These elemental toxicity problems should be a problem of the past.
We have the science and the devices to detect and track them easily.
I'm speaking about XRF analyzer. Currently it's still expensive : a 30K$ portable device, but that's because it's a low volume production.
These are gun-like devices that you point to a material, it shines x-ray on it and analyze the rays that comes back, which allows it to determine the elemental composition and percentages of the material for free in a few seconds. Like magic.
Today they are used for checking the paints for lead. They are used by precious metal buyers and sellers to identify precisely the content.
But I dream of the day where anybody can just check its steak or salmon with it for traces of anything toxic. It won't detect all food safety problems like bio contamination or organic pesticides, but it can definitely make heavy metal poisoning a thing of the past, by helping track the supply chain, the same way that having an air quality monitor can help improve your air quality.
The amount of X-rays needed to detect trace amounts of lead with a handheld device are probably more dangerous than the lead itself if such an device is used on a daily basis. There is a reason why your dentist goes to stand behind a wall when you she takes an X-ray of your teeth. If you would have a sample with 10% lead, the amount of X-ray used during for taking an X-ray of your teeth might be enough to measure its concentration within a few 1% accuracy, but if you are talking about 1ppm (and that is far above the 15ppb that is considered safe) you need a lot more X-ray to get a good enough reading.
Measuring exact contents with XRF is difficult if you do not have homogeneous samples due to all kinds of complicated effects where the XRF from one element interacts with the XRF of another element. To get within 1% accuracy you often need a controlled (vacum) environment and callibrate your instrument with a set of standards at regular interfalls. At least that is how it was 20 years ago when I developed software for a company that produced high-end industrial XRF measurement devices.
It's viable to get something like it on your supply chain. It's even viable to X-ray inspect fish at random in fisher's markets if you move your machine between them.
What if rather than everyone needing their own, there was just a certification standard (like organic) which says the food has been scanned and confirmed to contain less than X lead/mercury/whatever?
Side note, is this what archaeologists use, to figure out the composition of a coin, etc.?
Certifications are the current situation for first world countries but it takes time to get them adopted everywhere. And if you have lead paint or pipes in your house, or if you have bought some Chinese plates with beautiful colors, who will tell you that some pigments may leak into your food.
There is the question of trust of the measurement where they will just sell you an approval stamp for 100$.
There is also the problem that some actors have incentives to cheat, like feeding insects to your salmon, and feeding the insects from literal garbage that may get contaminated by electronic components in the dumpster. Or maybe the specific salmon just ate a ball of mercury but was not selected for testing.
A generic tool, that can analyze your immediate environment without having anyone else involved is empowering and can catch a wide variety of problems that you can track further if necessary; feels like a freebie offered by Science. Although it will still need some years of work to make it as sensitive as they show it in Science-Fiction.
Humans have not evolved alongside everything we extracted from the ground since the industrial revolution. It's like a new pair of eyes that would help you avoid a bad apple or smelly fish.
If we could also get a cheap and easy to use Raman spectrometer to complete the XRF analyser it would also be a great addition.
(I don't know what archaeologists use but they definitely can use a XRF analyser to find the composition of coins)
Did the water quality certification miss something in Flint? Certification means trust. Someone breaking that trust can have life long implcations for large groups of people. Giviing the individual power is better.
It probably passed at the treatment plant where it is easy to test. It would have failed at everyone's home though, where testing needs to be done house by house. (or maybe a statistical sample of houses)
Are they really that sensitive to be able to detect trace amounts of heavy metals distributed in let's say a relatively large piece of meat (larger than the detection area of the device, so the amount of metal it "sees" is even more decreased)?
well icp (inductively coupled plasma) is the gold standard (expensive but highly sensitive and used for heavy metals like lead in stuff).
xrf can spot higher concrntrations, but one can concentrate beforehand and then use xrf. while xrf fixed cost is 30k usd its cost is a dropjn the bucket compared to icp and solid state keeps on going.
It probably isn't important whether the lead content is 10 ppm or 20 ppm in most cases, since neither is acceptable, so the standard of sampling involved here is far less demanding than the standard of sampling needed for analytical chemistry. You just need to avoid contaminating your sample with lead from some other source.
I would like to add a video on XRF from Applied Science, as the device is not very well known (at least in .cz, I have learned about it only recently).
The dream future is both utopian and dystopian. Technology is advanced enough that such things are in hand of common man but society is so dysfunctional that basic things like clean water and food aren't ensured.
