Forum Focuses on Water Issues

About 50 people from around the state gathered Friday at UWM’s School of Continuing Education to discuss water issues in Wisconsin and concluded that the two major concerns were the need for the government to implement more policies regarding water and the need to educate the public.

One of the topics discussed was the emerging contaminants in the freshwaters of the region.  Scientists have estimated that at least 600 contaminants can be found in just the Great Lakes.  With more research, scientists and researchers expect that they will discover more.

A speaker from Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewage District (MMSD) explained the role MMSD plays in help keeping Milwaukee water clean.  MMSD controls the two water reclamation facilities in Milwaukee, which are Jones Island and South Shore.  MMSD serves about 1.1 million people in the Milwaukee area.

“In the past, society urged people to put their unused medicines down the toilet and we found that that’s a pathway to having them go into the river and lakes because modern waste water treatment wasn’t designed to remove pharmaceuticals or personal care products,” Karen Sands, Manager of Sustainability at MMSD said Friday.

Those who attended Friday were divided into groups that focused on different aspects of water problems in Milwaukee:

• Aging Infrastructure
• Biodiversity
• Climate
• Emerging Contaminants

Groundwater

Each group was lead by two experts in the field and the groups were asked to identify a couple of key issues in that area and rank them in order of importance.  This was done by having the members in each group vote on which problems deserved the most attention.

The leaders then tallied the votes and the top two from each group were delivered to the entire group at the end of the day.  All the groups agreed there needed to be more policies and regulations put into play by the government regarding contamination of water and that the public needed to be better educated about these problems.

Another key issue a few groups addressed was the need for more research (and funding for that research) on these topics.

This event was a part of the Wisconsin Idea Forum [http://www.wisconsin.edu/wisconsinideaforums/] which is held biannually at different UW System Institutions.  These forums focus on different topics each time they are held and are lead by experts in the field who address various national issues that affect Wisconsin residents.

Emerging Contaminants

Rebecca Klaper, an associate scientist at the Great Lakes Water Institute in Milwaukee[http://www.glwi.uwm.edu/], and Karen Sands, manager of sustainability at MMSD [ http://v3.mmsd.com/ ], directed the group that focused on emerging contaminants.

Klaper started off the session by explaining what some emerging contaminants are.  A few that she mentioned included- pharmaceuticals, personal care products (pcps) like antiseptics and cosmetics, fragrances, and the chemical Bisphenol A (BPA).

Scientists have conducted studies to determine how many emerging contaminants there are. One such study [http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1021/es903383a ] by a couple of scientists, Derek Muir and Philip H. Howard, came to the conclusion there were about 600 contaminants just in the Great Lakes region.  These chemicals get into our water through the waste water treatment plan, eating fish, flushing things down the toilet, doing the wash(flame retardant is washed off and goes into the sewer system), and through agriculture.

Klaper says there have been some studies that show humans are being affected by these chemicals.  “Some of the flame retardants have been found in tissues and in breast milk and they’re associated with reproductive problems in the offspring of the women that are exposed.  There’s slight causal links that show things like fertility are declining like sperm count is declining in general over the population worldwide,” Klaper said.

Lisa Sasso was one of the few students in attendance. She is a junior at UW-Whitewater who made the trip down to Milwaukee after hearing about the event from a teacher.  Sasso, majoring in integrated science and business with a water resource emphasis, says she learned about how the aquatic life is affected by emerging contaminants in the water from Klaper’s lecture on Friday,

“Fish are being affected [by these chemicals] and they are [resulting in] intersex fish so they can’t reproduce which is a huge problem that will really hurt the fish population. So that was always a shock to see how it really does affect the animals.”

Sands then talked about the role MMSD plays in keeping Milwaukee water clean.  MMSD serves 28 communities, 18 of which are in Milwaukee and the remaining 10 are in the surrounding regions.

Sands mentioned the two water reclamation facilities in Milwaukee, Jones Island and South Shore, and then described the treatment process water goes through before the reclamation facilities release it into Lake Michigan.  She said that an important element in managing these emerging contaminants is source control which MMSD currently has programs to aid in.

One such program is the Household Hazardous Waste Program where individuals are urged to bring hazardous waste to one of the drop off sites or to designated police stations around the city.

The other program is the Medicine Collection Program which allows people to drop off their unused medicines at designated drop off sites.

Top Concerns

After hearing about the problems emerging contaminants pose, group members were asked to come up with and prioritize a list of concerns they thought needed to be addressed.

The group ended up with three main areas of concern

• Research– on the interactions between organisms and the environment, on finding out whether the chemicals bioaccumulate, (for instance, one chemical in small amounts may not have an impact on wildlife or humans but when that chemical is mixed with several other chemicals in the water, it may have a very different effect). There is also a need for  research on the regional presence of chemicals, on overflow, and on antibiotic resistance.
• Education and public awareness– educating the public on these issues and providing more classes at universities on water issues.  Also, the need to educate the public about source control was an issue.

Public Policy and Management– there is a need to implement more policies concerning source control, and managing the use of chemicals to prevent things like antibiotic resistance.  There is also the need to work with the industries to address new chemicals and the possible health and economic dangers associated with each chemical, as well as finding funding for these policies.

When the groups all gathered together at the end of the day to address their main concerns, there were two that were mentioned in every group: The need tocarry out more innovative policies  on these topics and the need to educate and inform the public about these issues

Klaper is helping find a solution to these problems by continuing her research at the Great Lakes WATER Institute in Milwaukee.  New technologies are coming out to aid in the removal process such as activated carbon and reverse osmosis.  Klaper compares this to “using a huge Brita filter on a sewage treatment plant.”  She is quick to add that these are very expensive.

“They’re being evaluated right now for their effectiveness and then also being evaluated for their cost to see you know, would that be something that municipalities or cities or companies would consider putting on treatment systems and the jury is still out,” Klaper said.