Episode 030: Satinder Brar
Prof. Satinder Brar, James and Joanne Love Chair in Environmental Engineering at York University, studies emerging contaminants in wastewater. She creates the techniques to identify new pollutants such as pharmaceutical compounds that are hazardous at extremely low concentrations, and then eliminate them in ways that contribute positively to the ecosystem.
Transcript
Cameron: My guest today is Dr. Satinder Brar, who holds the James and Joan Love Chair in Environmental Engineering at the Lassonde School of Engineering at York University. Dr. Brar studies water pollution at its source, looking at how new pollutants enter wastewater and what we can do to remove them from the water before it goes back into our lakes and streams. Her work is technically demanding, requiring great skill and precise equipment. It also requires, as we will hear, an ability to talk to others across disciplinary boundaries and across industries, I hope you enjoy our conversation. Satinder, welcome to the podcast.
Satinder: Thank you so much, Cam, for this invitation. I'm grateful to be here.
Cameron: I'm grateful that you're here too, because your topic is so fascinating. You are an Environmental Engineer who studies what goes on at the intersection between Environmental Science and Engineering. You first came to my attention through a link that was provided to me about an item on The Nature of Things, which is a CBC television program, where you were talking about the Alcanivorax bacteria, and it could be used to digest oil spills, and I'll provide a link to that on the podcast website. Your research is not just limited to oil spills though, you're looking at a phenomenon called emerging contaminants now.
Satinder: Emerging contaminants have been around us for a very long time. They are present at very low concentrations, up to parts per trillion. So that makes it emerging in a way that because of the analytical equipment which was improved over a period of time in the late nineties, that we started analyzing them, although they were always around in the environment. European Union has started regulating some of these contaminants with plasticizers such as Bisphenol A, and phthalates. I think Canada and United States, they don't have any specific regulations, they have just started consultations on this.
Cameron: I'm going to ask you later on about the whole policy implication of the work that you do. For now, I want to understand how you go about it. So these emerging contaminants, these pollutants that we haven't previously had the techniques to really study and analyze. So, is a lot of your work actually developing those techniques?
Satinder: That's the first step. As soon as we get any environmental sample from a site, we need to develop a specific analytical method to analyze the contaminant of our interest, or something else which is also present because it's a cocktail of contaminants that we are looking at.
Cameron: What makes for a good method for testing these when do you know when you can stop improving the method and start to use it?
Satinder: Good question. First of all Cam, when we start developing the method, we always start with something which could be stimulated sample, that is we take water, let's say Milli Q water, or deionized water, and we spike it with the given concentration of that contaminant, and then we develop the chromatographic methods for it, and once we see that this method works because of its reproducibility in expressing the same concentration time and again, then we move on to the complex matrix where the first challenge that we face is to extract that contaminant, because it's like an ocean where you are looking for a grain of contaminant. So technically you have to be very precise in all your extraction steps, right from zero. One error anywhere in the steps, and more the number of steps, you introduce more errors and probably we would not even detect the contaminant, forget about developing the method. It takes four to six months to develop an analytical method.
Cameron: I was going to ask you how long it takes. It sounds like it would take years, but you can do it in a matter of four to six months.
Satinder: Yeah.
Cameron: You're looking for a process that you can use in the lab that is reliable. That means it produces the same test results over and over again without a lot of variation, that is accurate so that it gives you a reading that's similar to what you know you started with, with your test sample.
Satinder: Exactly.
Cameron: And how expensive or inexpensive does it have to be before you can use it?
Satinder: The methods are quite expensive, especially the analytical tools, because we will be working with the chromatographic systems, and these chromatographic systems, just talking about the capital cost, can be somewhere up to almost $500 to $600,000 or even $1 million, depending on what we want to do.
Cameron: Oh my goodness.
Satinder: So that's pretty costly in terms of capital cost, and in terms of operation as well, you need skilled people to operate these equipment. So you cannot rely just on students analyzing their samples and the instrument breaking down every time because the cost of repair, the least it can go is $10,000 and maximum I can't say, it's pretty costly.
Cameron: This ability then, this test for detecting the contaminants is then useful for being able to analyze what happens in things like wastewater treatment.
Satinder: Yes.
Cameron: The kinds of pollutants that might come from industrial work that end up in the water, is that the kind of thing that you're looking at?
Satinder: Exactly. Yes Cam. So we are looking into surface waters, ground waters, as well as wastewaters. All of us know that whatever we use at our home and is flushed down the toilet drain, or even in the sink finally ends up in the wastewater treatment plant. In terms of industries, and mostly the industries should have their own wastewater treatment facilities, they are not supposed to be dumping their wastewater into the municipal wastewater treatment plant, but where the industry size is small, then they have to pay per kilogram of COD, Chemical Oxygen Demand, that is how much chemical is needed to oxidize their pollution load, then they're allowed to send their effluent to the wastewater treatment plant. But I think what intrigues us more in our research is that the hospitals, the effluent from the hospitals also ends in the municipal wastewater treatment plants. That kind of spikes the concentration of many of those pharmaceuticals, which would otherwise be only coming from our household users, which would be much lower, as compared to the load that comes from a hospital.
