The Importance of Sustainability in Agriculture
Environmental stewardship is a growing interest for governments, industry and researchers worldwide. In Alberta, efforts to conserve and remediate waterways, as well as to reduce air pollutants like methane have become a priority, with many funding opportunities arising and available to help the agricultural sector and researchers contribute to this endeavour.
Greener Chemistry and Greener Products
Our team of chemists at the University of Calgary is interested in developing environmentally-friendly and affordable flocculants from natural sources that are locally and abundantly available. These would be designed to replace the metal salts and polyacrylamides currently used for flocculation. As chemists, we have the capacity to custom-build molecules that will work best for each sample of wastewater we receive, and we will work directly with operators to produce the end product they desire. Our goal is to keep wastewater treatment costs for farmers and ranchers at a minimum, while providing them with a flocculant that is safe for the environment, and will not affect the quality of soils and water following reintegration of the products.
Wastewater on farms and ranches varies enormously with animal type, on-site processes, location, season, etc… and so as chemists, we are interested in building a variety of materials that can be tested with specific wastewater samples. By providing a suite of flocculants with different efficiencies in clearing wastewater and extracting nutrients from it, we will offer operators a way to fine-tune flocculation to their specific needs. Accessibility will also be a huge factor that we consider, by working with operators to design a flocculant that can be integrated with existing processes on their farms and ranches, or implemented at a minimum cost to them.
Our work will be taking place at the University of Calgary, a world-renowned research facility. Through collaborations, we will be taking our research beyond the scope of synthetic chemistry, by exploring the multiple facets of flocculation with biologists and engineers, providing a complete picture of the materials we develop and their outcomes as they interact with wastewater and with the environment. Our main focus will be to test the biodegradability of our materials, to ensure that no problematic chemicals will persist in soils and water after their use. We will also work with researchers within our growing collaborative network of partners to test nutrient and pathogen contents in both solid and liquid fractions, so that users of our materials are fully informed.
Finally, we aim to incorporate the principles of Green Chemistry into our synthetic processes, to contribute knowledge and alternative methods to this important and growing field of science. We aim to produce our materials in the most sustainable and safest way possible, reducing our carbon-footprint to a minimum. In addition to sourcing our starting materials and chemicals from nature, we will be looking into chemical reactions that can be done in benign solvents like water or ethanol, that don’t require much energy input, and that produce the least amount of waste possible.