 Welcome back to another episode of likeable science here on Pink Tech Hawaii, where each week we explore more things like about science. I'm your host, Ethan Allen, and today we're going to discuss another fascinating new innovation of filtering water. Filtering water is a really critical technology for millions, hundreds of millions of people around the globe who lack access to clean water. Today joining us via Skype is Dr. Terry Denkovich, the founder of Folio Water. Terry, it's great to have you on the show. Welcome. Hi. It's good to be here. Excellent. Thanks for joining us tonight. Tonight where you are, today where we are here. So Terry, just let's just jump right on into this and tell us a little bit about how you got involved with this business of water filtration. Well, the project started for me basically around 10 years ago. I was a PhD student at McGill University. I was in the Department of Chemistry and my project was to add an antimicrobial chemical to paper in the application of a water filter, which is pretty, pretty broad. I could have gone many directions, but I started to kind of go down this point of use for developing countries route pretty quickly when I saw that there was like such a huge need of people who didn't have access to clean drinking water. Yeah, exactly. There's a real, I don't want to say market out there, but there's a real need for this in the third world in developing nations where people sometimes have to walk great distances to get water and basically don't just have taps where you can turn on and get your water right away. I see behind you, you've actually got some of your apparatus here. And I think it's a real nice demonstration here. Well, maybe while you set it up, I'll just say a few words. It's one of the key issues in a lot of places to have a very simple technology. And you can see our audience can see Terry is taking this piece of essentially a coffee filter looking like thing, folding it up very simply into a classic coffee cone shape, putting it into what looks like actually a coffee filter type apparatus, although it's slightly different. But in that this actually attaches, it has threaded ends on both ends, but it attaches to bottles. So you have a bottle of dirty water and a bottle of nothing in it that is clean. If you want to put your clean water in. Yeah, actually, this is the well. So she puts, this is presumably the muddy water or dirty water. Okay, and then, now she puts the other bottle on top, the empty bottle on the bottom, and then. And this is the exciting part, where you flip it. And bit by bit that water now is going to filter through. And the substance in your filter that's doing the antimicrobial is, of course, nanoparticles of silver, am I not correct? Yeah, that's correct. And as I understand it, and please, you know much more about this than I. Silver is quite toxic to, essentially a wide array, virtually all microbes, but not particularly toxic to all people, at low levels. Just make sure this is stable. Okay, it looks like it's pretty good. Okay. All right, sorry, I don't want to have that filter in the background. Right. It'll be pretty stable. Can you please repeat your question? So I was just saying this is, it's impregnated with silver nanoparticles, and the mechanism by which the silver is actually toxic to the microbes isn't apparently well understood as I read. Yeah, from what I understand, it hasn't been figured out the specific mechanism. There has been many observations that have been made by scientists. And some of these include disruption of the membrane structure to the cells. So it looks like there's holes that form. Sorry, this is actually forming a little bit of a pressure seal tonight. So there's a better flow. Anyway, so once the cells have little, the contents start to leak out and the silver can bind irreversibly to DNA and proteins because of the strong linkages between sulfur groups on them and silver itself, that forms a very insoluble compound that's well known in, you know, silver chemistry. OK, OK. And so you sort of, in your graduate work, you came up with this idea of putting the silver nanoparticles into the paper. And then I suspect you had to spend some significant amount of time figuring out just how to get the silver in the right concentration in the right way into the paper. Yeah, so a lot of the project during my PhD was looking at not just one, but several different methods to add silver nanoparticles to paper. Like you can think of many different ways. But so kind of a job is to kind of figure out how many different ways, which ways work the best, which ways don't work so good. So I started with, like, for example, a compound that was very reactive that had some toxic products, byproducts that worked really well. But I wasn't sure if that was good for the long run. So I started to work with nontoxic materials to make the nanoparticles. And that's what we used today. But yeah, a lot of the PhD work was figuring out some of the basic synthesis methods and then group of concept in the lab, which means you test with lab grown bacteria to see if they, you know, you hit the right concentrations of silver. So it's not too much silver in like the drinking water afterwards. You want it's OK to have a little bit of silver in, right? But if you have too much, that can be not good for people. Right. So it's like a fine balance. You've got to work there. Yeah, when I was talking with your former, I guess, one of your former professors, Jim Smith, he said the same thing with his matty drops. He had to play around with the concentrations that would come up just right in the water and be enough to be quite lethal to all the microbes, but still only about a tenth of the level that the EPA considers safe for human consumption. Yeah. Yeah. So you started doing these and then at some stage, you must have begun to realize that this