $50 per water filter, and they started to increase the prices on us, and our president was like, hey, these water filters are like water filters, right? Just try to think of an idea like we can make it better, and cheaper, and more efficient, and we came up with Aqua's filters. They look really interesting, just that little cylinder that you just saw on the screen there, a few inches long, inch in diameter. They must have, I gather, those several stages of filters, because you can put really mucky water in the one end, and yet that muck doesn't get all the way through the filter, it somehow is, successively, it must have a set of successive coarse, medium, fine, very fine, ultra fine, super ultra fine filters in them, or something like that, right? Right, right, right. So these Aqua's filters contain thousands of micro filters within themselves, and each filter that it goes through is smaller and smaller, like you just said, and they're certified to 0.1 micron absolute, which 0.1 is able to filter out most, actually 99.9% of bacteria. As well as, I'm sure, fungi, parasites, all those different stuff. Yeah, no, that's wonderful, and yeah, this problem is really widespread, I mean, there are really, you know, millions and millions and hundreds of millions of people around the world who lack access to clean water on a daily basis, and then in emergency situations, that number balloons upwards when people's existing water systems get overwhelmed. So this is great work that you're doing. So, how does your club sort of work, and how do you get these filters out? How do you figure out where they're needed and get them there? So actually, that's one of the problems that we're facing when our clubs, as we start to grow and expand our operations, but generally, we get people what we call, like, H2O ambassadors, or just travelers that are going to these rural places. A lot of times, it's USC mission clubs that go out there to work, or some other local nonprofits to go out to these regions, and we give them our water filters, and we train them on how to use them, so that's how we distribute them out. Okay. Well, cool. We actually, following the show, should follow up on that, because we have staff who go out to all the US-affiliated Pacific Island on a pretty routine basis, and almost all those places that could use these kind of filters at some time or another, so we should really get them more broadly distributed out there. Great, great. Yeah. So, but you've already taken them to Africa, to India, and Nepal. Right, right. We've got them to Ghana, different places in Africa. A lot of rural villages in Northern and Southern India, we've given them to Nepal. We've also done some places in the Pacific, and we also send water filters to Haiti when they have those earthquakes or natural disasters. That's how we always send them to places that need clean water. Yeah. And one of the beauties of Mesaisia is it's such an appropriate technology for a lot of developing rural countries. I mean, here in this picture, you see that muddy water in the bucket, and this is typical in bad situations. Yes, they've got water, but it's stuff you wouldn't want on you in a day or drink, basically. And so it's much better than, say, a fancy UV sterilization system or a versus osmosis system, which takes a lot of power, a lot of technology, a lot of know-how to maintain. These are the simple little plastic filters. You punch a hole in your bucket and hook it up there, or just screw it onto an existing spigot, stick the filter on the other end, and you're ready to go, right? One of the interesting stories that I heard from one of our H2O ambassadors was actually, was their trip to India, where they actually went to a pretty, I think it was Delhi, I think, one of these major cities, and they were staying with a pretty wealthy doctor there that had really modern homes, modern systems and everything. But when they came to dinner time, the Indian doctor said, he's like, oh, shoot, I forgot to boil water. And you would think that in one of these major cities, they will have clean water there, but no, they have to boil their water to drink. Right. The infrastructure and the water systems in so much the world is so, I mean, we sometimes think of our US system as having its flaws when you think of Flint, Michigan, and things like this. But those are so rare, and the US most of our water system really is pretty good. I mean, you can pretty much rely, you can turn on the tap anywhere you can drink the water, and you don't really think twice about it. Yeah, the systems may leak a little water out, you know, dot, and dot. But the losses in some other parts of the world are appalling. I had a colleague of mine who went to Ponpei and helped redo the water system part of Coror, they're not Coror, I'm sorry, a colony of the capital. And they were using, I think it was a per day basis, something like 111,000 gallons of water per day. They replaced the infrastructure pipes, and they were then using like 10,000 gallons per day. I mean, literally they were wasting 90% of their water, it was just leaking away. And of course, if it's leaking that value, you know stuff is leaking back in, too, from the ground, and that's, so yes, you can't trust the water to your taps. And that's, I'm sure, true in much of India, even in what, you know, relatively modern, well-developed parts of the cities. Right. Also, with these water filters, they actually save a lot of energy, because a lot of these rural places, in order to disinfect their water, they might put it under fire or boil it to get all the bacteria out, and this also, you don't need that anymore with these water filters. Right, right. So you're saving all of that, the energy, you're saving the natural resources, the forests grow that help hold the ground in