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Although global recognition of World Water Day was last week, the Great Lakes Research Center is celebrating it’s involvement today and tomorrow and featured a lecture last night from Greg Kleinheinz, professor of environmental engineering technology of the University of Wisconsin- Oshkosh.
Originally created by the United Nations in 1993, World Water Day was designed to raise awareness of the importance of fresh water around the globe.
This year’s theme is “Nature for Water” and encourages the use of natural filtration.
At Monday night’s lecture, Kleinheinz discussed the probability of using natural elements on beaches for the purpose of filtration.
“Instead of having an engineered system, they put some plant or grass seed so they can create some buffering for the contaminates so they can mitigate some contaminations in the beach,” said Daisuke Minakata, Assistant Professor of Michigan Tech’s Environmental Sciences, who says that some of those contaminates come from rain water.
Currently it’s estimated that more than one fourth of the global population lacks access to safely managed drinking water.
Minakata said, “We have a lot of environmental issues related to the water. The idea is instead of using some technologies, why don’t we just use some nature based media or filtration media and then we can create some purified clean drinking water.”
As part of the celebration, the center has a related art exhibit that will be on display through mid June.