was going to be a worthwhile a product, you know, an actual rather than just being graduate work. Right. Yeah. So so basically, I graduated about almost five years ago now for my PhD. And then you mentioned Jim Smith. He was my first postdoc advisor when I was a postdoctorate researcher at the University of Virginia. And that gave me an opportunity to work with while someone who obviously knew a lot about working in developing countries. And so at that point, Jim had been to, I believe, Guatemala and South Africa. I'm not sure what other ones, but definitely those two. And he had a lot of experience with taking innovative technologies to the field as you're well familiar with. And one of the things I did in that postdoc was going to South Africa and seeing really what life could be like in some of these rural or poorer areas and seeing how well this filter worked in that setting with like water sources that people did drink from without any sort of purification. And so that was, you know, obviously very eye-opening. And basically, I saw, oh, wow, this actually could be effective, but I need to kind of, you know, alter the design and look at what makes sense for what people use like in their household. And this was not the design that we had back then. This is a modified, updated version. The version back then was a little like lab, less smaller, like more what you used to characterize something in the lab setting. So it's indeed so. And then as you've developed this, you also, of course, faced this problem. And we were discussing this the other day about sort of scaling up production, right, because these paper filters will each one will filter so much water. But at some point, you basically it's it's done. It's got a relatively limited life, right? It is paper. And so you're trying to produce, ultimately, you produce in these booklets and here's a picture. I guess we have all in now of the one that your current production machines were rolling out rather rather impressive quantities of the fully a paper. So at each stage, I'm sure as you're sort of doing this differently, the way in which you get the paper impregnated with the silver must vary. You must have to sort of reconfigure your whole process sort of at each scale up step. Is that been a challenge? Well, yeah, of course. But it's something that luckily the the technology to start with worked out pretty well that each scale up hasn't been as bad as I don't know. It hasn't been something we couldn't do, I guess is the best way to put it. So the scale up first started from me going from making tiny little squares that are yay big. It's something that you could cook in a, you know, a lab oven or prepare and lab equipment, which is usually small scale up to something that would that I did actually in a commercial kitchen in the church kitchen, which use big bacon trays size of paper. And now it's just on a paper machine. So this is like our bound pack of papers, just tree crafts, but it's just I don't have any roles with me, but it's just like a big roll of paper that's this color. And this stuff could be made much, much quicker now. We made me more paper this past year than, you know, any year before that, for example, like in the tons scale, not in the, I guess, pounds, grams, orders of magnitude bigger. But yeah, the scale up there, the process has changed a little as it does. But, you know, it's still was something that even the first time that we tried it on the paper machine, we still got something that we're like, hey, that looks like it's not so bad. And, you know, it's something we could work with. And now it's even better as we've done this a few times using industrial machine equipment. Excellent, excellent. So are you, I know there's a bunch of interesting stuff going on. There's lots of different approaches now to this idea of filtering and purifying water. There's this wonderful, these foliar filters that you've got. There's Jim Smith's thing, the matty drops, which of course are not a filter in any sense. They will leave murky water murky, but they will kill off the microbes. As yours does, but yours filters it as well. You deal with sort of two liter quantities at a time in yours. I was talking with a young gentleman from South Carolina of Southern California last week who and his colleagues have developed a little sort of cylindrical sort of filter that can run 380 gallons a day or something through it. And so yeah, there's all these different things that I think it goes to show. There's not a sort of one size fits all solution here. There are different people are going to need different amounts of drinking water at different times for different needs, right? Yeah, and different cultures too. Sure. And it matters if you're on your own or if it's a whole family. Are you sort of in one stable spot or are you having to carry the water with you? All these things will come into play as to what's great. And what's really impressive, I think, is these technologies are very appropriate. That is, all of them, the ones I'm seeing now are these quite low tech sorts of things where they may be based on very high tech nanotechnology, but they're very simple to use for the end user. And that's really critical because things like reverse osmosis is just way too complicated for a lot of the settings where people are most in need of the water. I can say from my own experiences that I've worked with now a couple of industrial designers. And it's not, industrial designers don't always go into the sort of market. Just as scientists don't always go into this sort of, you know, like this is a kind of, well, for lack of a better term, a low profit making driver for the most part that people do it because they're passionate about helping others. But I've met many industrial designers that have been like, oh, I don't want to make just the latest flat screen TV or, you know, the