> These are gun-like devices that you point to a material, it shines x-ray on it and analyze the rays that comes back, which allows it to determine the elemental composition and percentages of the material for free in a few seconds. Like magic.
Hasn't that been around, in handheld form since the 60s? I think they're called tricorders.
> a 30K$ portable device, but that's because it's a low volume production.
Is this inherently true? Do the raw materials and parts the final factory buys to make the machine really cost <$100 (or so) and the cost is all in the up-front investment in the machinery to make it?
Yeah I doubt it. Applied Science on Youtube did a teardown of one and they've got crazy oil-filled high voltage electronics. It would take an insane amount of engineering to bring them down to an affordable price. Not just economies of scale.
You mean those same high voltage electronics that every CRT TV from the 90's has? The same TV's that give off so many xrays they have to shield them with leaded glass?
They were pretty affordable then, and I expect that now they can be made even more cheaply if there is demand for them.
CRT TVs are commonly only about 10 kV, while XRF needs 20–60 kV. Larger TVs were up in that range but were not handheld.
I agree that you can generate 60 kV pretty easily, though. You can do it in a smaller volume if you fill the electronics with oil, but it's not essential.
It's a x-ray tube and a x-ray sensor + analysis. It's bad radiations (like in luggage detector or dentist machine) but when you turn-off the device they stop, whereas radioactive don't stop.
Individualistic isn't bad. Individualism is the fundamental basis for thinking that individuals have intrinsic worth; take that away and you may not like the result.
Your food can currently be poisoned "at will", assuming someone wants to poison you.
OP was saying he wants everyone to have one. Nothing to do with rich people.
> Individualistic isn't bad. Individualism is the fundamental basis for thinking that individuals have intrinsic worth; take that away and you may not like the result.
It's not that individualism is bad, that's a quality of people. The "solution" isn't able to be produced or acquired in any way that's close to calling it a solution. Nobody is coming after you.
Indeed, it's a lot easier to fix the problem when people can buy a cheap device and verify for themselves that the water is unsafe. Otherwise you'll only get government / corporate hand waving and have to pay lawyers a few million dollars to get anything to change.
It is indeed. It's trying to empower the individual so that it can fight back and help protect its community. It also helps create incentives to prevent cheating as it makes it observable by making general measurement cheap, so that the resulting system is better for everybody and not only those that can afford it.
Rich people can already buy premium food and own recent habitations with modern standards.
While the poor currently rent poorly ventilated tiny flats with lead-paint on the walls, lead pipes behind them, asbestos under the roof, while eating cheap food filled with heavy metals and pesticides, and not knowing it.
This is a bad idea. Defeating the possibility of knowing what’s in water because it doesn’t immediately force the fix of the root problem. Step A does necessarily come before step B.
I don't believe I've ever seen the US fix any root problem in my lifetime (I'm a millenial). There are historical examples, but it seems like all the problems of the country today are impossible. If anything, we're backsliding on issues previously considered solved, like black lung for instance. Given that, I'd rather just live in denial. That's me - obviously I don't tend toward the optimistic.
I could have written your comment when I was living with my parents throughout the Great Recession. The only way this gets better for you is to find those things you can do to make income or otherwise be productive and on your own and do them. True fatalism looks a lot more like the guerrilla world of “For Whom The Bell Tolls” than “Siddhartha.”
Huh? I make a good income and have for the past decade plus. I'm not referring to my situation - I'm referring to systemic issues in the US. Do you think a country where high school students are concerned with removing lead from their water is functioning well?
Entirely possible, but perhaps the same is true for you as well? And if the conclusion that said someone wants me to reach happens to be true? Does that make a difference?
Defense in depth, that’s all. Yes it’s a problem when people think fixes at the edge obviate the need for fundamental fixes, but that doesn’t mean fixes at the edge are bad.
>by helping track the supply chain, the same way that having an air quality monitor can help improve your air quality.
It is about making them cheap enough to be ubiquitous in the supply chain. Of course some middle-class-to rich people will also have access to personal devices, but the point is to make it cheap enough to become part of the supply infrastructure. Plus if the devices and do real-time reporting of results via an app, this could also even enhance the supply chain monitoring by red-flagging hotspots early - benefits their poorer neighbors too.
