When Technology Meets Community: A Short History of Our Groundwater Treatment System
Why are Arsenic and Fluoride So Hard to Remove From Our Water?
Arsenic and fluoride are two very persistent and dangerous contaminants that, unfortunately, occur naturally in our groundwater – the principal water source for 700,000 people living in northern Guanajuato, including San Miguel de Allende, in central Mexico. As we continue to take more water out than can be recharged by rainfall (over-extraction), the water table drops – forcing us to drill wells deeper and deeper to reach our ever-fleeting water resources. Unfortunately, the deeper we dig, the more concentrated the levels of arsenic and fluoride become.
Some low levels of fluoride are needed, and beneficial, to our health. However, in excessively high concentrations, fluoride is responsible for serious health effects such as dental fluorosis – irreversible changes in tooth enamel that range from small white spots to permanent yellow or brown staining and pitting. Fluoride can also become highly concentrated in bones, which alters the structure and function of the skeleton, ultimately leading to severe bone weakening and deformation, especially in children. More worrisome is the impact fluoride has on the brain and nerve cells. Regular consumption of high concentrations of fluoride is tied to cognitive and learning impairments in children during the critical developmental stages of life.
Arsenic, on the other hand, is simply toxic to human health. Excessive consumption, even at relatively low contamination levels, is linked to arsenicosis, multiple types of cancer, skin lesions, and other types of chronic diseases, including chronic kidney disease.
Unfortunately, both of these contaminants are incredibly difficult to remove from water. Standard treatment options including boiling water, using most water filters, and even “whole-house” water treatment systems, common in San Miguel, cannot touch arsenic and fluoride in the water.
At Caminos, we’ve continually relied on Rainwater Harvesting as our ‘go-to’ solution for confronting water contamination simply because rain is naturally free of arsenic and fluoride. However, the need is simply far too great to meet with rainwater alone, which is why we’ve spent years developing an alternative solution in our arsenal, so we can greatly scale-up our reach, and our impact.
The Path to Deeper Impact:
A Capsule History of Our Groundwater Treatment System (GTS)
Our Groundwater Treatment System, or GTS, is the result of more than 6 years of a massive collaborative and multidisciplinary effort. Spearheaded and coordinated by Caminos de Agua’s Technology Development Team, working hand-in-hand with our social outreach and education professionals, GTS has brought together a unique set of actors including academics, technical fellows, and other volunteers from around the globe looking to help develop an innovative new technology, to community leaders and concerned mothers seeking a dependable and affordable solution to their water quality challenges.
Prior to bringing GTS into the field, years of collaborative research and development were required to develop and streamline the technology. Matthièu Carriere, Research and Development Coordinator at Caminos, explains:
“In order to get to the point where we are with the GTS right now, we’ve needed the work from dozens of people beyond our staff here, from accomplished academics like Josh [Kearns, PhD], or students from professor Medellín Castillo [from UNAM San Luis Potosi], and all the volunteers who’ve come through the years, all the sponsors, and providers, that have been essential for integrating and bringing to fruition the GTS.”
Photo: Caminos de Agua's Saúl Juárez (left) and Matthièu Carriere (right) working together on a technical project.
Once the technology was proven in the lab, Caminos’ Community Outreach Team took the reins to find a suitable rural community partner to install the first GTS pilot system. After some initial set-backs in finding our first collaborator, we ultimately came to the community of Los Ricos in 2020. As Saúl Juárez, our Community Projects Coordinator at Caminos, explains:
“Los Ricos were our neighbors, [located] right next to Caminos’ field site. Fili, a co-worker from that community, constantly asked us if he could get water from our rainwater cistern, and we would see other people [from Los Ricos] looking for water…so we asked ourselves why don’t we do it [the GTS pilot] with them?”
Photo: Ana (in pink) at a "Water Learning Community" laughing together with a fellow community learner.
By 2021, the first GTS went online in the community of Los Ricos, and today, it is maintained and operated by a group of women from the community itself. Getting to this point was a long process because far more important than developing the innovative technology itself is how the technology becomes owned by the community. Only when that happens can a technology transform into a solution. As Ana Torres, Community Organizer with Caminos de Agua illustrates:
“In each of these processes, at every step, the group of families who were going to participate and be co-creators of this technology, established their own agreements and ways of sustaining the technology by themselves… If we had just arrived with technical workshops… this project would never have worked. It works because there has been a process, first of identifying, creating awareness, and then letting them be the owners of the process.”
Today, “our” first GTS is no longer ours at all but rather in the capable hands of newly-elected members of the water committee of Los Ricos. María del Rosario, a mother in Los Ricos and one of the drivers of bringing GTS to fruition, recently began handing over responsibilities after helping train new community members on the operation and maintenance of the GTS. She reflected early on:
“We had many years without safe drinking water. While taking care of the GTS is hard work, it’s changed the reality of my family and community.”
Photo: María del Rosario (in the middle) together with two members of the group maintaining the GTS at Los Ricos.
Now, in our tenth year of working on water issues in this region, we’re looking forward to deepening our impact in the region by expanding the GTS to 10 new communities over the next 5 years – providing clean drinking water to 10,000 new people in the region. The GTS in Los Ricos was purposely designed small as the initial pilot system and today serves 25 families, but GTS can be scaled exponentially and make a much larger impact. Over the past months, we’ve been meeting with substantially larger communities, in collaboration with the Municipal Government of San Diego de la Unión to find our next partner, and moving forward we will also be presenting GTS to the State Water Commission of Guanajuato by the end of the year.