Hi! I’m a water resources engineer by day, so this post caught my eye. There are tons of parallels to be drawn here between water treatment and air treatment, and I think you’ve done a great job outlining the scale of potential benefits available to us. However, some key differences arise in how we interact with air and with water in our daily lives. The water supply chain is cordoned off from other environments and the larger global supply of water, meaning we can take small volumes relative to the total supply and apply targeted treatment techniques to improve the quality of the consumed volume. With regards to air quality, much of our consumption is still directly from the global supply (the atmosphere). While we do have systems in place to filter and treat this air indoors, outdoor air quality is a much larger beast to tackle, and it may be more efficient to opt for intervention at point of consumption, in the form of masks/aerators, than to attempt to treat the global air volume. Turning to pathogenic risk, I think you’ve correctly identified an area of great potential improvement, since most airborne pathogenic transmission happens indoors, where we could conceivably intervene via existing AC / air supply systems.
Both of these measures (Clean indoor air / clean drinking water) are really just proxies for how clean our bodies are, (both in terms of pathogen exposure but also of pollutants). I wonder what other tools you could include in a “clean body” framework? My first thought was about the potential for blood-donation to filter out bio-accumulated microplastics from the body (reducing the concentration as newly made blood does not contain any), but I’m sure there are other examples.
Hi! I’m a water resources engineer by day, so this post caught my eye. There are tons of parallels to be drawn here between water treatment and air treatment, and I think you’ve done a great job outlining the scale of potential benefits available to us. However, some key differences arise in how we interact with air and with water in our daily lives. The water supply chain is cordoned off from other environments and the larger global supply of water, meaning we can take small volumes relative to the total supply and apply targeted treatment techniques to improve the quality of the consumed volume. With regards to air quality, much of our consumption is still directly from the global supply (the atmosphere). While we do have systems in place to filter and treat this air indoors, outdoor air quality is a much larger beast to tackle, and it may be more efficient to opt for intervention at point of consumption, in the form of masks/aerators, than to attempt to treat the global air volume. Turning to pathogenic risk, I think you’ve correctly identified an area of great potential improvement, since most airborne pathogenic transmission happens indoors, where we could conceivably intervene via existing AC / air supply systems.
Both of these measures (Clean indoor air / clean drinking water) are really just proxies for how clean our bodies are, (both in terms of pathogen exposure but also of pollutants). I wonder what other tools you could include in a “clean body” framework? My first thought was about the potential for blood-donation to filter out bio-accumulated microplastics from the body (reducing the concentration as newly made blood does not contain any), but I’m sure there are other examples.
Great post, looking forward to more!