I have a BIL who's job is water & sewage monitoring. He's told me about how they have sensors at key points throught the system so they can identify when someone is dumping (often illegally) toxins down the drain into the system. The idea is to both find it as it is coming in to be able to make quick adjustments, and also rapidly ID the locale and then the source to stop it.
Such scanning systems in the food supply chain could be enormously valuable, and it will require them to become inexpensive and fast. And no, I do not begrudge rich people (even those who became rich via extraction vs creation of wealth) access to the tools - by buying them before they are truly cheap, they help increase production volumes so that it enables the production of cheaper versions.
I agree, but, "rich people" eat at mcdonalds, and buy food at normal grocery stores. "Rich" being able to afford a $100 detector.
So while not perfect, it would perhaps force suppliers, chains, and such to clean up their act. To test food themselves, otherwise a random person with a detector may catch something.
Outside of lead, arsenic is another biggie, often in rice. I'd love that to be tested, at home, per meal.
Flint is an hour East of here. They are still having problems with lead in the water there. First they replaced all the water mains. While it reduced lead levels it didn't completely fix the problem.
Then they replaced the pipes running from the mains to the house. That helped a lot (entire sections of the city are lead free) but those still having problems believe it's in the pipes in the house. There isn't a will among state government to tear up the houses to replace all the pipes. If this works it could help those still suffering.
Yeah, the Flint water crisis is not a science problem at all, it’s something that could just be solved plainly by fixing infrastructure. Obviously, great accomplishment for the high schoolers, but right now this news is just becoming another excuse for institutions that actually have power to do anything about this to keep doing nothing about it.
There are entanglements - to remove and replace some of the pipe requires removing and disposing of asbestos, or updating or replacing materials or structural elements of a house. A contractor or homeowner can't simply replace plumbing and ignore everything else, and property value is garbage for those houses even if they fix everything up.
They could waive code requirements and grandfather in exceptions that would allow focus on the plumbing but there isn't necessarily a simple answer to the issues facing these people. Who wants to spend a ton of money on a property declining in value in a notorious market? And even if there was a clear and easy path to fix things what effect is lead exposure having on their cognition?
Gotta solve for potential pathologies, obstinacy economics, labor rights, and so forth - it's not a simple home project even if it should be. Filters start to look like a better solution in the face of politics and bureacracy.
I mean if the government wanted they could identify homes that are too expensive to repair, put the residents up in temporary housing, remove and replace the home with a simple new one, and put the residents back. The federal government gives hundreds of billions to big corporations every year in tax breaks, incentives, contracts, and protection, but we would balk at giving individuals safe homes.
This is the way. Habitat for Humanity does this with donations, governments can do it too. Put families in brand new, safe, modest homes, demo and landfill old homes like you would handle a superfund site (and safely dispose of the asbestos, lead, and god knows what else is in these homes).
There seems to be this unwillingness to imagine better. We can't fix the lead because there's also asbestos and we can't fix the asbestos because of shoddy construction and we can't fix the shoddy construction because even if we did the house wouldn't be profitable. Insanity -- the house valuation isn't the point, human safety is! Fix broken things! If things were fixed as you went, there wouldn't be huge reputational problems and infinite constrained loops, there'd just be one isolated issue!
(As corroborating evidence, Montreal has a problem with lead in some pipes. So, they're replacing the pipes, in every residential building, on the island. The mains past the property lines have already been replaced. On the private side of the line, there are two options: You either have it done yourself or the owner pays $3000 for the government to do it. There is no opt-out. It's been going on for two years, and in three more years, there will be no more lead. Problem solved. No reputational hazard. No valuation considerations. It just gets done because it's the correct thing to do.)
Well we could start by making sure super wealthy corporations pay their fair share of taxes, and using that tax money to improve American infrastructure. This “who is going to pay for it” question is nonsense. No one ever asks this when we release massive and inflated military budgets. No one ever asks this when we give tax cuts to the super wealthy, who have more than enough wealth to pay for important infrastructure work while maintaining a lavish lifestyle. Remember that corporations do well when Americans are not falling victim lead poisoning. Corporations do well when young children have their full mental function due to a lack of heavy metals in their water supply.
Who is going to pay for it? Well if we don’t pay for the infrastructure work needed, it will continue to be the innocent children of Flint Michigan who are paying for the shoddy infrastructure with sacrifices to their health and well being.