newest chair or whatever and have been interested in solving like this sort of problem. And this design came out of, it wasn't exactly what we had from the industrial designers, but it was influenced by a lot of their work and it combined with engineering designers too. Like, so, you know, this is not just me who made this. I'm not going to take credit for that, but it's taken a team to come up with this idea. And this is actually our first version. We have a new and improved version that's going to be done in a couple of months, once. Excellent. We're going to have to jump out for a short break here. Dr. Terry Denkovich from Folio Water, CEO, founder of Folio Water is on via Skype with us today on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Ethan Allen, and we'll be right back. Aloha, I'm Kaui Lucas, host of Hawaii is my mainland every Friday here on Think Tech Hawaii. I also have a blog of the same name at kauilukas.com where you can see all of my past shows. Join me this Friday and every Friday at 3 p.m. Aloha. Okay, I'm here with Brent Opegaard of the Faculty of the School of Journalism and the Department of Communications at UH Minoa. We've had a number of shows. We have a movable feast going on and we talk about journals and we talk about language. We talk about communication in general and we talk about the effect of that on the country and on individual people. Brent, it's so good to be able to discuss this with you in our movable feast. Oh, it's my pleasure. This is a great opportunity. You'll have to come back again and again. Okay, deal? That's the deal. Brent Opegaard, I'm Jay Fidel. We care about everything. Thanks. And you're back here with me, Ethan Allen, your host on Lakeable Science here on a Friday afternoon on Tech Hawaii. Joining me via Skype today is Dr. Teri Dankovich and we're talking about her new folio water filters that are silver impregnated paper filters that kill off the microbes as well as sort of physically restraining sediment and all going on through. Indiable tools for the people who don't have access to clean processed water. Before I get back into conversation, though, actually thinking about the various different technologies that are being used now to filter water and the various different approaches that people take, reminding me of a story I heard years ago about sort of multiple approaches. These scientists were training chimpanzees and trying to study the intelligence of chimpanzees and they set up a problem for this one chimp. They put the chimp in a room and hanging from the center of the ceiling was a bunch of bananas the chimp wanted. And in the room was a step ladder set up and a long pole. And they wanted to see whether the chimp would pick up the pole to knock the bananas off or would move the ladder over to climb up and get the bananas. And the scientists walked on in with the chimp and the chimp looked at the pole, looked at the step ladder, reached up, took the scientist by the hand, walked the scientist out in the middle of the room and climbed up on the scientist and took the bananas down. And I just sort of thought, in a sense, this is the same, it's a sort of parallel situation here, right? There are many ways often to get to the same goal and some creative thinking will sometimes get you there really fast. Anyhow, sorry, a little off the side there. But so, Terry, tell me this, what do these filters filter out and what don't they filter out? All right, so these filters, as we've talked about before, contain silver nanoparticles, which are lethal for lots of different types of bacteria and also some types of viruses. I personally haven't worked with viruses, but I've seen in the literature reports of a few types of viruses that silver can kill or inactivate. It also doesn't necessarily kill protozoans, but it has a pore size small enough to screen them out and get them stuck on the filter so they can't pass them through them. And so we've tailored it for the microbiology. It can also remove dirt particles, as mentioned before. We have not tailored it to remove heavy metals or pesticides. So there might be some physical absorption to the paper, being that there is some absorption that will happen, but it's not, it doesn't have any extra chemicals to really focus in on those heavy metals. So no, it doesn't remove lead if you were wondering. Right, you know, one simple paper filter can't do everything, but it does amazing, amazing things. And about how? So you've been producing these now for, you said, for several years, and how many do you think you've probably produced at this point, distributed? Doing the numbers because we're just starting to get a track of these things as a company because we've just started to distribute over the past few months. And basically we're at about 1500 of the books format and the books depended upon where we have distributed them have had between 10 and like 26 filters. So probably about 20,000 filters for your magnitude. That's got to feel good. I mean, you know, you've helped probably 20,000 different people then avoid gastrointestinal illnesses and serious. Well, it's not necessarily one to one. It's, you know, it's a pack of filters. So it's probably closer to the, you know, 1500 number for a number of people or maybe a little bit more in 2000. Yeah, that's still it makes a real real difference in people's lives. So I had colleague get gastrointestinal illnesses traveling in the islands here and no fun at all. And so what do you do produce any educational materials with these? Or do you just sort of figure that people are going to know how to use them? No, no, we some people are some people understand very intuitively upon seeing the demo. They're like, yeah, that's easy. But we don't want people to be confused once we're not there. So this is the inside of our packet. It's basically just a picture telling you how to do