With over 3,300 rural Alaska homes lacking running water and flush toilets, Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation is supporting work to develop better and more affordable methods for delivering drinking water and sewage disposal services to rural Alaska. This month, Alaska DEC announced Phase 3 of the Alaska Water and Sewer Challenge, which is designed to leverage public funding with resources from the private sector and academia to produce innovative, cost-effective water and sewer technologies that can be built and operated in Alaska’s Arctic climate.
In Phases 1 and 2 of the project, interested parties formed joint venture teams of engineers, social scientists, innovators, and others; then six teams were awarded funding to develop competing proposals for addressing the drinking water and sewage disposal challenges. In Phase 3, three teams will develop and test three different prototypes: 1) attaching a small vestibule to a house to hold water and wastewater holding tanks; 2) treating raw water with a two-stage filtration process followed by UV disinfection; and 3) recycling both graywater and some black water using a modular approach to allow homeowners to create a system that fits their lifestyle.
For more information on this visit the Water and Sewer Challenge website.