Wow, yeah I didn't even think about the asbestos in older houses. Imagine having some people come in and check your pipes for lead but check for asbestos (because they'll have to tear out walls to fix it) and then you find out that you now have two problems :(
And depending on the area, the local government, local banks, and contractors could be working hand in pocket, arranging things such that you'll need to pay out the nose, and/or go into debt to resolve the problems.
Honestly, I'd probably sneak a pex run and pay a friend of a friend and not notify the authorities if faced with lead issues, but my exposure to lead might have my brain mangled to the point that I don't care or can't effectively plan a surreptitious fix. Flint is just all sorts of fucked.
Take a look at homes in Europe built before indoor plumbing. The plumbing is added to the outside of the house. Doing this in Flint would greatly reduce the expense.
Or at a bare minimum, add a lead-free faucet for the drinking water.
I've only heard about external water pipes when somebody wants to rant about how bad some british houses are. Pipes on the outside, separate taps for hot and cold, carpeted bathrooms, poor insulation with drafts. I've never seen it done in reality even in houses several hundred years old, and in Michigan they would freeze as soon as winter arrives.
You can put insulation and siding over the pipes outside what is currently the house (and remove insulation inside if necessary). That way the pipes will stay at the same temperature as the inside of the house. Or, as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30878006, heat tape. As an extra bonus, if they do freeze, they'll leak outside the house instead of flooding inside the house.
Glad you pointed it out, there was something that didn't quite add up there. Yes it freezes in europe, those pipes would get destroyed if they were on the outside.
It's probably easier to replace pipes in an older European house anyway; less insulation / less layered walls, less things embedded in concrete, sometimes even wood beam floors. I lived in a >100 year old house that was renovated at some point, newer pipes and electricity was put up against the walls, then a layer of drywall was applied everywhere to make things look tidy.
There are lots of ways to stop pipes from freezing. A couple are mentioned here.
Another way is to put the valve below the freeze line in the ground. Opening the valve to the water would close a drain valve in the pipe leading from it to the faucet, and closing the valve would open the drain valve.
I have a setup like this at my house, although the two valves are not linked. It works fine.
It really wouldn’t. Unless by insulation and heat sources you mean… by putting the pipes inside the house.
Otherwise you’re just building a house around your outside pipes.
No amount of insulation is going to help your pipes outside overnight under a certain temperature. The water isn’t moving because you aren’t using any of it.
We had some pipes inside under the floor of an old addition of an older farmhouse which regularly froze despite being inside, our wellhouse had hundreds of watts of heating. There’s no chance of pipes exposed outside in a northern US climate not freezing.
Insulating and heating outside pipes is a solved problem and adding a small layer of insulation around a pipe with electrical heating elements is much cheaper and energy efficient than insulating+heating an entire house. Short term anyhow.
Keyword is "self-regulating pipe heating cable".
I don't know why you're making it out like it's rocket science and with such confidence.
I've never seen this anywhere but in the UK. I guess it works there because of relatively the mild winters? Michigan on the other side, has a continental climate.
Pretty standard in trailer parks. You'll need some heat tape in the winter to keep it from freezing, but I'd say that's a good trade off for less lead.
Most new plumbing is done with plastic pipes (blue for cold, red for hot) that can be snaked and fished less destructively than metal pipes. While these don't contain lead, they may contaminate the water in unknown ways.
The type of plastic used for water pipes (cross-linked polyethylene, or PEX) has no known safety concerns as far as I am aware, mostly because it doesn't require added plasticisers. This is in contrast to PVC, which often contains phthalates and polycarbonate, which often contains bisphenols.
For all the concern about Flint and lead in the water, I was shocked to learned that despite lead levels in the water increasing, lead blood levels in children were still much lower than a decade earlier. They did increase, but they were still less than half the level in 2006.
The study, which appears in the Journal of Pediatrics, found a decrease in Flint childhood blood lead levels, from 2.33 micrograms per deciliter in 2006 to 1.15 micrograms per deciliter in 2016 — a historic low for the city. The mean blood lead level in 2015 during the height of the water crisis was 1.3 micrograms per deciliter, up from 1.19 in 2014 before the water source switch.
People were complaining to the city council about water quality 8 months after the switch to the water source that caused high water lead levels (and were likely concerned well before that).
The lead isn't an immediate problem if the water chemistry is correctly maintained, the pipes develop scale and there isn't a lot of material being dissolved into the water. The presence of lead infrastructure of course requires that the water chemistry be correctly maintained so that it does not disturb the pipe scale.
So it can be the case that the total exposure from the problem was somewhat limited.
