What Lurks Beneath: How Robots Can Save City Plumbing with Vanessa Speight
What About Water? with Jay Famiglietti
Release Date: 02/15/2023
Drilling Deeper Won't Fix This
What About Water? with Jay Famiglietti
People in the lower Colorado River basin are now witnessing drastic cuts to their allotments. In many cases, developers find alternate sources of water by drilling into underground aquifers. But in places like Pinal County, Arizona, that groundwater is already becoming scarce. We hear from , who sits on both the Pinal County Board of Supervisors and the board for the Central Arizona Pipeline. Without sufficient water for crops, and facing some of the highest temperatures on record, he says farmers in his area will fallow up to 70 per cent of their land this year. As Phoenix and its...
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The Colorado River's Alfalfa Problem
What About Water? with Jay Famiglietti
The meat and dairy industries are some of the biggest water users in the American West, thanks to one of cows' favorite foods – alfalfa. As aridification continues across the American southwest, water is becoming far more scarce on the Colorado River. A critical source of water for roughly 40 million Americans, we look at why so much of the Colorado River's freshwater goes toward growing water-intensive hay crops, and at what can be done to significantly scale back consumptive use in the future. In this episode, we hear from people who've traveled from around the world to see the...
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World Water Day 2023 with Autumn Peltier
What About Water? with Jay Famiglietti
When Autumn Peltier was eight, she learned the tap water on a neighbouring reserve wasn’t safe to drink, or even to use for hand-washing. That injustice triggered her decade-long advocacy campaign for safe drinking water. She made headlines as a 12 year-old, admonishing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at an Assembly of First Nations event for the choices his government had made for her people. In this bonus episode for , Peltier and Jay discuss the way her life shifted, as she started campaigning for clean water. Peltier also shares what it was like to shoot her documentary The...
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Will Sarni: Can We Tech Our Way Out of Wicked Water Problems?
What About Water? with Jay Famiglietti
Can we really “tech” our way out of freshwater shortages, scarcity, and pollution? In our Season 4 finale, we’re asking the big question of the season – will new water technology be enough to solve wicked water problems? Will Sarni joins Jay for a look back at the bright ideas and inventions we’ve heard about this year, sharing his view on technology’s ability to solve problems around water quality and scarcity. Jay and Will discuss what a “disruptor” like Uber could do for the water sector and what it will take to get the public sector to respond to innovation....
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What Lurks Beneath: How Robots Can Save City Plumbing with Vanessa Speight
What About Water? with Jay Famiglietti
In this episode, we’re going underground, undersea and into your water and sewer pipelines with science fiction’s favorite problem-solvers…robots! Jay sits down with Vanessa Speight, a professor of Integrated Water Systems at the University of Sheffield, to learn how new, spider-like robots have the potential to locate and fix leaks in aging water pipes. Jay and Vanessa discuss when we might actually see these pipe-traveling bots in action and what they can realistically do for developing nations, where drinking water loss can be as much as 70 per cent due to aging and...
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An AI Fix for Aging Water Systems with Seyi Fabode
What About Water? with Jay Famiglietti
On this episode of What About Water? an entrepreneur in Austin, Texas turns his dishwasher sensor into a tech startup that’s feeding water utilities snapshots of their water quality in real time. Jay sits down with Seyi Fabode, the CEO and co-founder of Varuna, to discuss how his company’s cloud-based software is helping cities keep track of their drinking water quality by the minute, allowing them to respond to spills, contamination, and fluctuations before it’s too late. Jay and Seyi dream up a new tech idea together and trace Seyi’s entrepreneurial roots from his...
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Chemical Cocktails: What’s in our Groundwater? with John Cherry
What About Water? with Jay Famiglietti
If it’s not stuck in glaciers or polar ice, 99 per cent of the world’s freshwater is groundwater. Water underground supplies nearly half of the world’s drinking water. But what happens when dangerous chemicals and waste – polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), oil, gasoline and road salts – percolate down into that supply? On this episode of What About Water? Jay sits down with the father of contaminant hydrogeology, Dr. John Cherry, to talk about the water under our feet, and how we can better monitor it. In the 1970s, Cherry wrote the foundational textbook on groundwater...
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Dirty Laundry: Water and the World of Fast Fashion
What About Water? with Jay Famiglietti
Call the fashion police! In this special holiday edition of What About Water? we dive into the apparel industry’s dirty secret: its water use. Behind oil and gas, fashion is the single most polluting industry on the planet. It accounts for 8 per cent of all carbon emissions and 20 per cent of global wastewater. We start by catching up with shoppers at the Picker’s Hullabaloo Flea Market in Charleston, South Carolina. They tell us about the clothes on their wish lists this year and why they choose to shop second-hand. Jay talks water overuse and about changes for garment designers and...
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Into Thin Air: A Smarter Way to Water Crops, with A.J. Purdy
What About Water? with Jay Famiglietti
How can we measure water when it disappears into thin air? On this episode of What About Water? we’re looking at evapotranspiration, or “ET” for short. It’s the combination of water evaporating from the soil, combined with the measure of water transpiring through crops’ leaves. Accounting for this water loss helps farmers know exactly how much water they should apply across their fields, and new agricultural technologies and satellites are making it much easier. Jay sits down with California State University at Monterrey Bay Senior Research Scientist – and former...
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Submerged
What About Water? with Jay Famiglietti
In the quest to find clean, renewable sources of energy, we turn to a familiar method: hydroelectricity. Today, the ancient method of harnessing the power of flowing water is hitting enormous new heights. Hydroelectric dams are some of the biggest human-made structures in the world. As humans dam more and more rivers, the scale and sheer size of these structures continues to grow. But in trying to meet our future electrical demand, are we pursuing a technology that is harming communities, rivers and the environment? In our first-ever documentary “Submerged”, we hear the...
info_outlineIn this episode, we’re going underground, undersea and into your water and sewer pipelines with science fiction’s favorite problem-solvers…robots!
Jay sits down with Vanessa Speight, a professor of Integrated Water Systems at the University of Sheffield, to learn how new, spider-like robots have the potential to locate and fix leaks in aging water pipes.
Jay and Vanessa discuss when we might actually see these pipe-traveling bots in action and what they can realistically do for developing nations, where drinking water loss can be as much as 70 per cent due to aging and unmaintained systems.
In our Last Word, professor Lucian Busoniu tells us about SeaClear, a project funded by the European Union, building the first fleet of autonomous robots to collect litter from the ocean floor.