Royster Fellow Rick Johnston, a graduate student in environmental sciences and engineering, is working to rid the world's drinking water of poisonous arsenic.

Cleaning water,
Saving lives

Removing poison from the world's water supplies

Some graduate students start their degree programs with only a vague idea of what they want to do, but when Rick Johnston applied to Carolina four years ago, he had his goal in mind: He wanted to save lives.

A doctoral candidate in environmental sciences and engineering, he is looking for a better way to remove arsenic from drinking water supplies around the world.

“Arsenic is probably the most serious naturally occurring contaminant in drinking water, and it affects millions of people around the world,” Johnston said. “It’s an environmental disaster, and we keep finding more contaminated areas as we do more testing.”

Although arsenic can be found in surface water, contamination in groundwater is a much larger problem, he said. With about half of the U.S. population dependent on groundwater as a drinking source and many developing nations wholly dependent on it, arsenic contamination threatens the health of millions. In many developing nations, arsenic levels can be high enough to cause skin lesions, diabetes, cancer and even death.

Johnston knows the effects of arsenic first hand, having served as a water quality consultant in Bangladesh, where perhaps 30 million to 40 million people drink water containing dangerously high levels of arsenic. Working for UNICEF, he found ways to remove arsenic from water and educated people about the problem.

Looking for a low cost, low technology way of removing arsenic from water that could be applied
at the village level, Johnston came up with a technique that is a twist on how many European communities remove iron from drinking water by injecting oxygen-rich water into an aquifer. After the oxygen reacts with the iron to form rust, the iron-free water can be pumped out, leaving the rust behind. This method also will work to remove arsenic, Johnston said, because rust is a natural absorbent of arsenic.

The method could be especially useful for developing countries and rural areas in the United States, he said, because the technology would not need the maintenance or technical training that conventional methods require.

Johnston’s five-year Royster Fellowship has provided many of the resources for his study at Carolina.

“The Royster Fellowship was definitely a big factor in my decision to come to UNC,” he said. Johnston also was awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation Fellowship for his work on arsenic.

“It fit in perfectly with the Royster Fellowship,” he said of the NSF award that, in combination with the Royster Fellowship, has allowed him to focus exclusively on his own research.

In addition to Johnston’s doctoral studies, he and his wife have started a family since moving to Carolina: His son was born in 2000, and his daughter in 2003. “They’re my reality checks,” Johnston said.

“Sometimes it means coming home, having dinner, putting the kids to bed and then going back to the lab,” he said. “But when you get so engrossed in water quality, it’s really refreshing to emerge from that and go to a playground and play in the leaves.”

After he completes his doctoral degree, Johnston hopes to apply his work with arsenic removal on an international level. He hopes to help people live better lives, he said. “You can’t live a healthy life without safe drinking water.”

– Grace Camblos

© 2004, The Graduate School, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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