If the remaining lead is caused by the pipes inside the houses, how come this problem is isolated to Flint? Shouldn't there be the same level of lead all over the US? Maybe they are only measuring lead levels in Flint, because it was they were very high at the beginning.
Flint switched their water source to one that was more corrosive, which resulted in much more lead entering the water. It was down to water chemistry. Water without the corrosive elements won’t pick up much lead.
Most places are smart enough to not falsify water test reports so they can skimp on pH balancing treatment so the water isn't acidic to save literal pennies. The water coming in was acidic enough for the local hospitals to complain about their stainless steel sinks rusting from it. Even if there was no lead in any of the pipes they would have had to replace the entire water system because it ate right through their steel pipes which otherwise had been coated in mineral deposits to protect it.
I have seen a technique where they line old pipes with newer plastic, like pumping an inner tube into an existing line; is that possible with the pipes in the house or would that cost too much of its diameter? Could they make a <1mm lining like that (which may need to be reapplied every once in a while), or some other kind of treatment to stop the lead from leaching?
I mean that would still cost a lot of money and time to implement in every house that still has lead pipes, but it's probably cheaper than replacing all the pipes.
I think most of those technologies are point to point linings. I also assume curves in the pipe cause 'issues'.
The other side of this is, if these houses have lead pipes and need a full water system gut (and probably the replacement of every device that touches the water); why stop there and just seal everything else back up. You're _going_ to find all of the horrific issues that existed but no one had seen in the light of day before. Or make all new issues. (For a good reference program on this, watch any of the highlighted construction / make it right shows made by "Mike Holmes" (OK, just the Canadian ones, in the US he's been in new build series only.))
When going that deep to fix the problem there's a substantial risk the whole thing is going to just have to be demoed and something new build to really fix the problem.
Sorry to sound cynical but it's a question of priorities. Michigan just gave General Motors $2 billion to build two EV battery plants, one in Lansing and the other in Detroit which will create 3,000 jobs.
The billions are coming from Federal COVID money. The state caused Flint's problem by discontinuing water from Detroit and pulling from a local river without adding a required chemical.
This decision was made by an emergency manager appointed by the then governor to save money. This manager took power away from the elected mayor and city council.
I can't believe paying 750 000$ for a job is ever considered a good idea. If your goal really is only to provide jobs you might as well start a public works program instead of shoveling money to the private sector.
If it is a one-time sum, it may actually make economic sense over some reasonable time period. Consider:
1 industrial job may lead to :
- 1-2 jobs in private services in the same area
- 1-2 jobs in public services in the same area
- industrial activity that can be taxed later
- in the case of electric batteries, there may even be some environmental benefits that have value
- once the facility is located to some location, it may be expected to grow over time, creating even more jobs and taxable corporate profits
In other words, each direct job can easily be around 4 jobs total. Future taxes from 4 jobs + corporate profits (and other taxes) + expected growth + the value environmental benefits may very well be worth the $750 up front investment.
Sorry to sound cynical but it's a question of funding. Flint city council (Democrats) almost unanimously voted to switch the water source to the Flint River to cut costs because they did not have funding for a renegotiated contract with the original water source. The city was effectively bankrupt.
>Michigan just gave General Motors $2 billion to build two EV battery plants, one in Lansing and the other in Detroit which will create 3,000 jobs.
This is fake news, Michigan state did not give money out to GM.
>The state caused Flint's problem by discontinuing water from Detroit and pulling from a local river without adding a required chemical.
>This decision was made by an emergency manager appointed by the then governor to save money.
Voted almost unanimously by the city council. Everyone loves to leave that detail out.
The United States is still the richest country in the world. There is plenty of money, they just don't want to give it to people because capitalism.
It's ironic as well given how they spend a trillion in the military which seems like an unprofitable investment. They coax kids into joining the army to get or pay for an education, instead of the much cheaper and more profitable option, just pay the kids' education directly.
>There is plenty of money, they just don't want to give it to people because capitalism.
Capitalism is the best system ever invented to get money into the hands of people. It's done more to take people out of poverty than any other system in human existence. Capitalism isn't to blame here.
>It's ironic as well given how they spend a trillion in the military which seems like an unprofitable investment.
Military is federal, Flint water is municipal. This is basic civics. The military is not designed to be a profitable investment.
>They coax kids into joining the army to get or pay for an education, instead of the much cheaper and more profitable option, just pay the kids' education directly.