Cameron: One of the papers that I read of yours, it was from 2015, which looked at chlortetracycline or CTC. This is well established, what's called a "broad spectrum" antibiotic. It's on the World Health Organization's list of essential medicines. So it's a very, very important antibiotic. It's been around a long time. What is it used for mainly now?
Satinder: Even for human use, there are certain kind of illnesses where it is still prescribed, because there is no other alternative, but otherwise for majority of other sicknesses where tetracycline was primarily considered as a key antibiotic, it has now been banned from human use. However, when we go to the veterinary side of it, it is widely prescribed.
Cameron: So you're talking about the livestock industry for instance?
Satinder: Yeah.
Cameron: Okay. There's a phrase in your paper, which calls these "subtherapeutic doses." What does that mean?
Satinder: Subtherapeutic doses of antibiotics is normally given to the livestock, especially because in North America, we shouldn't forget that we have confined animal farming operations. So the livestock is together for a very long time. They are given subtherapeutic doses of these antibiotics just as a precaution or what we call as prophylactic dose so that no epidemic arises. So it's kind of a prevention.
Cameron: Now, when they feed this to the livestock, does most of it stay in the animal?
Satinder: Sixty to 80% is flushed out through the urine, but it does its work, what it has to do, but don't forget that the animal is not sick at that point, it's just a prevention, something happens, the antibiotic can take care of it.
Cameron: Right.
Satinder: And unfortunately, I know this model is not good, but here in Canada, because of the weather conditions, we have to have confined animal farming operations. And of course it is also the commercial scale at which the livestock is present.
Cameron: So the quantity of waste coming out of these facilities is huge and has to be treated at an industrial level.
Satinder: Definitely. But that's not the case. Whatever is released there ends up in the wastewater treatment plant.
Cameron: Okay. So it goes to the wastewater treatment plant, and at that point in time, you need to be able to come up with some method of dealing with it there. You are taking these samples that you've got from the wastewater treatment plants, and in some cases you're actually making synthetic sewage, which sounds bizarre to me. You get the sewage sample and then you are inoculating these samples with two different kinds of bacteria, are those bacteria that are normally found or used in the treatment plants?
Satinder: They are one of the bacterial species that is predominantly present in the wastewater. Wastewater has many of them, it's a soup, whatever you can think of, you can... Actually, wastewater is sourced as a mine these days. There are several projects occurring in European Union where they collect wastewaters, I'm part of that global project. What they do is, when I was in Quebec City, I used to send them samples from the municipal wastewater treatment plants to Denmark, and they would do this microbial sequencing, the gene sequencing, and they're developing a genome for the entire waste waters across the globe. It's a 10 year project, it's a very long project, but it's interesting to mine, and to find what kind of microorganisms are present in wastewater, because do not forget that whatever you can think of is dumped into the wastewater, and you can have all kind of surprises there. If you go to the other side of the wastewater treatment plant, it is considered as a gold mine in terms of nutrients and metals. There are researchers working in this line of research where they try to harvest some precious metals from wastewater treatment plants. In our research, we have worked on using the wastewater sludge as a nutrient source for growing bio fertilizers or bio pesticides. And it works fantastic. So that soup acts as a food or a feed for the microorganisms and they can uniquely grow on this substrate and produce bio pesticides.
Cameron: Hasn't sewage traditionally been used as a fertilizer source in some societies?
Satinder: It was used even in Canada, it has been banned recently because those bio solids, do not forget, they contained so many organic contaminants and heavy metals, but still it was being used. But the problem with that is Cam, because the quantity in which they apply the bio solids to their agriculture is several tonnes per hectare. So when you're applying several tonnes per hectare, over a period of time, you can imagine how much accumulation of those organic compound, toxic compounds, as well as heavy metals that is happening, which is not good for the agriculture. So taking you back to the bio pesticides, the ones that we developed using the wastewater sludge, the rate of application was only 45 grams per hectare, which is nothing.
Cameron: That's a phenomenal difference.
Satinder: Oh yeah. Tonnes and grams, yeah.
Cameron: Your job right now is not to change the livestock industry. You're just dealing with the symptom of the livestock industry, right?
