Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited Waterloo’s campus on January 14 as part of a visit to the region considered to be Canada’s hub for technology and innovation. Accompanied by the Minister of Innovation, Science, and Economic Development, the Honourable Navdeep Bains, Trudeau’s trip involved visiting developing start-ups at Velocity, including their expanding science division; touring the Blackberry headquarters; and participating in the opening of the new Google offices in Kitchener-Waterloo. The PM has since praised the university at an international level at the World Economic Forum, touting the brilliance of the ideas and the diversity of the students.
The Prime Minister’s visit aims to help in the development of strategies to facilitate research and innovation for environmental and economic sustainability. Most notably, he addressed a crowd in Needles Hall and announced a funding initiative that will see $12 million in funding allotted to water research. The money, vested to the Southern Ontario Water Consortium (SOWC), hopes to help develop technologies in water treatment and groundwater testing.
The SOWC provides development for climactic and watershed data analysis, drinking water treatment, toxicology, contaminant detection, wastewater treatment, and groundwater monitoring and remediation. It is a group of post-secondary institutions that aim for environmental cleanliness, which will now be able to collaborate with 90 businesses and organizations in the expansion of about 80 different projects. The University of Waterloo is involved in a substantial number of the projects, along with institutions that include the University of Toronto, the University of Guelph, McMaster University, and Wilfrid Laurier University.
One of the projects being developed involves node-based water shed monitoring involving over a hundred sensors that collects hydrology data relating to climate, as well as the soil moisture and water table elevation in the subsurface. Another project involves a mobile membrane plant that can be used in the field for water treatment on a pilot scale. Furthermore, high-tech sensors capable of detecting contaminant such as pharmaceuticals—an emerging contaminant for which there has been relatively little research into their removal from water—are also being developed. The university houses many labs dedicated to this work.
The research and innovation to follow will help to improve wastewater management in municipal treatment plants, thereby increasing efficiency, reducing risk of failure, and generally enhancing human and environmental health.
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