They do both, federal government backs student loans, grants, etc. that literally pay for kids' education directly. And again, most education is State, not federal.
> Capitalism is the best system ever invented to get money into the hands of people.
I would like some citation for this one. Pretty large claim. For example China brought out 2/3rds of their population from poverty to middle class, pretty large number. Now there can be a debate on whether Chinese system is communism or not, but it definitely is not capitalism the way people in US like to define it.
>I would like some citation for this one. Pretty large claim. For example China brought out 2/3rds of their population from poverty to middle class, pretty large number.
Yes... Thanks to capitalism. Communismn killed tens of millions in China when they attempted to reconstruct the country from an agrarian economy into a communist society through the formation of people's communes.
>Now there can be a debate on whether Chinese system is communism or not,
There is no debate. There are billionaire capitalists in China.
>but it definitely is not capitalism the way people in US like to define it.
It is 100% the way people in the US define capitalism. Sure it has it's Chinese spin, but it is undoubtedly capitalism.
I would think technology did far more work pulling people out of poverty than capitalism. And capitalism is only like 250 years old. You could have made your same argument 500-1000 years ago about feudalism pulling people out of poverty, and yet I doubt anybody would be all that happy to switch to a feudalist system and would heavily criticize any claims that feudalism was the main driving factor behind improvements in technology and living standards.
>I would think technology did far more work pulling people out of poverty
Thanks to capitalism!
>And capitalism is only like 250 years old.
And the rate of humanity leaving poverty in that time span is greater than any other time in history.
>You could have made your same argument 500-1000 years ago about feudalism pulling people out of poverty
Err, no? If anything, that pushed even MORE people into poverty. No one sane would ever make that argument.
>yet I doubt anybody would be all that happy to switch to a feudalist system and would heavily criticize any claims that feudalism was the main driving factor behind improvements in technology and living standards.
Because you're inventing a fictional strawman. Feudalism did the opposite of your claim.
It seems like you think all of history was complete garbage for people until the last 200 years and neither technology nor living standards ever improved until then. Serfs worked an average of 40 or less hours per week. The luddites came about because capitalism made their lives worse instead of better. How much of our world is now polluted with heavy metals and toxic chemicals because of unfettered growth at all costs? Capitalism didn't give people public schooling or public infrastructure, and most important technological breakthroughs have come from the military, university grants, and government programs. Without those, capitalism wouldn't have managed jack. You can look at all the areas of the world with little to no government interference within business or economic matters. They haven't sprung to the forefront of technology and living standards because of free enterprise, in many of those places their lives have gotten worse. Russia was industrialized under a communist model, and no matter what flaws the corruption and struggles from within their government brought, the fact that they went from subsidence peasant farms to an industrial power in less than a generation is proof that capitalism isn't the only way forward nor the source of all economic gains.
Richest country in the world, and yet life spans have been stagnant and recently been dropping, infrastructure has been crumbling, and American lives have become completely dependent on abusive labor practices and dirty industry of foreign countries to keep the bottom of their economy from collapsing.
China and Malaysia are capitalist, and none of those aforementioned countries are in the top 25 for life expectancy. China isn't even in the top 50, and Cuba is ranked below the US. Swing and a miss.
US gained a lot of world power after WW2 when other western countries were rebuilding. Do we know for certain it because of capitalism and not that US had lots of virgin resources to exploit in relative isolation while the other powers rebuilt.
All the major powers are capatilistic now. There is a spectrum but it is capitalism. In some governments will push their weight around to get what they want but it's still capitalism
This is a "feel good" human interest story, not a scientific breakthrough. As someone who worked as a chemist in a lab for a long time, this is a nice classroom demonstration of chemistry, but in no way an actual scalable solution (using calcium phosphate to trap lead? we have way better way to do that).
Thing is I wouldn't want any of the people from the project to see this thread. This is exactly the wrong way to discuss project work of young people. At that age what to a grown adult seems like mild criticism can seem 1000x worse to the person.
This is easily an area where HN should not tread at all if it can't get that right.
That's $52/year per faucet. I've got four faucets in my home that a child could reasonably drink from. That's $200/year and 48 filter changes assuming you don't miss any changes. And that doesn't help with showers and baths, or even pools and hose water.
Compare that to a whole-home filter: under $500 with a five year warranty. Filters are a couple hundred bucks every 100,000 gallons. The time savings alone is worth it, but the real value is knowing that you're not relying on $1 plastic filters.