Satinder: Yeah. But at the same time, when you find an effect and there is a cause. So I think if the cause could be dealt with as well, at the same time, definitely that kind of translation and research, I think sets a better example in terms of application. This brings me to the other intersection of my research that is on Value Addition of Residues, originating from different sectors, such as agricultural, agro-industrial, municipal, industrial, et cetera. So in this case, for example, we had this fruit juice industry, it's a big industry in Quebec. So they had one problem, when they extract the apples or any other fruit as a matter of fact, oranges for juice, they have this solid part which is left in the plant. It is 30% of their total intake of fruits. So 30%, over million litres you can imagine is too much. Maybe if it's a small juice bottling industry, maybe not so much, but when we are talking in several million litres, it's too much. So they came up to us and said, is there any sustainable solution for this residue? Now the residue that is produced by the industry, it contains the pulp, the peels, the seeds from the fruits, et cetera, as well as they add some husk, which actually enhances the filtration of the juice when they're initially crushing these fruits. So we thought, okay, we can try to probably grow some fungi into it and produce some enzymes. So we started these experiments in the lab, and eventually we went to fermentors as well, we were able to produce certain enzymes, which could be actually then turned over to the industry to be used for the clarification of the juice. The case in point is that we told them these enzymes could go back to the industry and could replace their ultra filtration equipment, because they have to ultra filter to have a clear juice. So if they can use these enzymes, which is produced from their own residues, it could reduce their cost. And we tested this, it worked great. And the similar model, then we took to the micro breweries in Quebec city, there are a lot of them and they started using it for the clarification of their beer. I would say, especially in the case of micro brewery, we have been quite fortunate because they are using it really in real scale, because I visited the micro brewery in Downtown Quebec, and they produce these enzymes and then return it back to their own fermenter to clarify the beer.
Cameron: Fantastic. Tell me about working with industry partners, is the goal to scale up what you can do in the lab?
Satinder: Yes. That's the goal. And another thing is, I think it's a learning exchange because we are more from the academic side. So our orientation is always towards research from fundamental sense, and then the application side of it is more, I think, known to these industrial people, and whenever you interact with them, you see that they have very simple problems, which could be easily solved, but sometimes they think that it is going to cost too much in terms of research. So it has been a wonderful exchange in all my life's journey so far and I hope to do so in the years to come, that whenever you interact with them and you can just suggest them that this kind of solution would solve their challenge, most of the times, I should say they're amazed and they would like to work with you.
Cameron: Do you ever get a chance to get involved in helping set policy for these industries?
Satinder: I wish I could. I haven't done so far. I was part of an intergovernmental panel in Quebec, where we were coming to certain points on environmental regulations, especially with respect to the emerging contaminants. So, I wish I could do the same here or at the federal level, that is where next I would like to go, and I think being part of York University, probably Osgoode Law School researchers, or even the researchers working in environment and urban change from social aspects, if they could be partners on many of our projects, which is actually interesting, I think we could move the research in this direction.
Cameron: It sounds like a fantastically collaborative model because you're not just working with industry partners, but you're doing this kind of cross-disciplinary study that involves talents and perspectives from all across the board.
Satinder: Yes. And I think it's important for an environmental challenge. Over a period of time, we have observed you can't work in silos, you have to work with people from different scientific backgrounds, as well as let's say management, social sciences, art, law, because they're all intertwined together if you want a global solution to any environmental challenge.
Cameron: What are you working on now? What's the direction you're headed?
Satinder: Good question. With respect to the emerging contaminants, we are still working on antibiotics and how they complex with the metals. Why we want to understand this is, let me bring you to the perspective of the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmaceutical industry is developing these days highly potent antibiotics where what they do is, they complex the metal with the antibiotic, and then at a lower dose of that antibiotic metal complex, you can have the same effect. And this is a new class of antibiotics, which is coming into the market and being promoted by the pharmaceutical industry. Now for us, from environmental perspective, whatever the pharmaceutical industry does, that sort of turns new pages for us in the sense that we see that the antibiotics, when they complex with the metals, even the ones that were not actually manufactured as such, but because in the environment you have other contaminants present, like we saw in wastewater. So when these antibiotics complex with metals, they become more toxic. They are more persistent. They stay in the environment for a longer time, and because they stay around for a longer time, it is one of the factors which also can contribute to the antibiotic resistance. There are several factors, of course it is not a unique factor, but it is among those several factors which can contribute to this super bug formation. It leads to challenges with antibiotic resistance.
Cameron: Well, Satinder, it's been fascinating to talk to you. I want to keep in touch with you and find out where you're research is going.
Satinder: Definitely.
Cameron: It sounds like things are changing so quickly in your field, that we could easily have you come back on the podcast in a couple of years and you'd be talking about brand new projects.
Satinder: Definitely. For example, before we leave, I just came to my mind what we are trying to do now with one of my colleagues in mechanical engineering, trying to develop portable sensors for detecting these tetracyclines in waters. And if we could supply those detectors to the municipal wastewater treatment plant operators, or in drinking water treatment plant operators. But that project has just started, because this colleague of mine from mechanical, he has a background in micro fluidics, so I'm trying to compliment my background in analytical skills in wastewater treatment plants with his, so that we can bring out this solution.
Cameron: It sounds like your most important skill is being able to talk to people outside of your field.
Satinder: I hope so.
Cameron: We've been the beneficiary -- myself and the podcast listeners -- of that today. So thank you so much for spending time with us.
Satinder: Thank you. Same here. Thank you so much Cam for the invitation again, and I look forward to more in the future.
Prof. Satinder Brar at home in her lab
