High Impact

Sustainability Solution

A team of international researchers led by USF will spend the next five years designing, implementing and teaching about a revolutionary attempt to turn wastewater into usable water, energy and nutrients.

Funded by a $3.9 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the program focuses on key strategic priorities for USF — sustainability, interdisciplinary research and global collaboration. It is the university’s largest-ever sustainability grant.

The team of nearly three dozen faculty and researchers will include about 100 undergraduate and graduate students from institutions in the United States, the Caribbean and Europe. Also included are USF students who are part of a unique master’s degree program with the Peace Corps, where they are working and conducting research in developing nations.

Global sustainability is a major research focus at USF. In January, the Florida Board of Governors approved the creation of the Patel College of Global Sustainability, made possible by a gift from philanthropists Drs. Kiran C. and Pallavi Patel.

Partners in the new, game-changing project include the University of the Virgin Islands, the University of Belize, the University of Exeter, the UNESCOIHE Institute of Water Education in the Netherlands, and the Institute of Chemical Technology in the Czech Republic.

“What makes the USF project unique is that we are working together from the start in the research enterprise, rather than farming out parts of the study to disciplinary specialists along the way,” explains Christian Wells, co-principal investigator and associate professor of anthropology at USF. “By bringing together sustainability scientists from all across USF, we can begin to address global problems from a more holistic perspective.”

The project’s overarching research question, says USF professor of civil and environmental engineering James Mihelcic, is: Can effective, geographically-appropriate and culturally-relevant engineered systems be established that utilize wastewater as a resource for recovery of energy, water and nutrients?

He says the project seeks to change the way the world thinks about wastewater, to be thought of “not as waste, but a resource.” The effort is funded as part of the NSF’s Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE), an agency-wide program supporting international projects in the science and engineering communities.