Cities have faced traditional challenges like congestion, pollution, and safety for decades, and most have a plan to combat them. Meanwhile, cyberattacks, climate change, and natural disasters are new threats currently mounting, which require new approaches and an expanded range of technologies to create true strategy shifts. Digital twins & urban modeling, resilient cities, circular cities, micro-mobility, and smart spaces have been identified as those shifts poised to make smart cities even smarter.
During the winter of 2018-2019, one million tons of salt were applied to icy roads in the state of Pennsylvania alone. The salt from industrial uses like this often ends up in freshwater rivers, making their water undrinkable and contributing to a growing global crisis. How can we better protect these precious natural resources? Physical organic chemist Tina Arrowood shares a three-step plan to keep salt out of rivers – and create a circular salt economy that turns industrial byproducts into valuable resources.
Today, one out of three people don’t have access to safe drinking water. And that’s the result of many things, but one of them is that 96.5% of that water is found in our oceans. It’s saturated with salt, and undrinkable. Most of the freshwater is locked away in glaciers or deep underground. Less than one percent of it is available to us. So why can’t we just take all that seawater, filter out the salt, and have a nearly unlimited supply of clean, drinkable water?
