NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas - NBC on Earth: Water Prize

Episode Date: May 6, 2018

An international competition with a $10 million prize hopes to find a solution to harmful algae blooms caused by agricultural runoff. Chief Environmental Affairs Correspondent Anne Thompson reports from Ontario.

On a Canadian marsh, a wave of ocean blue shipping containers is the venue for a kind of water Olympics. Nine international teams vying for $10 million if they can stop harmful algae blooms caused by agricultural runoff. From a shipping container in Ontario, I'm Ann Thompson and this is NBC on Earth. Here an hour north of Toronto in Ontario's agricultural heartland, the soil is dark and rich. When the weather warms, it yields a variety of vegetables, carrots, onions, and increasingly Asian favorites like bok choy. On a bitter cold day in March, three shipping containers hung with possibility on the yet to be planted fields.

Each bright blue shipping container is divided into thirds, giving each team nine square meters to try and solve one of the world's most vexing water problems, how to remove phosphorus. Phosphorus helps root systems grow. It also fuels algae blooms. Jim King, I'm Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs at the Scott's Miracle Grow Company. Jim, first of all, what is the role of phosphorus in fertilizer? So phosphorus promotes root growth in fertilizer. So if you think about the components of most fertilizers, it's got nitrogen, it's got potassium, it's got phosphorus,

or at least it did for lawn fertilizers historically, but not currently. But nitrogen makes your grass green and grow tall. Potassium is essentially like a multivitamin, and phosphorus promotes the root growth. And so we know that the other thing it does is obviously create or promote algae blooms in water. Scotts took phosphorus out of its lawn fertilizer six years ago. We looked at our formulations and determined that an established lawn probably didn't need to have phosphorus applied to it on a regular basis. There was enough phosphorus existing in the soil and so given that we just decided to take it out. We understand what the concerns that

the environmental community have, legitimate concerns that they have about phosphorus runoff causing algal blooms like the ones that are being studied here. And when we looked at our formulations, we just determined that most homeowners didn't need it, and we decided to take it out. Did you think it would make a big difference taking out phosphorus from fertilizer? The amount of fertilizer used in the United States

every year is pretty significant, but the amount of fertilizer used by homeowners is about 2% of the total. So even though we knew that taking out this very small amount of phosphorus was not going to move the needle, we also believed at the same time it was the right thing to do. But you didn't stop there. You're helping to fund this water prize.

So why go this next step? We've been involved in this dialogue around nutrient pollution and phosphorus in particular for about 15 years. And the closer we looked at the issue and understood the issue, the more we understood how problematic it was. So even after we decided to take phosphorus out of our fertilizer products, we also decided to keep the dialogue open and alive

and to be part of this dialogue on an ongoing basis to provide more visibility to the issue, help homeowners understand the magnitude of the problem, and help to fund people who are looking to create a solution to it. Because it is an environmental crisis for the country. A biting wind is a constant presence at the shipping container. Greg Moeller and his team from the University of Idaho are thinking outside the shipping box to remove the culprit, phosphorus. You did something different. You stepped outside of the

shipping container and you've built up. Yes, I'm a competitive athlete. Back in the day you look in competitions for every advantage against your competition and some people have natural advantages. What we did, we said the competition allows nine square meters of a footprint but they didn't give us a limitation in how tall we could make it. So there were two factors. Number one, this is our research rig, but we also exploited gravity because water flows down hills just like nearby Niagara Falls. Moeller is a passionate academic with shoulder-length reddish-blonde hair

and skin toughened by years outside. So tell me, what is this behind you? We call it the University of Idaho Clean Water Machine. And it actually operates like a Swiss Army knife, a multi-tool for sustainability. So we clean water, not only of nutrients, which impacts this ecosystem in the Great Lakes area, but we're also addressing hormones and antibiotics.