it. And then down here, you can see this is just how to fold into a cone and then kind of guidance on when to change the filter and when it's OK to use. So people will feel like we do also recommend, you know, based on 100 liters. But most people don't remember how many liters they filtered. So that's not necessarily the best guidance. And on the back right now, we just have a cartoon that one of our friends made that explains the science behind it. It does have words in English, but, you know, eventually we'll get that in foreign languages as well. But it's mostly a cartoon. But this is this is kind of this is like our first product that we're selling. This is the third prototype we've had as a lot of people have heard on the news, the three couple book version that I worked with a nonprofit called Water is Life a couple of years ago. And excuse me, that that was written in English and Swahili. And I can show that to the camera too. So you can kind of see that. And this one, unfortunately, the cover is actually very expensive to me. And the filter sizes aren't optimal. They're kind of small. So we move beyond that. It's more of a first version to the newer one. And we're still learning how to best print on the paper at mass production scales. So maybe in a few months, that's what I do. So right now we're just going to print on the package in. And maybe in the future, we'll we'll get the mass production of the print insorted as well. And so you have this, you've got your website up where you sell the packets and all. What are your plans? I mean, how do you want you want to scale this up and begin to really distribute these more broadly? How do you how do you see yourself going about that? So right now we've been working with a lot of smaller nonprofits and church groups. Like, for example, we've worked with a medical clinic that is run by a doctor here in Pittsburgh and the medical clinics in Honduras in a mountainous area. And we've also worked with rotary groups that often go to various countries and do water projects. And that's like basically to start to get the word out. But we really, our goal is to move up to local distributors in country that can distribute to either pharmacies, grocery stores, corner stores, and get it so that it's a sustainable supply chain because we're recommended to change the filter. Well, it depends on how many people are using it, but every week to every couple of weeks. And that's, you know, you can buy the packet, but if you are, you know, using it a lot, you're going to want to be able to get it locally, not just through our website or through some somebody that comes from the U.S. to, you know, whatever country. One of the pushes that we're trying to make right now is into like the Dominican Republic and Haiti. And there's problems in both countries. I mean, the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew is still a problem that hasn't received as much attention since October, really, but it is still like hundreds of thousands of people who have lost everything because of that hurricane and, you know, basic necessities are really unique first. So that's one of one of our first steps for this year. And so I like really want to just trust that one and we have someone that's really focusing on that area in our company as well. It's sometimes these areas get very hard hit. We've just had one of the islands that I work on got hit by a water spout, which is very unusual. And it just went over and really destroyed a, you know, ripped the path of destruction across the island. Fortunately, it wasn't very wide, but it, and even it was in its path was pretty well wiped out. And so these people lost rainwater catchment systems and roofs off their houses and all that kind of stuff. So how will you know when you have succeeded in this business? Well, I think in the short run, we'll know when we've sold a bunch of products that if people use them right, they're going to get clean water. If we start to look at it more as a business, we'll have to look at it as a certain amount of growth per year and, you know, the whole return on investment and so on and so forth, the business metrics. But, you know, our background is more from the heart of the social enterprise side of things more than the for profit, just pure business. So we're going to look at things, how we make impact on people's lives. And that's hopefully more than just clean water, but better health, less disease. And it's a little bit harder to measure, but, you know, we're hoping to work with partners in the university to like public health doctors and people like that to help understand some of those impacts better. Sure. One of the things we're doing to look at this issue is looking at school attendance rates and seeing if when they get clean water sources, does school absenteeism drop because basically if fewer kids are sick for fewer days, you should see you should see a nice increase in school attendance. And again, that's a win-win-win, right? The kids are healthier. They're spending more time in school. They're learning more. So it's everyone's advantage. And then their parents also don't have to stay at home with them too, so they can also earn more money with their jobs too. Exactly, exactly. So what advice would you give to aspiring scientists who want to make an impact in the world just very briefly? Well, I think I got to where I was because I didn't give up. There's so many points along the way that I could have chose to do something else that would have been maybe paid better. It would have been, I don't want to have to work as much. I feel like I work a lot of hours, a lot of the days. And but I like what I do. So that's, it doesn't, it's not a negative for me. Excellent. So I think you have to believe in it. Well, thank you so much, Cherie. I've really enjoyed talking to you, learned a lot as I always do on the show.