Indian Company Licenses Berkeley Lab Invention for Arsenic-free Water

When Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientist Ashok Gadgil set out to solve an insidious public health problem afflicting South Asia, arsenic contamination of groundwater, he knew the hard part would not just be inventing the technology but also ensuring a way to sustain its long-term use on a large scale.

"A lot of technologies to remove arsenic on the community- and household- scale have been donated. But if you go to these villages it's like a technology graveyard," said Gadgil, who heads the Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division and is also a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley. "One study found that more than 90 percent failed within six months, and then were abandoned to rust in the field."

So Gadgil and his lab came up with ECAR, Electrochemical Arsenic Remediation, which binds arsenic using iron dissolved in water. Their innovation was two-fold. They created a technology that is exceptionally effective, inexpensive, and easy to maintain. And just as importantly, from the start they conceptualized a business model for implementing the technology in a way that creates incentives for its longevity. Now Indian company Luminous Water Technologies has licensed ECAR and plans to bring it to arsenic-affected villages throughout India and Bangladesh.

"Technology alone is not enough. It has to fit within a sustainable system based on partnerships with local entities," said Susan Amrose, who has worked on ECAR since 2008 as the lead project scientist in Gadgil's lab. "Other technologies have failed because there is no system of incentives or money or knowledge to keep them running. The key difference with ECAR is that it was designed to fit within a local system aimed at achieving successful social placement—so a flow of funds pays for ongoing operation, maintenance, and social marketing, without turning it into privatized water."

Arsenic-contaminated groundwater can be found all over the world, including in the United States, but the problem is particularly acute in South Asia, where tens of millions of people in India and Bangladesh get their drinking water from tube wells highly contaminated with arsenic, almost all of it occurring naturally. Arsenic poisoning, or arsenicosis, can cause painful lesions, diabetes, cancer, and blood vessel diseases that often lead to gangrene, amputation, and premature death.

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• Water Monitoring
• Groundwater Recharge