We're addressing climate change because we produce a biochar or carbon material for farmers. We're recovering phosphorus because the world has very limited phosphorus resources, and without phosphorus, we don't have food security. So how do you take the phosphorus out of the water? We actually use chemistry, and we try to do simple chemistry, sustainable chemistry. In fact, our process only uses air, water, sand, rust, and charcoal. In a Rube Goldberg like contraption, two stories high, the filtering system transforms the water. So how do you get the phosphorus out of the water? What we do is we first make it

dirtier. When we use biochar, biochar is like your charcoal briquettes that you use in your home grill or the activated charcoal in your water filter at home. And so we actually make that so that the phosphorus sticks to it. And when the phosphorus sticks to it and when the phosphorus sticks to it We can filter it out and we filter it out simply on sand and it's sand that we've coated with iron And I like to tell folks that it's the same sort of process that happens in our kitchen sinks and in our toilet bowls when? We have an iron stain and we all have to go in and scrub it out What we've established is a system that continuously stains some sand, a sand filter with this iron, and it continuously scrubs it out

and scrubs off the phosphorus and the biochar. Then we collect this material and we actually now have a fertilizer that not only adds nutrients for crop growth, but it adds carbon to the soil where it's stable for 200 years for climate change. So it's a closed loop. It is. We're trying to address what we call a whole system architecture.

So we're trying to clean the water, but at the same time address major issues of humanity like climate change and public health. That's fabulous. Can you take me up there? Yes, I can. I'm going to spot you. I climbed a ladder with Professor Greg Moeller

to get to the control platform. I can hear water. Yes. Where is that in? The water, actually, what we've done is we take the water in a cascading series here and then we bring it up here and it falls again down like Niagara Falls so where is the bio chart the chart the bio chart is right behind you so what that

black ink is that is charcoal but that is also our future in terms of climate change because it's a very inexpensive approach to mitigating all of the issues associated with carbon. So give me the path of the water here. The path of the water actually starts down here. And we add the biochar to sequester the phosphorus, and it sinks to the bottom. We then take that water, which still contains some of the biochar,

we add some rust to it, some iron, so it's just like rusty metal, and rusty metal reacts with it and also cleans the water. And it cleans the water in your community probably that you drink, or also in your wastewater management system. But we actually pump that into these filters, and these filters are simply filled with sand and so the water pumps through that sand just like it pumps through the ground in in the it pumps through the ground so the water flows up and then it comes out and it cascades down here and then down into a second one and this second filter does the polishing and makes it a little bit cleaner before it enters and exits down there.

And in this case it discharges, but in other cases we could actually take the world's worst waters that you have ever seen, waters from wastewater treatment plants, waters from industrial plants, polish it, sanitize it, pull out all of the hormones and antibiotics, the pathogens, we can sterilize it, sanitize it, pull out all of the hormones and antibiotics, the pathogens, we can sterilize it, and we can actually produce drinking water as well as a renewable phosphorus

fertilizer. And then you can put that phosphorus back in the farm fields. We actually can produce a material with this biochar material, so it's a charcoal-based material that now has nutrients in it that we've recovered from waste that have come off of farmers' fields or come out of municipal water treatment plants. We then can recover and recycle that phosphorus, put it back to use in the food system

to grow the food that you and I eat. So you've cleaned the water and recycled the phosphorus. We do, and when we do that in a biochar or charcoal matrix, we're also addressing a very large-scale global problem of climate change. Because when we put that charcoal in the soil, it makes the soil healthier, but it sequesters carbon for 200 years.

Only four teams will make it to the final competition and a chance to test their ideas in Florida. Eric Eichenberg, I'm the chief executive officer of the Everglades Foundation. Phosphorus helps feed Florida's giant ag industry, but the runoff has famously fouled its other natural wonders. So the Everglades Foundation with Scott's Miracle-Gro is co-sponsoring the George Barley Water Prize. So here we are in Ontario, Canada. It is below 32 degrees, just how much I'm not quite sure. Why in the world is the Everglades Foundation concerned about what's happening three

hours north by plane? Well, phosphorus in fresh water is a problem not just in the Everglades, but it's clearly an issue here in Canada, around the globe. So for the Everglades Foundation to be here in Ontario demonstrates that this is not a local or regional issue back home, but it's one that has global implications, and it's an issue that we want to see solved.

