WashU’s Trusted Tap will empower households to monitor water quality
Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis are undertaking an ambitious project to improve how households monitor their tap water
Water utilities regularly monitor drinking water supplies. But once water enters the individual plumbing of households, there are no checks on what’s coming out of the tap.
For those homes served by water utilities and the 23 million American households using private well water, there is very little guidance about how or why they should care about what flows from the faucet. And those who have concerns about lead or other potential contaminants in their household plumbing do not have many affordable options to address those concerns.
Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis want to change that with a simple plan: Empower people with a method to monitor their own tap water.
The project, Trusted Tap, enters Phase 2 this year with additional funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation Directorate for Technology Innovation and Partnerships (TIP). The Trusted Tap team is part of cohort that started in 2023 to tackle the topic of “Future Water Systems.” Teams selected for this phase can receive up to $5 million over three years to advance the project.
The idea is that households purchase commercially available water filters online or in stores; use those filters until it’s time for replacement; and then mail those filters to WashU for analysis. The filter does the cleaning, but in exchange for sending in their used filters, households can get a snapshot of what exactly is in their water. The water quality data is recorded, and WashU scientists can offer guidance on what to do next if there are contaminants of concern.
Trusted Tap is part of the NSF TIP Directorate Convergence Accelerator program which aims to accelerate breakthrough technologies and prepare Americans for the higher-wage and higher skilled jobs that emerge.
“It’s really about getting nationally impactful scientific research out in the relatively short term,” said Dan Giammar, the Walter E. Browne Professor of Environmental Engineering and director of WashU’s Center for the Environment.
Giammar is the principal investigator for Trusted Tap, which brings in partners from across disciplines at WashU and beyond. The project aligns with WashU’s Here and Next strategic plan to “mobilize research, education and patient care to establish WashU and St. Louis as a global hub for transformative solutions to the deepest societal challenges.”
Setting up a system to enable long-term water monitoring is one such challenge, especially with the increasing awareness of the health impacts of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), commonly known as “forever chemicals,” which are found in detectable levels in some 45 percent of U.S. water sources.
To bring a sustainable system of water monitoring to reality takes a mix of people from different backgrounds. To that end, WashU has partnered with University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and is working to put together a pilot program with the Cherokee Nation Office of Environmental Health, Chicago Department of Water Management and both the Midwest Assistance Program and RCAP Solutions, organizations that reach out to well owners across multiple states. In addition, this is a multi-disciplinary effort from all over WashU, including the McKelvey School of Engineering, the Center for the Environment, the Health Communication Research Laboratory at the School of Public Health, the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, and the Skandalaris Center for Interdisciplinary Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
“We’re here because we want everybody in the country to have safe drinking water, and they can’t do that if they don’t know what is in their drinking water,” said Giammar.
What’s on tap
Phase 1 of the project involved setting up partnerships, conducting customer discovery and user research and evaluating the filters available for commercial use, but Phase 2 is where this work enters the home.
Jesse Campbell is a coordinator of the private well program through the Midwest Assistance Program. He was looped in to help inform researchers about well owners’ needs. His regular job is to travel the Midwest educating well owners and connecting them to resources.
“A lot of well owners never have interactions from any water quality professional at all,” Campbell said. Making the Trusted Tap process easy to use and cost effective is key to reaching this population, he added.
The final “product” in this project is the type of education that Campbell provides. WashU scientists are not building a brand-new filter; instead, this effort is about using filters that are available through the existing commercial filter market and producing water quality reports that engage the property owners with next steps, rather than overwhelm them.
“I am always talking to well owners about the need for testing, and why they would want to know what their water quality is,” Campbell said.
Rachel Garg, assistant professor at the WashU School of Public Health and co-principal investigator of the project, will lead the next steps of Trusted Tap that include audience research, end user testing, message testing and development of prototype instructions and water reports. Just as critical as the science of water analysis is the method for getting the public to buy into that science.
Health communicators will work in concert with the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts to make prototype water reports that give instructions on next steps and how to clean up any contaminants found.
“They’ll create several different prototypes, and our team will do message testing,” Garg said.
One potential example of how this process might work:
Imagine a well owner uses a pitcher water filter that lasts three months: The well owner mails the used filter to WashU where environmental engineers find levels of hexavalent chromium on the filter that are beyond the recommended limit. That property owner will then receive instructions for hexavalent chromium treatment, which requires a reverse osmosis filter to be installed. Longer term, the plan is to work with the commercial filter industry to keep the project running outside of academia. Eventually, homeowners will be sending those filters to a Trusted Tap company.
Beyond well owners and private water sources, the pilot project will involve Chicago homes because the city is in the middle of replacing its lead pipes. Chicago’s water system has the highest number of lead pipes in the country. The replacement of plumbing is a treacherous time for water quality since materials like lead can flake into the water supply when pipes are disrupted. A used filter report could potentially let participants know if lead levels are spiking and offer remediation options.
Removing the mystery
WashU students are also part of the ambitious project, from students designing a Trusted Tap logo, to engineers-in-training working on contaminant removal from filters.
Zehua Wang, a PhD student in the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering at McKelvey, is thrilled to participate in Trusted Tap. He’s been interested in environmental engineering since high school, when he remembers being worried about the tap water of his hometown after it started coming out yellow.
It wasn’t likely a dangerous contaminant but “it was not really fully reported, and the science was not discussed very thoroughly,” he said. “Nobody talked about it. It was scary.”
Now, he has an opportunity to demystify those waters. He’s researching how to remove metal contaminants like lead and chromium from the filters households will be sending in – and then how best to tally up what he finds so that the information about the contaminants can be included in the reports that are sent back to households.
“I look at how different filters can remove different metal contaminants and how to develop an efficient extraction method to recover those metals,” he said.
The next phase of research for the engineers behind the used filter analysis will involve combining multiple methods of contaminant removal, including finding a way to detect microplastics and microbes.
McKelvey engineers on the project include Kim Parker, who is co-principal investigator, associate professor and the research lead for process development, along with Fangqiong Ling, assistant professor, who is a co-lead on pilot testing.
Coming up with creative new ways to identify the contaminants captured by the used filters has many benefits over asking households to send WashU jugs of water, Parker and Ling said.
A commercially available filter that typically lasts a couple months “gives us information about the water quality over a much longer period of time,” Parker said.
On many days, for example, the levels of some contaminants may remain low. But if there is a sudden surge of a chemical in the system, “if you aren’t collecting a water sample at the right time, you miss that spike” she added.
Another advantage to using the filters is it’s much easier to send a dry filter in the mail than shipping gallons of water from different sampling periods.
According to Ling, one challenge with detecting microbes in potable water is that they often appear in too low a level to be detected in a one-time water test. But working with a filter that captures a two month stretch of time is “much easier to process.” Chemicals can also get a better chance to accumulate over time with this method.
Parker said the collaborative aspect of this process is key to its success. To succeed, they need to communicate with the public using plain language and simple action steps. That’s where the health communication experts from the School of Public Health, the Sam Fox School and partners at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign come into play.
“That’s going to be a really exciting collaboration,” Parker said. I feel like I’ve already learned a lot from them.”
