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In Davis: Back in Action

A lot has happened since the last trip...

The UC Davis Engineers Without Borders, Guatemala team (lead, Imaan Taghavi, is a 2013 Blum Center grant recipient) received a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's university competative awards program called "P3", giving the team $15k to complete research on greywater reuse options for rural communities in Guatemala.

We are working with an existing technology we call "Banana mulch rings" that has recently been utilized in communities around Lake Atitlan and seeking to optimize results.

The term "optimization", means we are picking and choosing various components of the system we would like to make improve. To this extent, we have assigned each of our 7 team members a specialization so they can focus on one specific are for optimization. Our team:
Imaan (team leader): Economics, Social Understanding, Water Quality
Matt (team leader): Soil, Water Quality
Eduardo: Tipping Bucket
Jamel: Hydraulics
Ariel: Education/Outreach
Wayne: Greywater
Irene: Botany

We spent time building a pilot system, which we will begin testing once we get back from this trip.

Imaan Taghavi, undergraduate student, civil engineering, UC Davis

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