Podcast - EP 61: Can dirty coffee grounds be the key to clean water?

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Jeffrey Moran sits in front of the WGMU microphone
Photo by Evan Cantwell/Office of University Branding

Every day at George Mason University, faculty like assistant professor Jeffrey Moran develop innovative solutions to the world’s grand challenges. And sometimes those grand challenges can have small solutions that come from the most unlikely of places. 

In this episode of Access to Excellence, join Moran and President Gregory Washington as they discuss the water-cleaning powers of spent coffee grounds, aerosol experiments on the International Space Station, and finding inspiration for innovation in jazz.  

 

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 The challenge is not necessarily lack of water per se, it's lack of access to methods to decontaminate the water that is already there, in ways that don't require extensive infrastructure... to basically use the materials they have available to them. Coffee is discarded by the millions of tons every year. It is hydrophobic so it can pick up other hydrophobic things. And if you look at a microscope image of a coffee ground, it has this very irregular, very dense surface where there's a lot of active surface area given the size of the coffee ground, which means it can pick up a large quantity of pollutants relative to its size…You could implement [CoffeeBots] in just a cup of water that you want to decontaminate. You could envision this being implemented on a small boat where there's a magnet on the back end of the boat. And so if you wanna clean up an oil spill in a small river, you can deploy it that way, deploy a large quantity of these coffee bots, and then move the boat along."

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