Nothing about these $1 filters is good for children. The idea that a household with kids has the time and energy to change filters on every faucet once a month (ignoring all the time your kids spend at school with lead water there!) is laughable.
You just need it for the one faucet in the kitchen you'd be drinking water out of.
Would that completely eliminate all your lead consumption? No, when you are brushing I'm sure you swallow some water, etc, but it would eliminate at least 90% of it.
There are at least three faucets in my house that we get drinking water from: kitchen and the two upstairs bathrooms. I'm not walking downstairs to the kitchen to get water in the middle of the night. I'd expect the average single family home is similar.
That's still $150/year and 36 filter changes.
And have you ever met a child? They'll play with and drink almost any source of water. Telling them not to drink from certain faucets is Sisyphean.
A permanently installed filtration system isn't as cost effective as a whole home filter, but it's still more cost effective than what's been designed here, and requires an order of magnitude fewer filter replacements. In fact, you probably wouldn't even need a plumber to install the system for you.
I think the GP is getting at the fact that, as a design, it is impressive enough to get media attention but not robust and comprehensive enough to be an actual real-world product. So much more industrial design would have to go into the concept in order for it to be available in the marketplace.
It reminds me of those news stories that pop up from time to time about some high schooler inventing a robot to clean up plastic waste from the ocean. A neat concept, and laudable, but the design they've produced has a whole litany of flaws that they did not address because they don't have real world marine engineering experience - susceptibility to corrosion, bio-fouling, etc.
Yes. I've built actual solutions for problems. There are things that kids can do in the research realm that's "interesting", but product development is not one of those things. The focus is on finding a thing that "works" (IE, shows at least one true positive), but not a thing "that could be deployed to a million homes for a decade and show a TP rate of 99.9% and a FN rate of 0.01%". Getting a product to the market involves mostly things that don't involve the working of the device, but rather preventing the device from failing in the field.
The other problem is that there are 10 other kids who are doing things better (learning to contribute in the long term) who don't get glowing articles written about them.
Is your reasoning just that most things don't work as expected, and this is a thing, so it probably won't work as expected? Or do you know something specific about the chemistry of this particular process?
my reasoning is based on watching large numbers of medical devices and other consumer devices that have been deployed to billions of people. In that sense, yes, I am applying a prior. But also, kids just don't learn the steps required to make reliable field devices. They learn how to set up an experiment and run that with lots of hands-on adjustments. That doesn't work in the field. You have to assume your users are idiots with harsh environments who are actively undermining your device.
Would be cool if this is an exception, but yeah, there do seem to be far more "minor invents brilliant new X" news stories (surely thousands by now) than there are cases of these things actually seeing widespread adoption...
The article should probably be titled: Talented Chemist teaches students to create a lead filter...
The chemistry teacher will have already solved the problem, and then guided her students through to a solution, then just let her students take the credit.
We have a minor problem mostly with the last meters of pipes if water is not flowing. Here it is sufficient to let the (cold) water flow until it reaches a lower temperature to be sure it was not sitting in the overground pipes too long.
I'm sure it is a fixed problem and you can get faucet lead filters already, they're just not affordable because capitalism.
Also the $1 is linkbait; it may be $1 in materials, but especially if the housing was 3D printed, the actual cost would be higher.
That said, no reason this product commercially available should be more than $10, and/or given away for free along with refills to the people most impacted while they work on a more permanent solution.
Can't you just mix in a little epsom salt and filter it through a filter paper?
Maybe the calcium phosphate (dibasic I assume?) suggested in the article is a better approach, though, and the lead-iodide coloring is a nice touch. Why doesn't all the potassium iodide dissolve away long before the calcium phosphate, though?
I'm speaking about XRF analyzer. Currently it's still expensive : a 30K$ portable device, but that's because it's a low volume production.
These are gun-like devices that you point to a material, it shines x-ray on it and analyze the rays that comes back, which allows it to determine the elemental composition and percentages of the material for free in a few seconds. Like magic.
Today they are used for checking the paints for lead. They are used by precious metal buyers and sellers to identify precisely the content.
But I dream of the day where anybody can just check its steak or salmon with it for traces of anything toxic. It won't detect all food safety problems like bio contamination or organic pesticides, but it can definitely make heavy metal poisoning a thing of the past, by helping track the supply chain, the same way that having an air quality monitor can help improve your air quality.