place, control erosion, yeah, it's over. When they cut down these trees, they also increase deforestation, which also decreases the amount of rainwater that comes in. Right, yeah, it really gets into a vicious cycle in a lot of these areas. I was just reading Jared Diamond's book, Collapse, I don't know if you have the pleasure of reading it, it's sort of a study of a bunch of societies on why there has been these collapses, and one of the large issues is this deforestation issue that basically countries have over-harvested, particularly the island nations have over-harvested their trees until they don't have any wood left basically, and it changes the whole water table, their whole cities, their whole civilizations just implode basically. Well what comes to mind is Madagascar, where they burned their trees, and all that's left are those big bam trees that I'm pretty sure they're facing some kind of water crisis over there too. Yeah, absolutely, and places that have changed more or less permanently, that their whole landscape in some areas, there had been in Iceland, used to actually have forests, and the early settlers who say the settlers there, they chopped and burned them all down, and they've never been able to regenerate. So it can be a huge issue, and these filters, it's one of those nice examples of sort of systems thinking, right? You see one little thread that you tug on here, and of the water, it begins to reverberate through the forests and through the whole landscape. Right, right, right. Yeah, it's like in the bigger picture of things, a lot of places look towards a decentralization of water treatment, so pretty much do it yourself kind of water treatment, and one of these systems engineering, like you think, how can I get these, how can I do a decentralization water treatment, and water filters are a great idea that we can relatively small and easy to distribute. Right, and these are at a nice scale, because they are able to run through them about 380 gallons a day or something, which is great. I mean, that's more than enough for a family, enough for a small community, so it can really help on a lot of the smaller island, the little outer lying atolls, and all in the app. For instance, you have a few hundred people here, a few dozen people there, these small groups, and one of these filters can make a huge difference to these people in terms of having access to good water or not, particularly if they've just been devastated by a hurricane or something in the rainwater system, a catchment system may not be up to snuff, and that certainly happens. They just had a water spout hit, I think it was FICE, and ran over it, and knocked out a whole bunch of the buildings, and tore roofs off. We should think about getting some out there. Yeah, definitely will. Of course, the problem is it's hard to get out there after they've had those disasters, but... So, let's jump back to Club H2O a little bit. How long has it been in existence? It's been about four years since it's got established at USC. And you said you've just gotten yourselves sort of formed into a formal 501C3 non-profit? Right, right. We just got our title in September, so we're trying to wrap up our fundraising and our operations. Yeah, because that gives you some nice options. If once you become a formal 501C3, you can really begin to do sort of a bigger scale, more official kinds of things, and raise some serious money for this, so you could scale up your production and get better distribution channels. Yeah, excellent, excellent. And over these past four years, about how many filters would you guess you've distributed? I'm sure you can't count them all exactly, but... I would say anywhere between 100, 120, these water filters, they can really give a community up to 75, 300 people, so they may seem small, but they have a big impact. Right, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And yeah, so if you've... How are you producing these at this point? I mean, is this one person building them by hand, or do you have teams doing this, or is it all automated now? Yeah, so it's manufactured in China, but it gets sent to... In that batch that we get, or these water filters, one of them gets sent to a lab to get tested to actually check if it actually filters out all the pathogens that it's certified to filter out. That's how we do our testing for these water filters. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And so the other key thing, of course, with any of these technologies is being sure that the people who are taking it out to the field have the proper training. And one of the things I like so much about these filters is they come in this very simple little package and you get some very nice instructional materials with them that's very simple. A few clear diagrams, or a step one, step two, step three, and they can see pretty clearly, but you still have to be sure your volunteers all know what to do, how to use them, right? Right, right. So these instructional, you know, like a picture is like a thousand words. These instructional pictures are actually very easy to read, but we also are into works of making instructional videos to go along with these water filters for our distributors to bring them out to the field. So that's one of the things that we're working towards. Excellent, excellent. And then, of course, it's useful if you have somebody in the field who can translate into local language, too. So if your community members have questions, you know, we run into this all the time because of the multiple languages out in the Pacific Islands, you know, and the Aplone has something like four mutually indecisorable languages, right? And then multiple dialects of each of those languages. So it's oftentimes there are real issues, but as you say, it's a great reason to do