When you look out on this farmland here in Ontario, do you see what you might see in Florida? Yes. Just a little colder? A little chillier. Around Lake Okeechobee, there's a number of, there's agriculture. Florida has a robust agricultural industry that is thriving. And when you have that close proximity to freshwater bodies, nutrient runoff,

pollution runoff has a negative impact. And we saw that in 2016, where we had toxic blue-green algae from Lake Okeechobee, billions of gallons of water dumping east and west. We were under a state of emergency for 240 days. So what's happening in these blue shipping containers, what kind of difference could that make in the Everglades? Well, we've tapped into the entrepreneurial spirit where $10 million drew a lot of competitors to solve this problem. So when we kicked this off two years ago, we had 104 teams competing. We're now down to the top 10.

And these 10 teams are right here in Ontario. Water from this marsh right behind us is going into these pods, polluted water. These technologies are working to solve this problem, removing the excess phosphorus from the water. It needs to be a cost-effective way. And if we can deliver clean, fresh water back to these rivers and lakes and estuaries, it's a game-changer. I was going to say, it's not just enough to remove the phosphorus, but you also have to be able to do it in an affordable way. Yes.

Right now, it's estimated to cost $3 trillion just to deal with the phosphorus problems we have now. And they say it's a 10% reduction to our global problem. We've tried legislation, we've tried regulation, litigation. From our perspective at the Everglades Foundation, it's time for innovation, and that's what this prize is about, the George Barley Water Prize. It's spurring innovation. We're optimistic based on these 10 teams that are here in Canada.

They'll be in Florida a year from now. This has the chance. It's a crowdsourcing breakthrough, if you will, Ann, based on these 10 teams that are here in Canada. They'll be in Florida a year from now. This has the chance. It's a crowdsourcing breakthrough, if you will, Ann, and we're really excited about it. What's the next step in awarding the prize? So after this third phase that we're in now, this will conclude in May, and we'll take from the top 10 to the final four.

And it's March Madness, and we're going to see the final four. We'll go to Florida. They'll sit along the Kissimmee watershed south of Orlando. And for 14 months, the four technologies will receive a tremendous amount of water from the Kissimmee watershed, polluted, heavily phosphorus. They need to be able to remove that phosphorus again at a cost-effective way. If it works, there's $10 million to the winner. I think when you look at the teams here, just where the teams are from tells you something about the problem. You've got two teams from Canada, five teams from the U.S., one from the

Netherlands, and one from China. Yes, it covers the globe. And that's why when we went off on this venture, we had a realization that, again, this was not a Miami issue or a Florida issue. It is a global one. And when you put $10 million on the table and you elicit innovative thoughts and technologies, it came from around the globe, as you pointed out. So who knows where this is going to lead? All we know is that the energy that's at this site today is what's going to lead us to see major improvements as we go forward. A man-made problem needing a man-made solution.

And this is what it ends up as? That's the clean water that we produce. And it's not safe to drink because we're not sterilizing it. We do sterilize it in other procedures, but we do strip out the nutrients and strip out all of the things. We return it to nature. And what we're trying to do is actually we clean it so well that just cleaning part of a dirty water helps dilute out all of those nutrients that create algae blooms. Oh, my God. It is crystal clear. And that's what we call it.

And, in fact, crystal clear is a technical term in water treatment. And so our goal is in all of the waters, and we treat some of the world's worst waters, waters that you can't even see through, to try to make it like this because we're not only dealing with issues of nutrients and algae blooms, but also issues of water security and water scarcity. We have to think as a people about water. There is no such thing as wastewater anymore. Jim, what do you hope comes out of this prize? A solution.

What we really know is that we've got to solve this problem. And hopefully, the participants and the finalists in the Barley Prize are the ones that find that solution. Maybe they're not. Maybe somebody half a planet away is working on the solution right now, and they find a solution. For us, it's less important who finds the solution.

What's more important is that somebody does. For more on this story, you can go to NBCNews.com. I'm Anne Thompson, and this is NBC on Earth. you