the pictorial instructions, you know. I, years ago, ran into some Ikea furniture that we bought, and I was just utterly stunned. The instructions did not have a single word on them. It was just all diagrams. It was just a set of diagrams. And you just look at these diagrams like, oh, this has got to go here. These have got to go here. Put them, and suddenly you've got this piece together without a word being spoken, basically, red in this case. So yeah, that's a great way to do it. So what are your, what are your, through your plans? Where, you know, where does club H2O go in? So right now, ever since we got our 501C nonprofit title, we're trying to reach out to businesses in the Ella region to help sponsor and get, raise more money in order to get these water filters. One of the plans that we have is actually contacting more nonprofits. Because we got our 501C nonprofit title, it kind of legitimizes us and we're trying to contact more local nonprofits like Red Cross and, you know, Proud, which is a part of just all different nonprofits that go to these rural communities to send these water filters because one of the great things about our water filters or at least club H2O is that we don't have any travel expenses. And especially if you're going to these rural communities, it could cost anywhere for 1,000, 2,000 for a ticket. I hear you on that. We do all the work out in the islands. I know the travel is time consuming and expensive. Hey, we're going to have to take a little break here. So we're talking with Mr. Terri Leon of Club H2O from USC. They distribute these water filters all around the world of the places that need them. I'm your host Ethan Allen here on likable science and we'll be right back after a short break. Aloha, Howard Wigg. I am the proud host of Code Green Think Tech Hawaii. I appear every other Monday at three in the afternoon. Do not tune in in the morning. My topic is energy efficiency. It sounds dry as heck, but it's not. We're paying $5 billion a year for imported oil. My job is to shave that, shave that, shave that down in homes and buildings while delivering better comfort, better light, better air conditioning, better everything. So if you're interested in your future, you'd better tune in to me, three o'clock every other Monday Code Green Aloha and thank you very much. And you're back here on likable science. I'm your host, Ethan Allen. Here on likable science today in Think Tech Studios with me is Terry Lamb from USC. And I'm Terry is one of the board members of Club H2O there at USC that distributes these aquas water filters all around the world to places that need clean water and which are many and growing. So let's talk a little bit about the filter itself and sort of that. So I assume this is the guy who developed them who was a student there. It was working in some nanotech lab or something? Was this, was he a, I mean, he was an engineering student, some sort of. No, he was a business student, but he worked with engineers to design these water filters. It's a pretty simple design. It's just like you said, like thousands of micro filters within inside that go smaller and smaller filters out more of bacteria. So, and it's basically just sort of, it's really fibers as I understand it, just sort of randomly packed in, but depending on how thick you make the fibers and how tight you pack them, you can keep sort of setting different porosities as it were. Right, right. And one of the great things about it is that some of the pathogens get stuck. It doesn't filter through, right? And obviously over time as you keep using it, it starts to flow out slower, right? And you can use one, you can back flush it. It makes a great thing for durability. Yeah, you've got these beautiful, again, very simple instructions about take, get one cup of clean water out and then you back flush it and do that three times and forward and back flush it a couple more times. And it makes sense if you've set up a very coarse filter and finer and finer, if you back flush it, you're gonna knock all the coarse stuff back off. And yeah, that's a great thing. These filters have a life of three to five years that you're estimating in the field. Right, wherever I estimate where anywhere between three years, if you don't maintain it, but it's a mechanical filtration system. So it can last quite a bit as long as you take care of it. So depending on how they take care of it or how well they maintain it, it's gonna increase their longevity. Yeah, and that gets really to a really critical point up. Again, education of the end user and having them understand right from the start, it's not enough just to get this thing and start using it, you've got to maintain it. And the maintenance is really simple. I mean, relative to something like reverse osmosis, which is big and complex and has electrical components and switches and filters and has to be really paid a lot of attention to and takes a certain level of technological skill to maintain. This is really very simple. Yes, every once it starts slowing down, you do this simple little five minute operation to back flush it a few times and then put it back in place, run through a cup again and you're back in business. Right, it's very simple to maintain. I was watching one of the shows, Professor Smith from the University of Virginia came on here and was talking about these purification pots which purify water through incorporating silver ions. Right. And usually that is a pretty good way to filter but it takes a lot of skill to make and it's very easy to break compared to something like a water filter where, or at least our aquas filter is just very small, very simple to maintain, it lasts a long time and it pretty much takes no education or very advanced knowledge of something like you said, like reverse osmosis, which you need like a specialist to be there, very simple. Yeah, and I mean, we see it all too often in these, in the islands where I work, is people meaning so well, bring a technology out there that's simply not appropriate. So in Palau, I was out there recently and they have this, a great array of solar panels by one of their government buildings and I'll need these up to cover a whole parking area so you've got your cars or all the shade and big solar panels all over and some component of that solar system broke a few months after installing it and that sat there for a year as just providing shade and no solar power because they couldn't get the part and they didn't have the technological expertise on hand to fix it, so it's like a year of solar power wasted because of some, whereas yeah, something like this, I mean, it doesn't take, yeah, well, if your end user has any sense at all about seeing that done once or twice, it's like, oh, okay, I see how to do this. Right, right, right, it's very simple. I mean, actually, the Maddie Drops tweet which you referred to, the James Smith, if UVA did, are again, I mean, they are an incredibly simple thing. They took some very high level technological expertise to develop those just as indeed developing the right kinds of fibers tacking the right way for yours did, but there again, once, I mean, end user just drops one in a bucket of water and that's about the level of skill it takes to use it. Yeah, that's one of the engineering designs for these things, especially it's very hard at, like, especially in these rural places where you have to make it inexpensive, very simple to make and maintain has to be culturally acceptable, right? It has to be transportable. Right, yeah, and the whole issue of culturally acceptable is really a really odd one we face in my work in YAP, where on the main island of YAP, there are about 85, 95% of the population actually has access in their homes to clean chlorinated water from one of three systems on YAP. It has three main water filtration distribution systems, all of which really do a good job of keeping good quality drinking water, but because of the traditions where the people say, well, you know, my grandparents drank the rain water and they were fine, my parents drank the rain water and they were fine, I drank rain water growing up and I'm fine, so I still wanna drink it even though now this rain water may not be as good as it used to be because the system hasn't been maintained or the grooves aren't clean anymore or whatever and they don't like the taste of the chlorine in the water and they even are sort of bringing up a new generation to sort of follow that same tradition, although it's a shame because, I mean, they do have rates of gastrointestinal illnesses from drinking water they shouldn't be drinking, you know? Right, right, and these water filters provide like an easy way to get clean water and that doesn't taste any different from... Yeah, and at the same time, you know, they're a really nice device, I like those matty drops to do science education, sort of dissect one of these filters. How does this thing work? Why does it work? You could really start talking to kids about, you know, what's in your water, get a microscope, again, a simple little, one of the simple fold scopes cost 50 cents, you know, and see what's in your water and then look at one of the filters and understand why this progressive filtering, actually how that really works and why it's so effective at keeping things out and there's a very powerful educational tool that I think. Right, right. So, and that, I guess, brings us to a point, so you're in school, you're going into this whole industrial and systems engineering and what's your advice to students who might be thinking about this kind of work and education and career? I would just say find something you're passionate about and just pursue it, just gotta go and just don't, don't seize, hey Al, don't be lazy and just seize the moment, I guess, whatever chance you get, you just gotta go for it and somehow you might not know where it's gonna lead you but as long, you won't know unless you try. So if you wanna do something as like nonprofit kind of work or you wanna be doing something, anything, you just gotta just go and do it and just try and if you fail, then you learn something from it, right? And you can keep doing it until you succeed. Yeah, exactly, that's one of the big take home messages of life, right, failure isn't permanent unless you let it sort of, you know, you gotta just, hey, just do it right this time, so let's look at that again and try something a little different and see what, we don't matter, head against the ball but we keep going at things from different angles and become a better problem solver over time, right? Right, it sounds very cliche but it's very true. A lot of the times that like a lot of different projects may not end up where you think it would end up, I can say, I've contacted a lot of different businesses for a club issue and thinking, hey, this is a great idea, they please support us, sometimes it just never works but you won't know unless you try. Yeah, I mean, I would never have guessed when I was doing my graduate work studying fish coloration that I'd end up out in the Pacific Island dealing with water issues, you know, that seems like an odd one. So we don't know where life is gonna take us but I like your idea of finding something that you care about and go for it and pursue it with all the passion that you're available to you. Anyhow, so Mr. Kerry Lam from USC Club H2O doing amazing work around the globe, congratulations to you and I wish you the very best in that. I'm your host, Ethan Allen, I hope you'll come back and join us next week, next Friday for another episode of Likeable Science. Bye-bye.